Read our accompanying blog Resilience in Leadership: Why 30 Seconds of Courage Matters More Than Endless Positivity for more insights and practical leadership strategies.

Podcast Transcript

John Bullock:

Welcome to this Advance Performance podcast. My name’s John Bullock and joining me today is Heather Wright.

Heather Wright:

Hi, John.

John:

And today we’re talking about resilience. So, the word resilience, what, what does that mean for you, Heather?

Heather:

Well, you know, it’s a word that keeps popping up at the moment when I’m talking to people, they say we need our leaders to be more resilient. We need our people to be more resilient. And when they say it to me, I think about, oh, times are tough, but we need to keep going. And it sounds like a bit of a slog really. Resilience. And I think for me there’s an anti being too positively fluffy movement and just not. We don’t want our staff to be skippy doo dah Isn’t life wonderful? La de da de da Smile and.

John:

The world will smile back.

Heather:

Yeah, and those are nice. And there’s some lovely songs with that. There is, but to be honest, I’m a little bit. The Buddhists say life is suffering and I don’t want that to sound depressing.

John:

Yes.

Heather:

And it’s not a great sales pitch for their faith. But what they mean is once you get used to the idea that tough things happen in life and actually. the tough things are quite good for us. I know it doesn’t feel that when you’re in the middle of it, but the idea is, what do you learn by it?

John:

Yeah. Builds character, doesn’t it?

Heather:

Yeah, it builds character. And I know some people will be listening to this thinking, I’ve got enough character now. Can everybody stop having things go wrong? But that’s what resilience is. Resilience is the determination to still move forward no matter what.

John:

Oh, I like that. The determination to still move forward no matter what. And I know this might sound a bit of a no brainer, but often, I mean, we’re all resilient at times, but the key is to be resilient when times are tough, not resilient when times are good.

Heather:

Because anyone can be resilient when times are good. For me, it’s about when I think we’ve all been there. And maybe this is a bit of a confession as someone who stands on a stage, you and I do that, we do the speeches and we talk about motivation, but I cannot say that over 20 years of doing motivational speaking and training and all of that, that I have not sometimes curled up on my bed saying, please let it all go away, please. Or I’ve been driving somewhere and I’ve thought, I want to keep driving. I want to run away sometimes. Sometimes you just want to run away.

John:

And that’s the easy thing to do, isn’t it? The runaway thing. And let’s face it, sometimes in life we do do that, don’t we? But that’s the key. The key is at that moment, how does resilience come into it?

Heather:

And resilience is…. Resilience for me is when you dig deep within, inside yourself, grit your teeth and go, I’m going to make this work. And if it means I have to do something different, then I will do something different.

John:

And that thought pattern is actually only a very short period. I know you talk about something called the 30 seconds of courage. Tell us about that.

Heather:

Well, it comes from a film called We Bought a Zoo, weirdly, which was actually a true story about. Although the film is set in America, but it’s a British couple who bought a zoo in Devon. And I’m pretty certain the script obviously isn’t fully representative of what they said, but the guy in it says, you don’t need a load of courage. I haven’t needed 20, 20 years of courage to keep the business going. What I’ve needed was short bursts. So it’s like you’re sitting, you’re looking at the phone, and you’ve got a difficult phone call to make, actually, you pick the phone up and it takes 30 seconds to dial the number, ask to speak to the person, take a deep breath and launch into the conversation. Or you see an attractive that comes in the. Where he’s seen an attractive woman and he wants to go and speak to her, and all he needs is that 30 seconds of courage where he walks up to her and says, may I sit down and can we talk?

John:

Yes.

Heather:

And that’s what it’s about, pressing send on the email. So you can write the email and in your head go, I’m not going to send it. But then the 30 seconds is you press send.

John:

So that’s a great way of looking at it, isn’t it? Because when we look at resilience, we often look at something that might be over a few months, and we kind of think, how the hell are we going to get the strength to do what we need to do? And actually. But actually the crunch moments are really quite small where you need the most.

Heather:

Resilience, little small bursts. And if in between time. If in between time, you have to have a cry and you have to grit your teeth, then that’s fine. Again, we’re back to this idea that in the films we see Gerard Butler saving the White House. And, you know, we don’t need the SAS. We’ve got him on his own. Got him on his own. I watched London’s Falling or something recently.

John:

Yes, that’s right.

Heather:

You know, don’t worry, Mr. SAS man, you’ve got me. You don’t need anything else. And we see some tough guy who’s not upset, who grits his teeth, he feels very strong. And actually, courage doesn’t come in that form in real life. Courage comes from sometimes when you’re walking along, you’re crying a little bit, you may even be sobbing. When you get to where you’re going, you grit your teeth and go, bum. I’m doing it. I’m going to get on with it. I’m going to get on with it. If you’re going to do a bungee jump, for instance, actually standing on the platform doesn’t take courage. It’s one second of courage, which is the moment when you jump.

John:

Yes.

Heather:

And I found this. I did a bungee jump years ago, and I was standing there terrified, terrified. You know, I thought I was going to die.

John:

What if this?

Heather:

What if that?

John:

That makes sense.

Heather:

Somebody behind me went, three, two, one. And at one, I jumped. And I can’t tell you the two words that went through my head. The second one was it as I went, and it was like, I’m going. And it’s one second and two seconds later, I’m upside down, bouncing up and down with the hell of an adrenaline rush.

John:

Yeah, absolutely. So. the key thing then, to sum up for us is when we’re thinking about resilience. Yes, we need lots of it. Yes, we all need to work at it as we go through life. But actually, a lot of the time, we can take that 30 seconds of courage, and that will give us the resilience that we need just at that moment, just to get us over that start line or jump off the ledge or whatever it may be.

Heather:

Phone call, write the letter.

John:

So when something seems really big that you’re going to need lots of resilience for, it maybe just chunk it down into. So what’s the crunch point that I really need the resilience for? And then it should help going forward.

Heather:

Absolutely brilliant.

John:

Well, thank you for your time today, Heather.

Heather:

Thank you.

John:

We hope you’ve enjoyed this podcast.