Hello, everyone.

It’s lovely. Thank you for joining.

And, yeah, let’s get started.

So did you know that almost three quarters of leaders in a CMI survey have seen evidence of increasing anxiety and stress for their teams.

And of them, ninety three percent felt it was affecting their employees productivity, and that’s the according to the charter management Institute.

So by the end of this talk, you’ll know the difference between mental strength and resilience and how to elevate the baseline of your mental strength so that you’re less impacted by challenges as a team and as an individual.

So I’m Charlotte Dixon, I’m a psychologist coach and facilitator at Design Success, and my interest in Teams and team dynamics, team success really came from my background in mental health and well-being. So I’ve worked across quite a range of different sectors, including the NHS.

And, when I worked there, I actually worked in a psychiatric unit and we had an incredibly strong team.

And I noticed that despite a lot of challenges, not just with tricky patients, but also with, the structural changes we had to manage. No secret the NHS has had a bit of a struggle in the last years, but, that we still managed to survive and actually thrive as a team and really managed to, be very effective. And that was partly due to sort of having a shared understanding and a shared language, but also the culture that we built within our team. And really how much we’ve worked on our mental strength and our resilience.

So I would like to share some of that knowledge with you today.

As as I mentioned, I work for design for success and, I work in businesses helping people to be up skilled and think about how to reach their full potential. And this, goes from everything from managing conflict in a productive way to thinking about imposter syndrome and teams and also building mental strength and ultimately improving your well-being at work.

So today in this session, we’re gonna look at see if my slide will work for me. There we go. We’re gonna look at exploring the idea of resilience and mental strength. People often say to me, isn’t that the same thing? And actually, as we’ll go into it a bit more, the concept of resilience has really evolved over time, and it’s a lot more complex than we originally anticipated, really.

We’re gonna look at the neurology, and how we think so drawing on some neuroscience.

And also, I’ll share with you some strategies of how to develop, a mentally strong team.

So the first thing I want you to have a think about is what a team’s what challenges a team has to face And I’m gonna put up a little poll.

When we think about a team and their success, we often think about the leader and how the leaders leading the team and of course leaders are incredibly important.

But just like we’re gonna use this throwing vote analogy just like you’ve got a cock at the back of a boat, telling the team which direction to go in and sharing information and setting the rhythm of the boat without the team members in that boat, the boat doesn’t move. And that’s just like teams. Every person is important and every person can contribute. And so the mental health of a team is reliant on everybody in the team.

And I just want to share with you some themes that, have come through in our work with with teams. And I want, as, I mentioned, I want to just pop up a poll of, what you’ve noticed this happens most frequently in either the teams you’ve worked in as a leader or, as, yeah, as a teammate.

I’m not seeing the child. Sorry.

Paul is not now working because I think somebody’s actually also logged in from Classic five global. That was, That’s okay. Perhaps. Oh, I’m so sorry. That’s alright. Perhaps if people wouldn’t mind popping in the chat what they’ve about most. So I you could always plan, but it’s not always good money, doesn’t it when you’re online?

Yeah, if people could pop in the chat, what they found, most commonly most common challenges are working in a team.

Thank you, Hannah. I noticed we’ve got burnout there. That’s something that sadly is very common and it’s but it’s worth something that is very There are lots of options of how you can support people’s free stats, and that’s the positive thing with all of these things.

Yeah, overwhelm. Absolutely. We’ve got resources and unclear goals. Definitely. And thank you, Aileen. I think that’s a really important one about silos.

People working in silos partly due to remote working, and I’m I’m not hitting on remote working because I think it could be a wonderful thing. It can be a wonderful tool and way of living, but it also means that there’s an increase in risk that people are working in silos. And in a way, that can contribute to quite a lot of these challenges.

Yeah, lack of support as you mentioned to Alan working from home. Yeah. Definitely. Brilliant. Yeah. Some great ideas in there. So, and the reality is if we were to do a poll, you might find that you selected quite a few of these, and the reality is teams are often managing a whole range of challenges all at once.

And that can really help, be unhelpful for a team’s stress. And if anyone’s familiar with Takerman’s, team development cycle, you know, teams go through a process themselves of forming, storming, norming performing, and different challenges tend to show their faces in different parts of that, those cycles. But underneath all of these, You tend to have see if it’s working. Oh, sorry. Jumping about. Underneath all of these, we tend to have some common themes coming through.

In sporting teams. So communication and misunderstandings, we all know that if, you know, you don’t have decent lines communication, say at the start of a project, it sort of stops before it’s even started. You kind of fall at the first hurdle.

Also different priorities. So it’s so natural within teams to have different roles, different needs, different timelines, even. And it might even be even for one team, you have different quarters or times of year, but if you’re having to work with other teams, there can be clashes and priorities and even resources and sharing resources.

And and as mentioned before, as well, home life balance, working from home, that can really bring up challenges in different perspectives, different styles of working, facet bibers are classic insight into that, how complicated and how not complicated, but how varied people’s, needs and preferences can be.

And also change in adaptation challenges, and that might be you know, adapting to mergers or shifts within the team, people leaving, or even just new projects.

And as I said, bearing in mind, we often have quite a few things at the same time.

This tends to lend itself to causing friction within relationship within teams and it can lead to frustration and ultimately quite high stress levels.

So, of course, this is a session on resilience and mental strength the next question is, this these are the team’s challenges. What can we do about it? I think the first step which is can often be really helpful is to think about how our brain works and really get an understanding of how we might react to things as it because as an individual, we will respond to things, but also to be aware that all the members of the team have the same challenge. Because we all have brains that function in relatively similar ways.

So and and our brain is completely designed to protect us. That is that is one of its key functions.

And, what we know from neuroscience and the worlds of research on our brains is that our are really responsive to threats.

So much so that the amygdala, which is that red, smaller circle, That’s where our amygdala is.

That’s the more primal part of our brain, and that’s tasked with keeping us safe and it will actually when we have, high levels of stress, it will overpower our frontal lobe, which is the larger green circle. And that’s the bit of our brain that’s responsible for executive functions, some of our memory, organization planning, forward thinking, even regulating our emotions.

I’m gonna say that last bit again, even regulating our emotions. So you can imagine when you’re in a high stress situation If you’ve ever been one of these people that have felt like I just couldn’t think clearly, I saw red, you know, you get into an argument and and suddenly, or if you’re trying to rationalize with somebody who’s who’s already stressed, it’s quite difficult. And actually, it’s because they’re experiencing an amygdala hijack, and that’s essentially where your, amygdala is firing off and it’s overtaking your frontal lobe. And if you’re, like me, if you get hangry, if you ever find yourself saying, I’m sorry for what I said or did when I was hungry, that is absolutely the amygdala hijack taking over her, and it ultimately it’s to protect you. But in a team environment, it’s not always that helpful. There are no lines we need to run away from. There are just difficult dynamics we need to overcome.

So of course, we can’t always avoid stress but by being able to manage it, it puts us in the best position to be able to thrive despite challenges.

And that’s where resilience comes in.

So I’d love to put a question to the group. I love answering this question because as I said resilience has really changed and evolved over the last sort of ten, fifteen years, and and kind of alongside science and, psychology and neuroscience it’s sort of evolved and become we’ve realized it’s become more complex. So I’d love to ask you what thoughts or words or phrases come to mind when you hear the word resilience.

Just pop your ideas in the chat.

Brilliant. We’ve got bounce back ability to adapt and bounce back. Able to cope with change, bulletproof.

Brilliant. Okay. And it’s so interesting because I think One of the things, when people talk about resilient, they tend to say, oh, that person’s really resilient. Oh, no. I’m not I’m not that resilient or I they’re lacking resilient.

And ultimately, we all have capacity to be or sorry, we all have potential to be resilient. Residance isn’t some magic thing that some people have and some people don’t. It’s a skill that we can grow.

And We’ve got, some brilliant ideas in here actually. I love that keeping your head above water at all times, and that’s a real challenge. And I think realistically our resilience will vary depending on our situation, vary on how we’re doing in life generally.

And as would a team’s resilience, and we’ll come on to that. I think an important thing to note is that resilience used to be described as, well, at the beginning, it was described as stiff upper lip as if not letting anything impact you. And actually the thinking has evolved, on from that. And rather than bouncing back from a situation.

It’s now described more as bouncing forward because the reason being that you can never really return what you’ve been through something. You can never really turned to the way you were before, and actually you wouldn’t really want to because being resilient is taking the skills and the knowledge that you’ve grown and learned through overcoming adversity and taking it with you to the next challenge. So that you’re not back at the start from where you were before, but you’re using that to be stronger the next time. So really resilience is about bouncing forward.

And, yeah, bringing bringing that skills and knowledge and learning with you on your journey.

Just having a little look what else we’ve got in the chat, looking happy and keeping going our resilient. I see people here Okay. Sorry. Go. So you said wrongly. I still hear people say, those smiling, looking happy, and keeping going are resilient.

That’s a really interesting one because, of course, there’s people and the classic social media, isn’t it? People that great. Having hashtag living my best dream, and blessed and all those things on social media and actually behind closed doors, they’re struggling.

We could go. I could talk a lot about this. I think it’s such a big topic, but, For now, I’ll just give you this neat little quote from the Harvard Business Review about resilience being able to adapt and recover from personal and professional setback. And it does note that, you know, it’s when you’re feeling low on resilient, a bad day can really throw you off your game.

And I I think that is something worth checking in in ourselves when we’re not feeling high and resilience.

How does that impact our day? What does that look like?

And what does this mean for teams?

Well, It’s about a team’s ability to withstand and adapt to external factors.

And for it, we’re going back to my rowing analogy.

You can imagine for rows to be successful, a professional growing team would need to be able to overcome the psychological pressure of com competing with a team they’d be able to problem solve if there’s, say, a crack in the boat unexpectedly adapt to weather conditions, and collaborate and communicate effectively and essentially weather the storm, and that’s what resilient teams are able to do. And hopefully you can see some of these elements in your teams that you’re working in. So ability to recover from setbacks, capacity to flex and adapt, problem solve.

Yeah, and and ultimately, ultimately with this, it tends to be our ability to think about external factors that we focus on. And that somewhat implies that the internal ones are taken care of.

And actually that’s where a mental strength comes in.

So mental strength is the team’s internal characteristics that contribute to a positive and determined mindset. So for example, when you think about a boat on the water, you never think really about this situation, which is the team getting the boat ready to to I wanna say sail, but there’s no sails on a rowing boat. But get getting the team ready to go and perform and be great.

And I find this really interesting. I tried Roan once. Pretty tricky. And actually one of the hardest bits I found was getting the boat into the water because these boats are so heavy. And if you can see, the person at the back is actually quite tall and the person immediately in front of them is a bit shorter. You can see by how their, arms are placed. And what I love about this picture is it really represents everything a team needs to be able to do to lift those heavy boats from, from off the wood up above their head and then into the water effectively, that team needs to have really worked on their communication skills, really worked on their strength individually and as a group.

If that short person for whatever reason wasn’t able to make it to or any of them weren’t able to make it that day, you can see how much weight the rest of the team would have to carry and they have to be incredibly coordinated to put that boat down into the water from that height without some of them falling in. And really, that about mental strength is about. So mental strength powers resilience.

It’s about the prep work. It’s about, being in a place where your brain is mentally healthy and and also being in a place where, you know, when we talk about internal characteristics, it it’s kind of at the level of the team, but also at the individual and as the organization.

So if you think about, you know, what what words come to mind when you think about mental strength, really what that looks like in a team is creating capacity to be able to ultimately be resilient when it’s needed.

So mentally strong teams, they’re motivated, self disciplined, they’ve got positive mindset, they’re open to learning, and okay with making mistakes.

Because when you are in about having difficult situations, you need to feel comfortable that you’re able to say, ah, I’ve got a problem here. And be able to draw on the resources of the team to really be able to support you much like a team in business would need to do because if mistakes aren’t you know, aren’t raised as they come up, then they just become bigger as an example.

And ultimately, being able to be mentally strong as a team, it avoids costly mistakes. It avoids silent quitter so people feeling fed up and leaving people get more satisfaction from what they do, and also they’re more effective and less stressed.

So the next question should really be, how do you make this happen?

Because it’s quite a big, concept that that has potentially lots of lots of different options and opportunities within it.

This is designed for success. It’s, formula for mental strength. But I think it’s a really powerful way of looking at it because it’s really important at just as a baseline to really think about your self awareness increasing yourself awareness, improving your emotional intelligence.

That itself is where people tend to start, but it doesn’t You can’t do that just alone. That’s not that’s not enough to have a mentally strong team.

It also involves being mentally prepared for the challenges ahead. If anyone has ever experienced impostor syndrome, you’ll know how helpful it is for someone to call you out in it. And by impostor syndrome, I mean, when you say you might be a new starter to a team and it will not necessarily at, ground level. It might be that you’re a manager, that’s taken over a new team and you have these fears that people find out that you don’t understand or you don’t know as much as they anticipate you do.

Imagine how supportive it would be if when you came into the team or if you moved into this team, somebody said to you, do you know what? When I went through this, this is these are the things that I felt. These were the concerns that I had. These are some of the challenges people who going into new teams’ experience.

And these are ways you might consider overcoming them. So it’s partly about having the knowledge, but partly about having the confidence that whatever challenges and unforeseen things they’re about we’re about to face. Like, I can manage them. Maybe because I have a plan if if I’m someone that benefits from a plan, this is where again you might wanna think about where your where you sit on those scales in Classic five. Or whether there’s something else you need to to feel mentally prepared and to be mentally prepared for challenges ahead. Because ultimately as humans, when we have the unknown, that really include increases our stress levels.

And the third element, that is gonna help you become mentally strong is strategy practice.

That is, a small because this is something that really gets so underestimated, but really is so vital for success.

That’s on a personal level and on a team level. So it’s about what fi finding what is helpful for you or for you as a team and making it second nature through practice, through repetition.

And that way it becomes ingrained in your behaviors. And your team culture. And that just means that when you are faced with adversity or challenges, that means your cognitive load is lightened because things are automatic. They’re already a part of your nature, so you don’t have to think about them. And ultimately, that means when there are challenges, you can focus really well on thriving and not just scrabbling around surviving trying to make the best of the situation.

And I just want to to highlight the strategy practice because there is actually a decent amount of science behind the importance of this as well. And I just wanna touch on how our brains work.

So with, with all the behaviors that we develop and automatic things that we do, naturally every day, like, you know, put our socks on and get dressed. We probably don’t give it a second thought when we get ready in the morning. We have clusters of neurons in our brains that form as we develop these behaviors.

And the stronger the connection between the neurons, the easier it is for information to pass through. And it’s essentially that’s that’s forming habits.

And you can imagine that if we’re needing to change how we’re doing things, this requires new habits.

I e, new connections in our brains to form. And for that to happen, we need to repeat.

And and it’s much like if you imagine you’re walking through a forest, you’re going from a to b, but it’s completely untouched for forests. There’s no paths. It would take you a while of walking through the same route for a path to form. And that’s what we’ve done with our habits that we’ve already formed. And then if you wanna go off onto into a different direction, a different path, or you to create a different path, you would have to keep repeating again that new route And the problem is there’s a temptation to stick with the easy path that you’ve already created, and that’s exactly what happens with the firing neurons in our brains.

So you literally have to repeat behaviors and become, Well, for them to become habits become more established because you’re actually fighting the neural networks in your brains that are already gone down a different route, essentially.

So I want to put a little question to you. I’ll be sharing in a minute some strategies and, some areas you can focus on build team’s strength, but I just want to put a question to you if there’s something that you do to support your team’s mental strength.

You can just pop it in the chats.

And it might be, as I said, it’s quite a big concept, and there might even be just little things you do.

To support your team to be mentally prepared for challenges ahead or increase self awareness or working on emotional intelligence.

Oh, I love that, Christina. Thank you. Ask powerful questions. That’s a fantastic one.

Yeah. Creating a safe space, absolutely psychological safety is so valuable in a team. It means that you can make mistakes without fear, it means you can share concerns and trust that the other the rest of the team have your back. So that’s brilliant.

Actively encourage open conversations.

Yeah. Fantastic.

Making time for authors. That is so helpful, Theresa. I think that is a really key thing. It’s a bit like kind of align it to people not really taking breaks. You know, we all know they’re good for us. There’s loads of research behind it, actually in new based on neuroscience of how much our brains work so much better when we take breaks.

And it’s the same with finding time. We often feel like we don’t have time to think about these things, but if we don’t, If we don’t find time, even if it’s ten minutes, then ultimately the pro problems tend to persist for longer and become bigger. So, yeah, finding time can be something that’s hard to prioritize, but once when it’s done and when it’s done a really helpful way, it can be absolutely invaluable for a team.

What else have we gotten here?

Ask the team how you can support them to achieve their goals. I love that, Kate. We’re gonna I’m gonna hold on to that for the next one of our strategies.

Picking up the phone and asking how they’re feeling truly helps every member of the team. Yeah. Absolutely.

And that that, partly is also about, emotional intelligence, not just your own, but thinking about other people. And having that awareness of how they may be feeling and reacting to things, especially if you’re a team going through a lot of change.

Reframing the really tough issues, which sometimes takes a few rounds. Yeah.

Fantastic. So that’s that’s, that brilliantly and celebrating. I love that. Yeah. That, really nicely at brings us on to our our next slide of, I apologize.

My laptop’s working a bit slow today.

Yeah. They’re reframing really tough issues.

That can be thought of as resilient thinking or positive mindset.

Some people will describe it as growth mindset. I know there’s been some research challenging that, but actually it can be really helpful to to look at how people are thinking and explore other options and interpretations of events. Yeah. That’s a really powerful one. Thank you. That’s brilliant.

So yeah, these are just some things, that themes and things that have come up for me in my work. Terms of supporting other people and what I found useful.

These topics each in their own, are quite complex and I could go I could go on all day. I love this stuff. But, today, I’m just going to just touch on physiological awareness and constructive conflict. I think I wanted to do physiological awareness because it’s something we often overlook and underestimate how important it is for us. And I I pick constructive conflict because it’s just a classic with teams when they’re struggling and I think it’s not complicated, but it does take a little bit of time and a little bit of focus on it. To really help improve that inner team.

So that’s the this is what we’re gonna look at next.

So when it comes to physiological awareness, when we think about making that baseline of our stress lower, It’s worth just looking at Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. I appreciate it has been challenged by some texts, but I think there’s still really useful information in here for us. Because if we think about how our brain works, we need our brain, which is, you know, looking after us, to be as high functioning as possible, and that means we have to look after our brains. And if our body is under stress, it’s actually going to impact our brain’s ability to cope with anything, let alone, you know, challenges at work and challenges at home, whatever.

We need to really start back go back to basics and say, how are we doing physiologically? Because that will impact us as individuals and also as a team. And I’d like to note that, I’m gonna go through some elements now. And just because one of them might be low at the moment, you might be struggling with something.

It doesn’t mean that’s, you know, things your your totally resilience is totally compromised because I, you know, I worked that team that I worked in on a psychiatric unit that was really effective We were all slightly sleep deprived, to be honest, because we had shift work, and we often everyone had to do night shifts, sometimes three in a row. So it doesn’t it doesn’t mean that, you know, we let’s be realistic. You’re not gonna be able to get a ten out of ten for all of these. But it’s just helpful to just take a look at where you’re sitting right now and thinking about what ten might look like.

And if there’s any little things you can do to nudge yourself up a little bit. To really support your resilience and mental strength.

And so the first factor, if you can grab like a piece of paper and just do a couple of lines down the page and you can rate yourself, or you can just make a little mental note. The first factor I would like you to think about is right now, how is your sleep?

What would you put yourself as?

I think it’s, I mean, we all know it’s important to have good night sleep. I think it’s important to note that if you wake up in the middle of the night, it doesn’t necessarily mean that you’ve had a bad night’s sleep because what we know about our circadian rhythms and our sleep cycles is that every three to four hours, that tends to complete one cycle depending on your age, depending on all sorts of things, but it’s generally three to four hours. So if you wake up in the middle of the night and you’re able to relax enough that you then fall back into sleep, the chances are you’ve just woken up at the end of one of your cycles.

And then as you fall asleep, you’ll start your next cycle and you might be able to even sleep through the whole next cycle. So just waking up in the morning, oh, sorry, in the middle of the night. Doesn’t necessarily mean you’re not sleeping well.

Also, this I just have to share this juicy bit of neuroscience because I think it’s so fantastic to like learn about they, they’ve done research on people’s brains when they’re sleeping, and they found that the, the activity through your brain actually changes when you’re sleeping. And the neuroscientists that observe this described it as it’s almost like there’s fluid rushing through your brain, and that’s believed to be your brain literally flooding out toxins. Sorry, yeah, flooding out toxins, in preparation for the next day, which would make sense when you think about it if you’ve you’re really low on quite often it’s hard to think clearly. And potentially that’s your brain not having had the chance of resetting.

So Yeah. The importance of sleep, as I said, I think we all know it.

So yeah, hopefully you’ve got yourself, your rating on where you sit in your sleep.

Now the next important element is movement.

And this is something we have loads of different systems within our body that function. So not just our circadian, rhythm and our sleep cycle, but we’ve got our hormone cycle. We’ve got our immune system.

We’ve also got our digestive system and all of these only function at their best when we’re really looking after our bodies and movement is a big part of that. Never mind, the, you know, endorphins from exercise that make us feel great.

It’s just it’s really a really important element of our body functioning. And that poses a bit of a challenge when you come to an if you are working in an office and you’re sitting down. Time. And this is where I think teams can really help each other.

And in fact, we do this in our team that if somebody’s been sitting down for too long and they just feel like they’re had meeting after meeting, they might just say, oh, you know what? I’m gonna make this standing meeting, and that’s completely acceptable. And people know it’s acceptable and it feels easy to do because we’ve all got this shared understanding that actually it’s gonna help people focus better it’s it’s good for your body and it just means that you’re able to, yeah, your your body’s able to function better. So I think normalizing behaviors like that, either standing or walking or even just accepting that breaks quite often when teams are really stressed and under pressure They miss outbreaks and understanding that movement is an element of taking a good break can be really helpful.

It’s also hydration.

So again, I think some teams have been really great at taking water into meetings, but also allowing for, allowing for maybe five minutes before the end of the meeting so that people can either pop to the loo or they can grab themselves a drink, It’s just little things like that can make a big difference to how your brain functions. And it really is as direct as that.

When you talk to, psychologists and neuroscientists, like, they really emphasize these basics and it seems so simple. So just ask yourself where you might set yourself on that scale for hydration.

And is it is it that there may be opportunities for you to increase that?

And of course the last one is nutrition.

Now, of course, there are lots of diets and recommendations about what we shouldn’t shouldn’t eat. And what we know from, the research is that actually if you miss out on vitamins in your diet, it can really impact your mental health.

And that’s that’s relatively, I’d say, in the last sort of five years that researchers come really started to be backed. And, yeah, so it’s just a really important part. And you can imagine again if you can lower or I guess, make your threshold for your amygdala being triggered different if you can if you can high make it higher. Then you’re less likely to struggle when you come up against challenges, and you’re more likely to manage both physically and emotionally. Because you’re not putting pressure on your brain.

Okay. So wherever your numbers are at, I’d like to, like, maybe pick your lowest one and just think, how can you improve that? Just one notch and and just remind yourself that by creating a new habit, you need to repeat over and over again for those neural networks in your brain to form.

Okay. We’re gonna move on to the second strategy that I would like to share with you. And this is about constructive conflicts in teens.

You might recognize this if you’ve come across it before, but let me just paint you a scenario.

So we’ve got team member a, They’ve just come out for meeting, and they’re talking to their colleague team member b.

And they’ve just come out just very frustrated. So they said, I just had the most terrible meeting.

I I went in with my points of view and team member c, they completely overrode everything I said. They didn’t listen.

It’s like they don’t value me. They don’t care what they say. They think they’re the only important one in the room.

So their colleague, team member B goes, that is terrible. I cannot believe they treated you like they don’t they know how how good you are? How many good points of view you have? And that’s totally disrespectful.

You should you should talk to your manager. You should, but maybe maybe also you maybe just, I don’t know, would quitting your job make you feel better? What else can, like, maybe next time I’ll stand up for you, actually. That’s what I’ll do. I’ll come in and I’m gonna stand up for you and show them that, you know, what you’ve got to say is important.

And team member a is, yeah, yeah, that’d be great.

If anyone’s familiar with this, That is the trauma triangle. So this is, Stephen Carpenter’s, creation, which is actually so helpful because when these this is happening in the team. It’s really easy to get dragged into the drama, and it’s so unproductive that it sort of sustains problems.

So, and most of this is unconscious. So we’ve got, person a, the person that went into the meeting and came out disgruntled. They were sitting in the victim role.

They felt like, the the person in the meeting with him who’s the persecutor. They put him in a persecutor role.

They felt very hard done by. They’re essentially feeling quite helpless. Like they’re not actually able to do anything about what’s just happened. They’ve then recruited their colleague, person b, who’s the rescuer, to come and help do something about it.

And that person has then responded in a way to say, right? I’m gonna solve your problem for you. The challenge with that is that sort of keeps person a in the victim role in that like I’m helpless, I need someone to look after me and it keeps the rescue in there. Oh, yeah.

I’m gonna come in and save the day.

And of course, the the person in that meeting unbeknownst to them has been put into the Perscutero.

And this isn’t to, disregard the fact that you can have people who are persecuted and fix tens and then people that are brilliant people in the world that are rescuers, that’s not that’s not to devalue what they do. But, it’s just to be aware that we can sit kind of psychologically in these roles, within teams really unhelpfully. And the value of just even knowing this and sharing this model with your teammates is that you’ll start to recognize it when it happens.

So As I said, the rescuer actually really unhelpful helpfully was keeping the victim in in that role of like, oh, you’re helpless. Let me help you. Rather than being empowering.

The the other thing you’ll notice is over time, the rescuer will, you know, try and save the day the victim will never really be satisfied because it doesn’t really completely solve their problem because they haven’t learned to manage their own challenges themselves.

After a while, the victim might get frustrated with the rescue with the rescuer, sorry, and say like, oh, you just don’t get it. You don’t understand. That’s not gonna help.

Suddenly the roles have switched.

So the victim actually becomes quite persecutory. They’ve they’ve become quite critical. And the rescue other person that was trying to help suddenly feels a bit like a victim. They feel a bit got out. You can see how it sort of continues.

So there is a way to help stop this, and it’s about stepping back and really noticing that it’s happening. If you ever, I mean, you may have seen this as well in Disney movies, classic damsel in distress, and the night coming to rescue. Thankfully, things are moving on a bit since then. But also with parents, good parent, bad parent situation.

And the value is there’s a real we if you’ve been if you’re a parent, you might have noticed when you say, like, actually, this is what’s going on. Hang on a minute. Let’s not get drawn into this, and that’s exactly what you need to do with the team. So if there are dynamics like this that are happening and ongoing, and we do, it’s totally natural that we will often feel more comfortable in one role than the other, or naturally when we’re feeling stressed fall back into that role, and that’s where the awareness of awareness is really helpful. But if we can notice it, if we can challenge it in a really helpful way, and if we can make sure that we don’t then by noticing it, go, oh, I can solve this problem and jump into the rescue position.

We can really help move things on a lot quicker.

What that looks like is being aware of who’s sitting in what role. So if you notice somebody and and it might be that they are behaving a bit like a purse, like the sort of, negative person and they’re getting all the blame. It might be that they’re actually being a bit more aggressive than they need to be because they’re feeling frustrated, by the way, the person in the Rick victim role is reacting.

You might ask the prosecutor how can you communicate in a way that is assertive and not aggressive.

Yeah. And if you find yourself in that position, you can ask for this yourself to yourself.

For the victim, it’s what small steps can you take? To positively influence, you know, your situation. So it’s about empowering them. It’s not about rescue.

It’s not about saying an important element of here, which I think sometimes people sort of misjudge a little bit, is it’s not about saying That doesn’t matter. That’s not important. Or, oh, you’re fine. You can get on with it.

You’ll you’ll you’ll you’ll fix it. It’s back to those, helpful questions, but was mentioned in the chat earlier. It’s about phrasing a question in a way to help people think about how they can solve their own problems.

And really it’s about empowering them.

And if you are a classic rescuer, which a lot of us are, we see someone in need, and we feel like, oh, I wanna help them.

It’s how can you empower them to find their own solution.

So for the rescuer, it’s asking them how they can be empowering.

Okay.

So I hope that makes sense, and I hope I I imagine, if you this is the first time you’ve come across drama triangle, you might now see it as you go about your day in lots of tiny little ways. People won’t be conscious that they’re doing it or that they’re falling into this role.

But it can just be really helpful to notice that, in a team and be aware of it so that you’ve got a shared language of like I might be sitting in the rescuer position today. How can I shift that?

So that brings us back around to our mental strength formally, by being mentally prepared for challenges so we think about, you know, if somebody and this is this is actually where it can be hugely valuable to really think about and unpick your FAST five profile and think about where are my risks?

Do I tend to fall into one of those areas of the giant drama triangle more than the other two? What can I do to rectify that? And if if you, have the opportunity to look at your colleagues profiles as well. And if you really have the opportunity to do a team’s scope, be fantastic because then you can see where you sit in relation to them. But if some of their risk factors of you know, one of the fa the facets that they’re on might challenge you in a way that actually you need to be aware of and have considered before you then you know, go into more challenges as a team.

So, yeah, I hope that’s brought that background to help you really think about some ideas of how you can improve the mental strength of your team so that ultimately they are resilient when they’re faced challenges.

Just to highlight, we’ve had a little look at resilience and mental strength today.

We’ve touched on the neuropsychology and how it impacts our brains sorry, the way the way we work. And, hopefully you found those strategies helpful.

We’ve got it. I’ve timed it almost perfectly forty five minutes. Great. Forty six minutes. So we’ve got some time for any questions, you’d like to ask me and Yeah. I’ll stop sharing and put questions to the floor.

It’s so lovely actually to see.

So many people were able to make it today. Thank you for joining.

And if you’ve got any questions like us direct rather than put in a chat, feel free as well. I was gonna say feel free to put your video on. I’ll just put my video on so I can so we can see some faces. So, welcome again everyone. So if you do want to ask any questions, ask away.

Charlotte is here.

Hi, Charlotte. How are you going? Hello. Good. Thank you. How are you? Yeah. Really well.

Thank you. Thank you so much for, presenting. It was a really interesting topic.

What do you think the role of strengths are and and more maybe the more positive psychology movement in the work that you do?

The role of strengths. Can you give it more specific? Yeah. So treat based strengths, for example, you know, coming out of somebody’s personality or other strength measures, you know, Gallup, or via strengths and things like that, the role of, strength, identification, and strength language in resilience and mental health.

I mean, I think that’s quite a a big question to unpack, but I I would say, I think.

Of course, today I focus on challenges because I think that’s often where people start where they where and, again, it’s like with the strategies, isn’t it? We often think when we’re under an immense amount of pressure, Right. What can we do now? And it’s about preparing.

And I think, of course, knowing your team’s risks as well as your strengths as well as their strengths is really valuable. And ultimately, I think it’s one of those things. If you know, that you, I I guess it’s part of that being being ready for challenges and being comfortable with change is knowing what your strengths are, being able to utilize them to manage challenging situations, but also being aware of what your team strengths are so that you can say, hey, you know what? This team member, but this requires psychological safety.

Here’s the thing.

To be able to say, like, this team member is actually stronger than me at this situation, you know, say if it’s a For example, if somebody’s really, a score’s highly on energy and you’ve got a big client meeting that has lots of people and it’s gonna be lots of ideas thrown around and and somebody who’s gonna really flourish in that environment compared to someone who maybe doesn’t feel as comfortable being able to know who to put forward for that is really helpful. And that is it’s almost people often, if they’re not functioning as a team, they see that as like one person winning up against the other, but actually a functioning team works like an ecosystem and they recognize some people are gonna be stronger and let’s utilize that because that benefits us all So I think there’s a real, yeah, there’s a real value in that.

But I think I’ve, as I said, strength, you could go in all different directions. Like some large positive affirmations, and some people find that, you know, having a really, well honed purpose and set of values and then, really celebrating the strengths of a team. Like, that can really set a team off in a a great direction.

And I think, yeah, celebrating someone mentioned earlier, celebrating I’m really acknowledging a team’s strengths as they evolve and develop is so powerful.

But yeah, it’s it’s it’s an interesting one because I think it’s gotta be a balance. It’s gotta be balanced against challenges and and against risks. And if we all said, oh, yeah. Here’s all our strengths.

We’re all fantastic, then you’re kind of doing your your team a disservice because actually are there. And if we don’t address them, then you end up in a bit of a mess. So I think it’s that balance. Do you think that risks then, just people not playing to their strengths.

So when you talk about risks, would you agree? I mean, the removal of negatives doesn’t always relate to the increasing positives, in an individual. So while we, you know, create strengths and we create capability, by removing a negative. Say, for example, depression doesn’t equal happiness, if re removal of depression doesn’t require, you know, doesn’t equate to more happiness, for example.

Removal of a threat doesn’t re require or it negate the fact that you may be in the insecure situation. And so I was I’m just fascinated mainly about, you know, when people talk about their strengths and you talk about it as team perspective, then do, you know, it’s kind of a theoretical hypothesis, I suppose, do they then say that the risks are, unless they’re physical risks, for example, or financial risks or things like that, that actually the team when they understand themselves can moderate those risks by leveraging their strengths.

Definitely. Definitely. But I also think that the risks are smaller when you’re mentally strong. Yeah.

And that’s the thing. And I think I to I think my my my career journey has actually been really, has kind of taken me through this, and I found it really that’s why I find it so interesting because I used to work with people that if if you like this is the baseline of well-being and happiness. I used to work with people that were way under an at rock bottom in in the mental health settings. And now in business, I’m working with people that they may be they may fluctuate.

Of course, everyone fluctuates, but generally, they might go down a little bit, but they’re not at rock bottom. But then also you get people that are are really at a stage where they’re functioning well, but they actually could be pushed to really fulfill their potential and they haven’t it’s almost like they haven’t, seen. They haven’t fulfilled their potential yet. So they’re just fine.

And actually, I think this is where mental strength and a team can come in because you can be sort of tootling along getting on fine. And then a challenge comes and then suddenly you’re knocked. Whereas if you’re, if you’re if you’re mentally strong, you’re you’re sort of, I should say it’s because it’s on a a scale really. If your mental strength is higher, then you’re actually when you’re knocked, you’re not as affected and you recover quicker.

I think that’s where the value is and that’s why I feel like the term resilience doesn’t really it doesn’t encapsulate it well enough because, you know, part of being resilient is having a support network that will be supportive for you, for you as an individual, maybe if you as a team within, you know, might have a support network within your organization.

That’s not being mentally strong, but it is contributing to resilience. Whereas being mentally strong is about making sure when there is an impact, it’s lower. And it’s just like physical health, you know, if you’re you’re re you can have a general level of physical health. But if you can elevate that to be and I say this as someone who doesn’t go to the gym and I’m not shaming anyone who doesn’t feel like that is female, like, physically, you know, strong because I’m really not prorating.

I mean, I think it’s great for everyone, but I’m I’m not, yeah, you know, priorities in life. But, you know, if you’re if you’re really physically strong, then when you have an injury, your body will recover better from it. And and that goes in line with, if you’re eating new having the new nutrition you need, if you’re having enough sleep, your body will cover better. And I I’ve got, my sister who bless her She’s a mom of a one year old, and I can tell you now she talks to me about brain fog every day.

And she is more more emotional than she used to be, and it’s because she is struggling with sleep. She’s struggling with all these things that the basics that her body needs. It’s more frequent cause, but, you know, it just shows you actually Like these things are so important. I think we underestimate it, especially when we’re really busy and overwhelmed with work, and that you, you know, I often come and go into organizations where people say, oh, we don’t have time for breaks, or we don’t have time for lunch.

And you just think that is impacting your work. You think you don’t have time for it, but if you don’t make time, that will ultimately affect your productivity.

It’s all. I mean, I could talk for asthma. Yeah. Thank you. But and as you say, it all all comes around safety and trust and that psychological safety that you create and better communication amongst team members and, a sense of being vulnerable with each other that Actually, while somebody is elevated and working well today and and functioning well and has a strong sense of resilience and mental strength, they’re there to support other people who may be floundering a bit and and struggling, through the day as well. So, yeah. Say that the other thing, I haven’t been asked to to promote that at five, but I think it’s really genuinely helpful.

Oh, yeah. When you when you I think there’s something really valuable about naming things and and how when you look at your profile and you see that there is a scale and there’s no right or wrong and that people will have different preferences. So even within our team, we’re a small team. We have really different preferences.

You know, different people at different ends of the scale, especially for energy actually. And and really just being like, oh, okay. We have different preferences. There is no right or wrong.

There is there is no shame in how being different from each other.

That is so valuable because I think often when there is friction, and it also creates a language in which people can go Oh, we’re different. And it’s not because you’re wrong or I’m wrong, which we just are. And, you know, ultimately, it’s very de shaming, but it also helps open up a language, like, and how we’re gonna move on from here. So, like, if you’ve got, you know, if as a team, you have, you know, you’re all low on will, what are you gonna do?

How are you gonna be resilient in a circumstance where actually somebody with perhaps scoring higher on bill might be the person you’d typically put forward. If you’re a team way all on low will, what can you do? Is it? You know, how can you how can you look ahead and be prepared for that?

So it’s and also being able to stretch from that place of known approach and and preference, you know, if you take low will much more probably democratized and considered and, you know, thoughtful about the decisions that you can really rely you can look back on that and hold that going forward and why you may have to flex a little bit more about being more assertive or being more independent for a period of time. You can certainly celebrate that in, in the strengths and the natural key qualities that people bring forward as well.

Anyway, yeah, I could talk you to you all day, obviously. But I think by by leaving though, like, by mode is is I I just think there is so much. And I think we kind of bang on about this to be our synthesized success because it is so valuable. There is so much research out there and our concepts, even if personality tests, of, you know, how our framework, how people interact, the range of I’m new, isn’t it?

Yeah. Yeah. It’s just there’s so much research. And I think what I find really exciting is neuroscience has come on like leaps and bounds over the last fifteen years.

And even our understanding of how brains work, it’s huge from when, you know, Freud was the first one that said, oh, we’ve got an unconscious. And he may have had some wacky ideas, but I really would like to give him credit for actually just recognizing that there is an unconscious because before him, we didn’t know that. Yeah. Well, maybe there might be some things in history, but generally it wasn’t a general public knowledge that we have unconscious.

And I think from that point until where we are now, we are so more aware of how brains work and how that impacts us in terms of relationships and daily lives that it it just means that we really can utilize that in a really fantastic way if we become aware of it, and I think that’s where what, you know, my messages really is there’s so much you can do to support teams be resilient, and ultimately people enjoy work because I think when people are really stressed, Like morale goes down and it’s, Yeah.

Yeah. No one wants to come to work and do a bad job or work in a toxic environment, but I do think, you know, personal accountability and the old saying of you are what you walked past or your team is what you, let slide type of thing and having the language, having the courage, having that mental strength, that resilience is a really great way to not boost the team and performance, but individual value and and worth. And I think when we see each other, really see other with language and our vulnerable moments, I think we we turn up better as people and better in society, better in community.

Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. Very good.