Betsy Jordyn 0:00
So I don't know about you. But I definitely deal with challenges, setbacks, and all kinds of interesting intricacies of challenges on my way to growing my own business. And I'm sure you're in the same boat. And it's for this reason I am beyond excited to bring on the show Richard Citron to talk about how you can use all of these setbacks and challenges as catalysts for greater success. So what's cool about Richard is, besides being just an amazing human being, he is a business psychologist, and he works with organizations and individuals to help them achieve even more than they thought that was possible, and to leverage the power of really difficult and challenging situations. So without further ado, welcome to the show, Richard.
Richard Citrin 0:52
Thank you, Betsy, thank you for that wonderful introduction. It is great to be with you. I'm really excited to share some ideas and have this conversation going on between us.
Betsy Jordyn 1:02
And you know, one of the things that is so important to me on this particular show, oh, when I forgot to introduce myself on the show, I forgot to even do my opening jingle for crying out loud. So this is the enough already podcast for welcome everybody who's listening in this is the show for consultant coaches who want to forge their own paths to success in their careers and their lives. And what I do in my business, I'm Betsy Jordyn, I'm your host, and I help people you know, turn their careers into their own businesses and figure that out. So what we're talking about here was this resilience is so important and so near and dear to the heart of my clients, because a lot of us don't necessarily come to consulting or coaching business ownership, because everything was going really well. You know, so they get here in a different, you know, from all of these different challenging situations, and it actually creates that that unique opportunity for them. So is that what you mean by resilience? Or what is your definition for resilience?
Speaker 1 2:00
Yeah, so you know, most people, your resilience has multiple spheres that it operates in, it's an engineering term, it means what a piece of metal returns back to its original shape. It's also an ecological term, we talk about the resilience of the Gulf Coast around Louisiana, after hurricanes. And of course, there's a psychological use for the term resilient, which typically means returning to a former state of being psychologically. So if we're stressed and our heart rate goes up, somebody cuts us off. A resilience is typically defined as the time it takes to return to that calmer state where our heart rate goes down, our breathing becomes more normal. That's typically the idea of resilience. Some people will say, bounce back, how long does it take you to bounce back. And that's resilience. In my study of resilience, which really, you know, has been for the past 2030 years, probably, I really take a broader view of resilience, Betsy, and I think of resilience as as a way to address and deal with the challenges, adversity and stress that we talked about. I don't talk about managing stress. Because stress like time is a time as a physical imperative, you don't manage time, time manages us, in the same way, don't manage stress, because stress is a biological imperative. So when that person cuts us off, or your boss gives you a short timeframe, or your kid comes home from school in tears, or body jumps into motion, that's just we can't keep that from happening. That's, that's just the biological imperative of it. And so I think of resilience as being something that I call going across the resilience continuum, which is how can we deal with our stress more effectively. And so my definition of resilience is our ability to effectively plan for number one, to navigate gracefully and successfully number two, and number three bounce forward from challenging and difficult events in such a way that we learn and grow from them. So can I notice Can we can we plan for stressful situations, you know, you you know, when they're coming up? I have not that this interview was stressful, but I wanted to make sure it was that it went well. So this morning, I took some notes, I did some planning, I checked my zoom up to my backgrounds. I did everything to make sure that that when I got into the interview with you everything was as I would want it to be that that reduces the chance of something going wrong lowers lowers my stress level going into something I leave for the airport early, whatever plane to catch. I don't leave I try not to leave at the last minute. Navigating gracefully that I always say is the hard part because what When we're in the middle of a stressful situation, we don't really control our body or our response to that stress. However, there are ways to think about it and really to develop some skills in being equanimity is about those situation being balanced when they occur in real time, so we don't lose our capability to deal with that situation. You know, what, what would happen? If you were, you've you watched a car crash, and you saw somebody who was injured? You know, would you freak out? Or would you be able to render aid? Call police and emergency vehicles? Have you want to do that in a way that was helpful? Number three, is this idea of bouncing forward, not just bouncing back, which is that traditional way of thinking of resilience, bouncing forward, says, Well, I want to learn from this situation, I want to take this experience and make something better out of it, I want to become a better person. So we think about these challenges and adversities and how can we learn and grow from them. And that, you know, learning and growing is really, at the heart of being a good consultant, being a good employee, being a good learner, you want to be able to do that. But it's particularly important for consultants, because because we're, we're experienced so many diverse items in our work with clients that we want to take those learnings and apply them and our clients are coming to us, typically, with some issues or concerns that they want to have resolved. How can we learn from those experiences to help them even
Betsy Jordyn 6:33
more? You know, there's, there's just so much in what you just said, and I feel like what you've done is like, take a major elevated reframe on the concept of resilience. I think that the the basic information when people talk about like people are resilient, you know, in today's volatile world, and all of that, I think it's just a matter of like, okay, I'm gonna survive through it. You know, like, that's what they think it's like, I'm just gonna muddle through, I will survive, I will make it I'll you know, I'll keep trudging along. And then you're saying the traditional definition from a scientific standpoint is returning back to stasis, you know, and, and the more resilient you are, you could just get back to stasis. And that would be an interesting perspective is like bouncing back, like, you know, and reducing that cycle time between this crisis and stress, get back to normal. I love like, like, even that would be a better perspective than I just, you know, I can survive through these difficult things, I could just get to this stasis. But what you're saying is that there's an opportunity to say, Hey, listen, I'm accepting that stress and difficult things are a part of life. And so when that happens, it's not if it happens, it's one that happens, I will a plan in advance for how to mitigate it, to what happens make a conscious choice to gracefully, you know, almost like journey with the stressful situations rather than let it consume you. And then the ultimate is, hey, how do I take these difficult situations, and like, almost like bounce forward, so it's not even like, Oh, I'm just going to live down here. And this is what I'm just managing. I'm not looking at just this. It's like, this is a springboard. This is a this is an opportunity. That's huge. That's completely different than what most people think about in terms of resilience. Yeah,
Speaker 1 8:16
thank you, you. You nailed it. And I think the, the element of this for me, you know, I'm an optimist, I've always been an optimist. And so I like to look for what's working. It's funny, I had a call from a client who asked me to meet with her chief operation officer and their HR personnel has some trouble hiring for certain positions. And she was going to meet with with her these two key staff members, and look at what some of the issues may be. And included her note, were a list of about 15 reasons why it wasn't working. And what I looked for on that list was one thing about why it was working, and there wasn't anything. So the whole orientation of this effort that they're doing this initiative is around why it isn't working. Now they are able to hire some people. Why? What's the success factors? What is it? What is it that draws people to them? Taking that that's such a big flip? And really, you know, people ask me, What's the silver bullet of resilience? Is there one thing that I can do, I wish I say this now, which I save it for later.
Betsy Jordyn 9:26
Don't Don't leave us hanging. Alright, you could save. You can save it for later so that it will be interesting enough to keep everybody listening in today.
Speaker 1 9:33
So really, the important story is that how can we change our thinking around so we see what's possible, rather than what the reasons are? That's, that's not working. There's so much negativity, the negativity bias. This tendency, we have to see what's not working what's wrong. You know, it just, first of all, it's another biological thing you know, because if we're walking on the savanna hunting Willy man myths were looking behind us to make sure that saber toothed tigers and hunting us, right. So so we need to be aware of challenges. But the truth is today the saber toothed Tiger isn't haunting us. And we're generally safe in situations. So let's, let's honor and recognize what's not working. And let's look at the positivity side, what is working, that's an intent that comes out of really, that the definition of the resilience model for me the way I, the way I talk about the resilience advantage, is what I refer to it as, you
Betsy Jordyn 10:34
know, it's just like, I only see the positive, or I see the opportunity, because I think that there's a difference between, I'm just going to have this, you know, that toxic positivity, you know, like, maybe the situation really is bad, but it's like, oh, but you know, they mean, well, or I'm going to think positive, really, or at least I'm, you know, not in some other country where I'm, you know, poor or whatever, rather than, like, hey, maybe there's a reason why this is happening to me, seems to be a different kind of positivity that you could have, you know, like, let's talk about like a typical scenario, or I would say at least 80% of the clients that I work with, who wind up in a consulting or coaching business ownership opportunity, it came because of job loss, you know, of some kind, some horrible job situation. And you could say, well, this box is boss is toxic, or this organization I got laid off, and this is horrible. Or maybe from the resilient advantage standpoint, I say, I wonder if this is something that's done, not to me, but for me, and that there's something that's possible that I didn't see, you know, rather than denying, because I worry about when people talk about the positivity is that we're going to deny our reality and almost like put ourselves in cognitive dissonance, where it's like, everyone's like, Oh, this is so great. But you know, like, but this feels really bad to me.
Speaker 1 11:52
Yeah, no, I hear you. And, and I would agree that that's where we want to work towards. What I find generally is that if I'm working with an individual who has lost their job, it's very difficult and wants to make an order somebody who's in a job and wants to make a career transition. I've worked with plenty of those folks. It's difficult for them to see where the opportunity is, it's that's a big leap.
Betsy Jordyn 12:17
Yeah.
Speaker 1 12:17
So you know, I don't I'm not pollyannish about positivity. However, what I will start to say to someone is, let's talk about what your strengths are. You know, so you've lost your job, or you want it or you hate your job, even worse, you're losing your job, that's a blessing, you know, somebody, somebody saw that it wasn't a good fit for you. And you're feeling bad. You know, what? To say? Where's the opportunity? I think we definitely want to get there. However, generally, the person's feeling so bad about themselves or negative, that I want to start by assessing. For me, it's always coming back to strengths. What is it that you do well, what is it that you enjoy doing? Where do you see your capability capacity, because I'm wanting to help build that person up incrementally, if I jump to opportunity, that may be the case, however, they may not be ready, right? Because they just don't see where the opportunity is for themselves. Because they, they're in a funky place. They're in a sub confusion, uncertainty, confidence, maybe, maybe wounded. And it's the same thing when I think consultants and coaches get called into business situations, or even where a coaching assignment can be development based, as opposed to performance based, you know, somebody is having to assume a new role is being coached into a bigger position. They, you know, they may not feel confident about all of their skills, or they shouldn't feel confident about all their skills, I want to start to help them see where those capacities are, then we can move on to something else. So I think kind of it in an incremental, but you're absolutely right. We want to be transitioning that not be pollyannish, about positivity.
Betsy Jordyn 14:06
And maybe there's something about this, like traveling gracefully with stress. You know, one of the things that I noticed when I work with a lot of consultants and coaches are starting a business, like they've never been a business owner, even if you know how to advise businesses, you don't know how to run your own business. So there's all these myths and stories that we have, that I think creates that suffering, you know, where it's like, oh, I should already know how to do this, you know, and we have all of that. And I think we're like that traveling gracefully is it's like what's so what you don't have the skill sets yet. If you're going for a promotion, if you're a director now you're going to a VP don't like feel bad that you don't have the skill sets. It's you know, be excited that you don't have the skill sets because you're going into a new level. You know, you're we shouldn't be we shouldn't know how to do things when we are making changes. But we have these myths and stories so we judge ourselves rather than just as you were saying like before that I think that would be a great application of the traveling gracefully. Absolutely.
Speaker 1 15:03
When when we wrote about this in my book with my colleague, Mike cow strategy driven leadership, we talked about how and why people get promoted. And we always say that if somebody is 100%, ready for the next job, that is, they're totally ready. Don't put them in there. Because you're wasting resource, there's nothing for them to learn, they already know how to do it. If they're 75%, ready, that's ideal. Because person who doesn't have it all together, but they have a good foundation. And if they're 50%, ready, they probably can do the job, but they're gonna need some support, some coaching, some training. And you're absolutely right, it's around the skills and competencies associated with doing that job that most people lack, because they just haven't done it. And, and that, and that's where I think I love talking about opportunity. How exciting is this for you to learn something new? Yeah, challenge.
Betsy Jordyn 16:00
Yeah, you know, like I'm in, I'm in Denver right now, and I just am new here. And like, one of the things I want to do start, you know, hiking more and climbing more like, I've never done it before, you know, and I can sit here and judge myself over and over again, but the fact is, never done it before. How would I? How am I supposed to know? How, how am I supposed to know what equipment I need? And what do I need to do? Like, I don't know, I'm not gonna know,
Speaker 1 16:25
you don't, my wife and I went, do a good deal of hiking in and about three or four years ago, we started to get hiking sticks, because some of the trails we were using were rocky and hilly and wet. And we've been using them for about six or nine months. And then we went hiking with it experienced trail guide. And he pointed out to me that I wasn't holding the sticks properly. And then if I changed my hand grip, and use them in a different way of walking, they would be more efficient and effective for me. So I didn't know I should have, I guess I probably should have gone to YouTube and asked the question, but I figured it out pretty easily using hiking sticks. But there's an art to that as well.
Betsy Jordyn 17:07
Yeah. And and it's good to rely on somebody else. Like that might be part of the resilience advantages, knowing when I need help to get that help and not feel bad.
Speaker 1 17:20
No, I you know, it, I think today, one of the things that we're seeing more and more is the importance of community and how much we get from community and, and having community be intentional. So you know, if you're in a consulting situation, you know, get yourself into, you know, into a mastermind group reach out, you know, you reach out to you, Betsy, and have people work with you, or, I don't know, if you do, if you're doing any groups,
Betsy Jordyn 17:47
I do have an amazing group,
Speaker 1 17:50
you know, meet it's have that so you can have that kind of spotlight early in my career was a clinical psychologist and, and I found it was important to meet with other clinicians to talk about cases to process, what was happening with clients to talk about how to run the business, and really for my own self care. Those are those are challenging situations. And you and I both in been in a consulting community, and we know the value of having that support from others. And getting feedback from somebody who's been there already
Betsy Jordyn 18:21
is interesting. I had a client who was really struggling, we're working on our branding right now. And she was just really in a Hard Place one on one. And just emotionally because it was a lot of imposter syndrome, and all kinds of other things that came up. But later on that afternoon, we have my community meeting. And so she had an opportunity to share how she was feeling with the community. And then she had somebody else's in the same boat, she is like raise your hand and you're like I'm in the exact same boat. And then another person said, I'm in an X in the exact same boat. So having me as a mentor wasn't enough, but having other people, like just raise their hand and say I'm there too. She completely transformed. She sent me an email later, she'd like all of that eagerness has disappeared, because I got that kind of support. So I think that there's a there's a huge aspect of having the community surround you. I do want to go back to because you mentioned like your psychology background. I am curious how you went from a psychologist to becoming the consultant and coach that you became author, speaker and all those other things. And an expert like how did you become this expert in resilience? Was it through your work? Was it through your personal life? Can you kind of bring the thread and how resilience has become like, you know, really your thought leadership?
Speaker 1 19:36
Yeah, it really has. Thank you. You know, actually it started very early in my career when I was a psychology intern and worked at a community mental health center. And we had, we had an edit I was in the education group. And so we actually went out to companies and spoke to them about mental health issues and stress was one of them and we actually it was early days of Saturday live it was We consider ourselves the Saturday Night Live group of the community mental health center. And so we would go actually go and kind of entertain and talk to people about in those days, I was talking stress management. So it's always been that thread that's been through my life. But there were several couple of major incidents. That happened for me both personally and professionally. On the professional side, we were living in Dallas Fort Worth on 911. And on Tuesday, September 11, about 730 at night, I got a call from American Airlines who is headquartered at the DFW airport, in Dallas, Fort Worth. And they asked us if we could come down to their customer call center and do some stress debriefing with their customer reps who had been on the phone all day. Talking American lost two planes that day, of course, talking to family members and crew and everyone else. And so over the next really six months, we spent a lot of time at American Airlines in the terminal at the training center with flight attendants, pilots, ramp agents, ticket agents, everyone really helping them to just kind of gain some understanding. And the story I share in the book is about flight attendant, about three weeks after just after flying, resumed again, who had a flight that morning to Paris, and she was in the quarter of the terminal area, there was nobody in the terminal, she was in tears. And I went and sat down and introduce myself. And we had this amazing conversation where I mostly listened the same way your colleagues did in your group meeting, mostly listen and share some ideas. And after about 60 minutes of talking, she looked me in the eye and she said, You know, I have to go on this flight, I have to do that for myself, for my colleagues for my company and for our country. So with that she could have stood up and gave me a hug and, and off she went to Paris. And I was just so struck by how she dealt with that process that understood that and that I saw as as her way of being resilient, bouncing forward, not just bouncing back bouncing backward a bit. I gotta do this flight, let me I'm gonna suck it up and do it that's bouncing back Barely. She went much further than that she she really transformed herself and did all of those elements, particularly the navigation and the bouncing forward in my personal life. So that was 2001. And during that time, we had some tragedies in our family. In 1997, our son had contracted AIDS in 1994. And then just he was just a little too early for the early cocktails that had been designed. And he passed in 1997, which was you know, obviously very, very tragic and very difficult for our family. Ken was very courageous, and we were, you know, loved him and proud of him all the time and had an amazing support system of friends and loved ones who were there for him. And so I was inspired by Ken In fact, in 1999, I did a bike ride in Ken's memory of AIDS bike ride across Texas, in the Texas heat from Austin to Houston to Dallas and had to raise about $3,000. In order to do this right, it was his fundraiser for AIDS, and between my friends and network and clients and family raised over $25,000 so wonderful way to kind of manifest that. Tragically, however, five years later, after Ken passed in 2002, our daughter Corinne, who had three small children was diagnosed with an aggressive form of breast cancer. Karina was a physical therapist, she took great care of herself, she was a knowledgeable healthcare professional and it was just missed, you know, the She even went to an oncologist who said there's no history of breast cancer in your family. This can't be breast cancer, but it was and we lost currying two years later after a bone marrow transplant and and that was you know, that on top of Ken was just so difficult to to bear and to handle and Sheila my wife stopped working and we took Corinne down to MD Anderson she lived in Nebraska at the time and and she got bone marrow transplants and we were everyone did everything we could she had an amazing network of friends they she lived in Lincoln, Nebraska at the time. Her friends you know, of course make meals every night and they took the kids to school and and in fact, the other day Today's March was today March 7, march 5 was her birthday. And her son always posted on Facebook a memorial for Corinne. I must have been 60 comments from people about how much Korean meant to them and how she changed them. So she was just an amazing woman of faith and a woman of character. And, and so I think, for me the the element of resilience was how do my wife and I handle this situation after it's happened, and we were very intentional about it, you know, the, there's a bit of a myth about couples that break up after loss of a child. And the myth is that most couples do, but we did some research. And actually, the numbers are relatively low, only about 15 16% of couples will separate. But that doesn't mean that it's not an estrangement or a difficult way of handling it. And Sheila and I recognized we needed to be intentional about doing it, we made some changes, I left the clinical world and went into the corporate world, I needed something a little more stable, I didn't want to have to deal with, you know, the individual issues that can get very intense into clinical practice. And I was interested in the corporate side of healthcare. So I got involved in that for a dozen or so years. And, and during that time, when Sheila and I kind of went down, parallel paths, she gave up her career as a professor and social worker, and became an author and, and extended her work as an artist. To group said, she's a dancer, professional dancer, originally, now she's become an author and grief advocate. She's just finishing up actually a new book called The Art of grieving, that she's written about how people can use the arts and artmaking to help us deal with grief more effectively. So that grief doesn't have to be, you know, always thought of as a negative situation, how can we see the gift in grief is what her work is about. I went down a somewhat different path, I decided I needed to go through a therapeutic treatment program. And so I did that I got some intense therapy around grief and loss, complicated grief, it's called. And, you know, something we talked about earlier, in 2010, I got, I was part of a reduction of force in my corporate work. So that that can be kicked out of the corporate world. And of course, oh, my god, what am I that's let's see how I help. What am I going to do. But of course, it turned out to be the best thing in the world. I have friends of mine who said, Oh, you should go into consulting and coaching. And I had already been kind of doing that in the corporate world, I have that experience. So that I embarked in 2010 on this new career, and it's been fantastic since so even that was a resilience experience. So I began to see about that time that resilience is really a theme and had been become more popular after 911, after Hurricane Katrina, after Hurricane Sandy, everybody was talking resilience. You I'd like to point out that in 2005, your bank didn't have multiple redundant call centers and service centers, they had one where they stored their data and everything was kept today, every big bank has dozens of them all around the world for redundancy, which is a resilient strategy. So we see resilience around the nest when I started studying it. And then in 2016, along with my co author, Alan White's, I wrote the resilience advantage that describes this model and how people can use and learn the skills of resilience to deal with their challenges more directly, I felt like I had good theoretical and practical skills in in understanding and using resilience.
Betsy Jordyn 28:44
I think that there's like, your story is so powerful, and I mean, hearing about your kids, like, just my heart breaks on. And I'm looking forward to having Sheila on the show and talking about the art of grieving, because I think that that is something that we don't know how to do. You know, like, when my dad passed, that was like, the catalyst that got me to where I am today, you know, but coming from a Jewish background, you know, we have like rituals, like, there were certain milestones and things like that, like, I think that in nowadays, like, you're expected, like grief happens, and you should be over it tomorrow. And I just, I love like, how, how you and Sheila, from an intentional standpoint is sort of like this grief is not going to instantly go away. We're going to companion with it. And then we're going to see what the lessons are within it. So I love that you guys just just are that model like talk about bounce forward for both of you. I mean, losing multiple kids is is a tragedy on and I like I like the idea like even when you talk about the call centers, like okay, we could plan in advance, we have redundancies we have ways to mitigate it. But there's this other side is like what happened with the kids, you know, 911 you know these crisis's happen that you really could never even anticipate? And one of the things that I think cuz very difficult, like for business owners, you know, who were the face where the brand, you know where everything is, it's hard for us to be out there, you know, put putting content out there being on social media, when there's all of this noise going on in our personal lives, that's just as difficult. You know, there's a lot of people right now I understand it's a trend that, you know, estrangement from children has become a trend since 2020. And that's a big thing. You know, you have, you know, health struggles, you have divorces, you have people in abusive relationship, like, you got a whole myriad of things, but you got to still kind of show up publicly, you know, and like, how would you say, the resilience advantage? You know, could like, how do you how do you balance that, like, I gotta be public, I gotta be out there. Oh, and then social media makes it seem like everybody's, you know, traveling the world and be super successful and look at us, and everything's great. And it's like, oh, my life is not perfect. You know, I can't become a thought leader until I got all my crap together. I can't write the book until my personal life is got no bumps and hiccups. How would speak to that person who might be wondering about this? Sure.
Speaker 1 31:05
Why I think you know, I think the way, I think one of the things that social media has done, and I think there's been a tendency is this notion of the hero on the white horse, that we have to do it all ourselves. You talked about the young woman earlier in your group who had the imposter syndrome. And how was that remedied? She got feedback from other people. So I think having again, thinking about and using the community is a very powerful way of doing that. I think the second, you know, I think one of the things to recognize, and you you pointed this out, is that, you know, we talked about 911, when I talked about my family crises, we talked about the financial crisis of 2008. I believe it's going to take us a decade to recover from the pandemic. And I think most people don't want to talk this is one of the things about grief that you'll hear she'll talk about is nobody wants to talk about it. Now, you bring up issues in the workplace about post pandemic, people go, I don't want to talk about that anymore, well, probably need to talk about it, because 40% of your buildings downtown are empty, and 60% of your staff don't want to come to work. And when you post something on social media, you're not getting, you're only getting 10 likes and not 100 likes, and you're only getting one comment instead of 40 comments. And so these things are all because everybody is so busy, trying to avoid dealing with a certain reality of what's going on. That they just did. There's just too many as you said, distractions there's too many interesting things for people to do seen in the arts. You know, if you if you wanted to go to a tour performance of something in Denver tonight, there's probably 15 things you could do. Not to mention staying home and watching Oppenheimer on Netflix. Yeah.
Betsy Jordyn 33:00
I'm on the barbie side, I saw both movies. I'm on the barbie side of the Barbie Oppenheimer thing.
Unknown Speaker 33:07
That's streaming for free. But Oppenheimer still cost but the Oscars are coming up. So you want to be a shareholder?
Speaker 1 33:18
The answer to that. So I think there's just as you said, there's a lot of distractions. And I think what's important for consultants and coaches to be looking at is this first step around preparation. And the preparation is, you know, answering questions and doing your strategic analysis of your work. You know, who are your customers? Who are you targeting? What what what are my success criteria? There's tons of ways of doing this, you I attended a meeting one day, so a National Speakers Association meeting, and this guy gets up to speak. And as he's, as he's speaking, he takes off his coat, he's wearing a jacket, takes off his jacket, takes off his tie. He's wearing he's, he's wearing a certain belt and shoes, takes those off, he starts to change. And he transform into into an outdoorsman. So he's got one of these outdoor vests that he puts out hiking boots. So he puts a waiter's outfit on. It turns out that he is a consultant to state gaming Commission's around how they can better manage insects in certain gaming areas or small animals. And sir, his niche is so small, that there's nobody else who does what he does. And he's got 50 customers across the country and that's all he focuses on. And what was so impressive about this guy, Betsy was that he knew that question that we all are asked, and rarely can we identify with that kind of clarity, which is who is your ideal Customer,
Betsy Jordyn 35:00
right? That's the number that I talked about that girl I was struggling with that we were working on our ideal client. And that's, that's when most people kind of have a hard time. Go on board. Yeah,
Speaker 1 35:10
yeah. And so you know, I think we all I have that problem, I shift my thinking about what I who my ideal client is, you know, and I know, I would be better if I had clarity around my ideal client being, you know, a 50 year old, this person in this this role and doing that kind of work, that if I have that energy and focus around that person, that's who I would attract. So, you know, I think there's plenty and these are certainly questions you ask your clients, it pushing them to think about the business aspect of their work. And I think for all of us to keep doing that, and asking these questions, and having the answers, you know, writing them down, and making a commitment and trying it out, if it doesn't work, that's the thing about resilience is we learn from those experiences. And everyone agrees that if you don't have failures, you're not trying, you're not learning. So get out there, give it a whirl. And if it works, great, if it doesn't work, so be it.
Betsy Jordyn 36:12
You know, there's a few things that I talked to people about when they first sign up to work with me. And I wondering if accidentally, I was trying to build on resilience to the approach by doing the brand building. So the first things first is we get clear on their intentions, like what's your business poster, create for your life, and get that in there first, and, and also get some time for reflection, like and make reflection and contemplation and part of your lifestyle, because that's the only way you're going to ever figure those things out. So it seems like thing one is getting clear on that, I think with the ideal client, and why that builds resilience is it ignites the passion, you know, and it's like, when you're clear on who you serve, I talked about this with my clients all the time, like, when I love this quote from Audrey Lord, who says, like, when I dare to be powerful, when I use my strengths and service of my vision mattered less and less, whether I'm afraid. And when you're on point with a person, the person's what ignites the passion is not your mission. It's not your methodology. It's the person like, Oh, I really care about you. Like, now I want to create more products and services for you, because I care about you. You know, and I think that there's something you know about that. And then the third thing that I always talk to people about is, like, it's really important to brand your name, because it's the most flexible container because you have no idea which way it's gonna go. And success is not a straight line. It's more like an ice skater where you go side to side, you know, and you put something out there, see how the market responds, and then you pivot, you know, you keep pivoting. I mean, every year, I change up my website, because it's like, well, I don't know, you know, because I'm never gonna land, but I know who I know who I want to help. I know why I want to help them. You know, and I, every time I learned something new, it's like I incorporate whatever it is that I learned. And I wonder if those are like some of those practices, because you don't know where you want to go in a few years, like us might have started in healthcare consulting, then move to resilience consulting for organizations, my suspicion is, is that you're probably going to be working a lot more with individuals one on one, again, I think you're gonna go full circle, you know, but it's going to be relative to maybe entrepreneurs, and you know, and building some of that, like, there's going to be something but you keep it and you don't know, you don't always know. And maybe that's what the resilient practices are. It's like, I gotta build some band, I gotta build some passion in my life. And I got to build some bandwidth for you know, we work for ourselves. And I would say that as consultants and coaches and business owners were the worst bosses in the world. You know, we don't we don't give ourselves time off. You know, we don't take advantage of the fact that we work for ourselves.
Speaker 1 38:46
Exactly. Yeah, I think, you know, there's another element of the preparation phase, which I refer to as building hardiness. And hardiness is the reserve that we have in our in our store in our storehouse, we can get that from working out, we can get that from eating well, we get that from taking vacations, we could get that from being around loved ones, and we get that from knowing who our work is focused on. Having that passion and love. You know, you talked about passion. Angela Duckworth has written about grit, and grit as a quality that she defines as passion and perseverance. So grit into the it's not enough to just persevere and to be gritty. You also have that that passion, that's what keeps you going. It's that storehouse, that's inside you that that builds that hardiness that helps to build that hardiness so that you can keep going. Now, just to put the caveat out there, you can't you can't overuse the grid. You can't. That's what happened around the pandemic. That's what burned people out, you know, the first first three or four months of the pandemic and productivity went up in companies people were loving working at home, I'm going to work whatever I want to do I remember talking to a mother one day. And I said to her, you know, how's it going with the family? She said, Well, it's pretty good. The only the only challenge is the only time I really have to get my work done is between 10 and two. I so that's not too bad is your husband take care of the kids between 10 and two? She said, No, they're asleep. 10pm to 2am. So you know that that level of grip began to wear on people. And that's why we saw so much pushback later as we got into the, into the pandemic. And I think really why your work from home took took a nosedive in terms of the employers, but also many employees who said, you know, I want to get back to some kind of normalcy, and we're still trying to find that balance between so it's a bit of a of a caveat that we want to be aware of is that is that even with resilience? You know, it's important to me when I talk to corporate groups, I say to them, resilience is not intended to be something that says, okay, just keep sucking, keep going suck it up, you embrace the suck, keep going, you have resilience, there is a limit to how much we want to do, we really want to be happy in our work. And so we don't deal with it gets to a point where people begin to get burnt out or begin to become depressed or begin to show some emotional signs that things need some care tending, then managers need to be sensitive to that make sure that they're helping, they're helping their team members out.
Betsy Jordyn 41:27
Yeah, but that seems to go back to the first thing that we talked about with the misconceptions about resilience. Resilience isn't sucking up and just dealing with difficult situations. And just like, Alright, fine, I'm going to endure this difficult situation, you said beginning is it's like the cycle of like, learning how to, like, get back to stasis, or, you know, you know, like adjusting. So let's say you are home, like, you know, you adjust that doesn't mean you have to work extra hard. Like if somebody is like working more than they were before, then it's like, I would probably say, Well, I wonder if you're worried that you're going to be on the chopping block. So you're worried about your productivity. So it's not really true resilience, like the true resilience would be is all right, this is stressful. How do I work through my stress? And then how do I use this as an opportunity to reinvent myself? Or maybe, maybe this makes me think that what I'm living isn't exactly what I want, or the career that I don't want. But I think that people are mistake, I think it goes back to what the we said in the beginning. Like that's a misconception that is not resilience, that's denial. And that is almost like our fight or flight. I'll dig in because I'm afraid or something bad happening. It's it's not coming out of our like our, you know, our conscious self, it's coming out of our survival stuff.
Speaker 1 42:38
It's coming, it's coming from the amygdala, not from the prefrontal cortex. Yes, yes. And we have to honor that. You know, so you don't know for for as a consultant, if you're working with a client than they do have that kind of panic, you want to make sure that you honor that. I say, Hey, I appreciate that. This is scary. You know, let, let's go back to what the strengths are, let's talk about what the opportunity is, what's the risk factors, you know, you'll returning to a more logical and rational way of thinking is where we want to do and we want to honor the emotional reality that's going off to that person because the feelings or feelings are real, they don't have to stay that way. And we want to just make sure that we don't we don't toss them out.
Betsy Jordyn 43:26
So I want to get to like your you said that you have some, you know, silver bullets and some practices that people can employ. And I definitely I want to end with that, because that feels actionable. But I just want to address one quick thing before we get there. And that is around like, I like could you talk a little bit though about the shame. You know, we talked a little bit about the practices, but the shame that somebody might feel where? Because I don't know if I've only heard the answer to the question on that. One is, you know, I got a public business on my face is out there. But I got like a shit show going on in my Oh, I wonder if I'm allowed to say shit show, I'll have to see if my podcasts, delete that out. Or maybe it stays in there. But it's like a crap show in my personal life, you know, where I don't have all my crap together, but I still gotta have a public Can you address that shame, so that those things don't become they still a debilitating thing, and you can be resilient, even though everything in your life isn't 1,000% buttoned up and looking what you think everybody else's life is looking like? Sure,
Speaker 1 44:29
you know, so I'm a clinician, as well as a, you know, business psychologist. So when somebody starts talking about, you know, difficulty in their life, I first want to make sure that it hasn't reached some clinical level to where they are not, you know, realistically able, you know, you wouldn't, you wouldn't ask somebody to drive a car if they had two broken arms. You know, so I want to make sure that I'm screening for that and there's a difference between a Feeling bad and having some, you know, episode of negative thinking or, you know, questioning your your capability. And and the general rule of thumb for this is that if it's something that's lasting for two weeks or more consecutively, then you worry about it. If it's something that happens for two or three days, and then you bounce forward, or even just bounce back in that situation, that's fine. I like to use the criteria of frequency and intensity. So how often does that happen? And how intense is it on a scale of zero return? So you will, let's assume that, that it's a crap show and not a shit show. Just to kind of distinguish distinguish those two, between each other? You know, I think that, you know, how do you how do you remedy when you're feeling bad about yourself, you know, what's your particular strategy for it? You know, so, for me, that happens for me, you know, every couple of weeks, I have, you know, yesterday was one of those days, I just couldn't get anything done, I didn't have any focus, I went for a walk, I laid out, took a little nap, you know, I worked from home, I can't do that, you know, I just at the end of the day, I didn't really feel very, very good about myself. So I decided when I went to sleep, that I was gonna go work out first thing in the morning. So I decided I would make a change that I just needed, even if I didn't have the energy for it, I would go ahead and take some initiative for doing that. Now, I have a good deal of initiative. So I can, I know I can kind of prompt myself to do that. But if I woke up feeling like I'm just gonna lay in bed all day, then I might be a little concerned about it. Listen, I'm a psychologist, I'm not embarrassed at all to say I talked about therapy earlier. You know, I used therapy my whole life. I love it. You know, in fact, they just like therapist just retired recently, guard her, Oh, man.
Betsy Jordyn 46:52
She was supposed to be available to you forever.
Speaker 1 46:55
She was great. I loved working with her. And she makes such a difference in my life.
Betsy Jordyn 46:59
I have boundaries and personal goals. Yeah, you know,
Speaker 1 47:03
and I need it. So. But it may also be and I certainly do this for my clients, it may be an executive coach, it may be Betsy Jordyn if these things are too hard to deal with on our own. You can't necessarily, you know, if you're feeling bad, you're not going to call Betsy up, she's not going to be your therapist in that situation. So you have to rely on other people, it's a friend, it's a family member. Or maybe it's a mastermind group of peers, who particularly if it's a business issue, you reach out. So I think you know, if there's a personal issue going on, you want to again, I use the term outer that you want to recognize that it's happening. You don't want to linger there, you know. So I like to say that, you know, pain is understanding sufferable is unnecessary. suffer through a situation, if you're having a bad day, go do something different, go do something you enjoy, go see a movie work on your hobby, you know, whatever it may be, that helps transform you out of that mood, the last three or four days, you'll get get some help from some other people, because that's not, that's not normal. You I think the other issue about how do we deal with getting the getting the branding and messaging out? You know, do that that's, you know, how do I do that? How do I recommend clients do that, you know, I think you have to find a pattern for doing that. You know, my rule of thumb is I post two times a week on LinkedIn, that's my primary social media access. And once I put something out, you know, I write a weekly blog called resilience, resilient Wednesday, on Wednesdays, and I was just noticing it the other day that see, I've read my four I've written 497 of them, is 497 weeks. So I'm pretty proud of that. Coming up on 500. And so I have no rule of thumb that I put these things out, I've got a mailing list of 3000 people or whatever it is, it goes to another 15,000 that once it's out there, it's out there. You know, I post things on LinkedIn, some of them are repost of something someone said or an article that I read that I want to provoke someone's thinking. And I'm exploring and playing around with that I I put a lot of things out there about you, I try to be a little provocative. So you know, when when all the word was going around about quiet quitting? You know, I said it's not quiet quitting. It's loud screaming you know, people are unhappy and they're screaming about this. I do know a lot of people were interested in that topic. But tonight, you know, it's about getting your work out your intellectual property.
Betsy Jordyn 49:46
Even if, even if everything's not okay, like one of my clients right now, like she's been going gangbusters, but she had a major issue with our son that happened this week. It's been distracting for sure. And it's not going to be something that's going to be resolved in a week or two or three weeks, you know, it's that she's on a new journey with this scenario. But it doesn't disqualify her from all the other things that she wants to do. And I think that would be the resilience message, I would hope people will come across as just because everything is not perfect, and some things are not going to be buttoned up, that doesn't disqualify you stay on stay, you're missing your mission, your mission is your mission, it's still going to be there. And then somewhere in it, you know, in your six circumstances, you had a mission, you had this other mission, but then the suffering really just sweetened and deepen the mission New York City had. So it's like, you're not really like this separate person. And these things happen, and it will serve you at some point. But I think going along with it is like, let's just kind of companion with it. Um, you mentioned the workout thing.
Speaker 1 50:56
Because I want to go back to something you said earlier, which is, you know, depending on what her work is, she may want to take some time to write about that, yeah, in a blog on her website, or write a post on LinkedIn. You know, I try to be I tell a lot of stories about myself, I've shared, you know, something very, very deeply personal with you, as I do with other people. You know, authenticity is a powerful force today, there's nothing more powerful. People want to know you're a human being that you have the same struggles they do. And if she has a challenge with her son, assuming it's something that she can share in some way that's appropriate, it may be something that, that will help her and help her clients. Because the same thing. So that's the opportunity you were talking about earlier.
Betsy Jordyn 51:45
You know, and that's a good point here is like that, that reminder, reminder that I'm I'm not the only person who's going through stuff, I show up with my humanity, and I don't have everything together. So I could tell you, and now we're going to be connected on as we are moving towards the end of this interview, we've talked about so many different things, I want to make sure everybody's listening knows how to get a hold of you and your books. And I want to end on here's that silver bullet we promised as the kind of practices that you can implement, at least are that silver bullet that you mentioned, so can you first share about you and how people can find you in that silver bullet of the practice, the practice, or if the silver bullet is got several practices within it, please share that as well.
Speaker 1 52:29
People can get more information on my new website, which is Richard citroen.com. That's cit. R. I am and talk about myself in the services. Got some cute pictures on there and talk.
Betsy Jordyn 52:43
Can you do that again? Because my note taker just popped back and I don't want the video to be ruined. Can you just say it again, you can find starting from the you can find me. Nathan, we need to cut this part out. Go ahead. Thanks,
Speaker 1 52:55
Betsy. Yes, people can find me my new website, which is Richard citroen.com. That's CIT, Ri m.com. Richard citron. And on there, you'll see information about me about my services about what we're doing. Look at my blogs, I also have a whole page of resilience resources that I've developed over the past 10 years that are available and free for people to use. I also have links to my two my two books, I've written three, but one of them's out of print. The first book, of course, is the resilience advantage, which is right over here. And strategy. We get these, both of these are available on Amazon, of course, this is the resilience advantage. I wrote that with Alan Weiss. And this is my book on leadership development called strategy driven leadership that I wrote with Michael couch. And those are that's the best way that if people want to connect with me, of course, I'd love to, you know, there's so many strategies around resilience that I like to break the strategies down around this planning, navigation and bounce forward. So let me talk about those. And within there is the silver bullet, particularly around the planning and the bounce forward, which is that the silver bullet is really around how we think it's the thinking. That's why when I talked earlier about the positivity, the negativity bias is so powerful in our lives, that the more we can think about what's possible, what are the success factors, what do we want life to be? What's that ideal client that are thinking and how we change our thinking around so that we see more of the positive and what's more possible, is really the key to building a resilience model that happens on the planning side, because on the planning side, we want to think about what our ideal situation is, but we also want to manage the risk. So we want to think about what the possible downside is that kind of pre planning and thinking how we think really sets the stage for not only success, but also for mitigating or decreasing the risk of stressful situations. The navigation in real time, really the best. The only key for that is around developing a practice of mindfulness. I do a lot of work with clients around mindfulness, I really do try to demystify mindfulness, you know, it's thought of, of course, as kind of a Buddhist or Eastern tradition where, which is where I think it became popularized in the United States. But the truth is, a I like to take any kind of spirituality or religion out of it. And recognize that mindfulness is really a birthright of ours, we all have to quiet our mind, we do it when we go on your hikes that you're going to be doing in the in the Rocky Mountains, we do it when we enjoy playing with our dog. We do it when we enjoy and savor the taste of a delicious coho salmon at the beginning of salmon season, wherever we can save her life that's being mindful. And we can develop an intentional practice, around mindfulness with meditation practices with quiet walking with all kinds of different tools or traits, but we don't need the bells and whistles and bongs and well, probably, that's fine if you're in Colorado, but probably not the box, but
Betsy Jordyn 56:28
the box or the bugs are in Colorado, the gun their
Unknown Speaker 56:37
dogs up, okay,
Betsy Jordyn 56:38
because, you know, we could easily be mindful with our, with our edibles here. But, exactly.
Speaker 1 56:44
And then and then the bounce forward again, is that kind of mindful thinking, how do we take this situation and learn from it? You know, in that instance, learning you're learning, you know, I'm a big believer, as I've talked about in terms of strengths and understanding our strengths. And, you know, my number one strength is learner. Learning. And, you know, if you're not a learner, it's very hard to grow and change. And so developing some expertise, in that is hesitant, is an important way of doing I was working with somebody who says, I don't like to read, I'm not, you know, I'm not really alert at all. And I said, Well, you know, what do you enjoy reading says, I'm not really, but maybe sports books. So I told him to start reading some sports books, and he's, he's immediately been able to transform a lot of his work. I'm not necessarily into sports metaphors, but to understand, in his own way, how he can apply the challenges he has to what he sees great athletes do. And I think that's a wonderful role model for helping us see what success is like, you know, talking about positivity, you know, you hit on hit us, you know, baseball is coming up, he had a base hit, and everybody goes ecstatic on the team. Forget about the fans. So baseball, and football, and athletes are very good at celebrating every little bit of success.
Betsy Jordyn 58:04
And talk about mindfulness, like they're very much in the moment, like you cannot be a good athlete without being in the moment. And I think that that's what you're talking about is, I think it goes with that companion, a thing, when you're talking about the mindfulness is like, I'm going to be in the observer role. And I'm not going to get like totally whipped up by what's happening around me.
Speaker 1 58:22
Exactly, exactly. We see that all the time. You know, you if you got kids or grandkids, you know, you see them playing in the schoolyard or playing in a playground, you just enjoy watching them you savoring that moment. That's mindfulness.
Betsy Jordyn 58:35
That's awesome. So really, at the end of the day, there's a million practices you could choose, but they're all within the planning the, the Navigating together with and then the bouncing forward. They're all there. But the silver bullet is like making an intentional choice to say I, I want to choose to stay in almost like this coherent state, you know, where I'm like, my, my prefrontal cortex is like, totally activated, and keep myself out of that fight or flight. And if I can do that, and I can create practices in my life, from a planning standpoint, and it during and while I'm competing it with it, then whatever the possibilities are, they're going to emerge for me that's gonna allow me to bounce forward.
Speaker 1 59:16
You got it, you're gonna get your certificate in the resilience advantage later.
Betsy Jordyn 59:21
Yeah, I want to see my badge. I want to get my you know, Richard badge that I am a resilient, you know, I'm a Riesling and a deaf person. So that would be great. Well, thank you. Thank you so very, very much for being on the show. This has just been so illuminating for me. And it makes me realize, like I didn't, I didn't realize like a lot of what I do as a business mentor is really cultivating that resilience, like Yeah, you too can repackage your career and turn it into a business and this could be the best thing that happened to you losing your job burnout, all of the things that are there. What you think crippled you qualifies you for this future. And, and that is that's what my passion is. And I didn't realize like maybe that was a thematic thing I had underneath it. So now I'm a little bit more aware. So if you are interested in, in learning more about resilience practices highly recommend everything that that Richard was talking about. If you want to work on your ideal client, figure out how to build your business and your brand messages definitely reach out to me, you can go to my website at WWW dot Betsy jordyn.com. When you get on my website, if you want to talk to me, you can book a free strategic clarity coaching call with me and we could talk about how we could partner together. So thank you all for listening. Don't forget to hit subscribe wherever you're listening, and I will see you all next time.
Unknown Speaker 1:00:43
Thanks, Betsy.
Betsy Jordyn 1:00:45
Thank you
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
