Bonus Episode 10: Resiliency

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Hi, this is Stephen McLain with the finance leader podcast. This is bonus episode number 10. Last week and did season number three of the podcast. It was a great season where I got to talk about some very important topics, like setting yourself apart collaboration, winning habits, and becoming a trusted business advisor. The most popular episode of the season was Episode Number 28, improving the monthly clothes process, which was presented from our leadership perspective to make monthly clothes more value added. So we help senior leaders grow and develop the business as finance and accounting professionals. My expectation is that we become more than just the analyst developing reports or the accountant who submits journal entries. What we actually do is use what we know to influence others around the company. So we make a positive difference, which leads to a better organization. It takes focus on leadership, and growing our influence. We are already expected to know the technical side of our profession. We set ourselves apart by becoming leaders. Back in Episode Two, I talked about our four key responsibilities and they are number one influencing is about achieving buy in about a big idea you have or creating positive change in your organization. Number two, we continually grow our people to mentor our team members to achieve their goals become better in their roles, and develop potential for greater responsibility. Number three, your credibility as a leader depends on you achieving results. And finally number four, seeing the future means we study industry trends, so we make recommendations to senior leaders on strategy development.

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I am working on bringing season number four to you, which will debut on November 10. continue to grow your leadership and make others around you better. Please look out for yourself and those around you. Your mental health is extremely important. Find ways to get mentally refreshed daily and check on your team to to make sure they are working on their mental health. This week I want to share with you an encore episode from season two. And that's Episode 11. on building resilience, resilience is about overcoming adversity, and also ensuring that you're able to bounce back when you are faced with an adverse event, I list out seven items that you can use to build a resiliency plan.

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Please enjoy this encore episode. Thank you.

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Welcome to the debut of season number two of the finance leader podcast. Today we are talking about overcoming adversity. As we recover from the conditions of the pandemic and economic challenges of 2020. I believe a new type of leader will emerge.

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One who is more likely to overcome adversity, one is more resilient, and a leader who is agile and flexible. A problem solver Are you that kind of leader. Welcome to the finance leader podcast where leadership is bigger than the numbers. I am your host Stephen McLain and this is the podcast for developing leaders in finance and accounting. Today we start season number two, this is Episode 11. And we're going to be talking about overcoming adversity. Another reminder of why I'm doing this podcast is that I believe that finance and accounting professionals are very technically savvy. They know how to do their job from a technical aspect. But I also believe that finance and accounting professionals can improve their leadership skills that they can make their teams better, that they can lead them from a new way of doing things and bringing their team along and building them up and improving their team a lot better so that they can improve excellence in the organization a lot more. And I believe that these topics that I talked about between trying to develop your key responsibilities, your critical soft skills, working on your mindset, working on your resilience, this is going to make you a better leader. This is going to help you think about your team, I think about the organization from a different point of view. And that's why I like to bring this podcast to you every week. Again, today is the debut of season number two.

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And for this season, I'm going to be focusing on self development of leaders and some of the topics that will be included are going to be critical, soft skills. I'm going to talk about some certification and licenses that you should be looking at achieving. We're going to talk about goal setting and also creating a career pathway. We're going to talk about how to take a risk in your career and also how to develop a purpose and a vision along with developing your excellence.

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decorative presence and then a few more topics. This is going to be very exciting as we continue to develop ourselves.

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This episode is sponsored by my new online course offering through finance leader Academy.

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It's called advance your career.

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Developing a promotion strategy for your finance and accounting career. Are you having difficulty getting recognition from your leadership despite all the hard work you pour into your job and your organization, this course will help you analyze what you bring to the organization and how you can set yourself apart from your peers through high visibility work and developing your leadership skills. Plus how you can devise a strategy to move ahead, you can go to Stephen McLain calm and select the store from the menu. Right now, we're still in production mode for this course.

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So I'm offering a limited time offer to buy it now. But the special offer will be gone soon.

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This is episode number 11 of the finance leader podcast. And today, I will be discussing that this crisis has taught me that we will need a new type of leader going forward and going to be talking about overcoming adversity. And then I'll end the episode with a few techniques on how you can be more resilient.

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Michelle Obama stated, you should never view your challenges as a disadvantage.

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Instead, it's important for you to understand that your experience facing and overcoming adversity is actually one of your biggest advantages. What has the COVID-19 and the economic downturn done the leadership right now I'm recording this episode in April of 2020. And we are still in the middle of the COVID-19 prices and the severe economic downturn, we are going to see and expect a new leader to emerge after this is over. I believe that it's going to be a leader who is more agile and ready to adapt to change more quickly. We need leaders who are more focused on long term sustainability than short term results, I believe it will be expected to build companies who can withstand a recession and I believe that we have to change we're going to need a new type of leader.

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One who is more agile, one who is more creative. One who is quick to assess, and one that can see the future a lot better and more focused on preparation, a leader who is filled with hope who can be decisive and who is people focused. And I believe that recession proofing for the long term is going to be a key factor for organizations going forward. This type of new leader is going to be long term focused, and we need to stop focusing on short term results.

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This is why so many organizations are not prepared for this economic downturn. I believe that leaders need to provide hope in tough times, and clarity. People who know me well know that I love and demand transparency. I am disgusted by fake leaders who hide information from their team. I don't trust leaders who are not forthcoming with information and who delay and telling you what's going on who are indecisive. Be very cautious about senior leaders who delegate that responsibility subordinates during a crisis, I expect senior leaders to lead from the front.

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And then don't tell me that you're in meetings during the crisis. I want to know what's going on, I want to see what the information is, I expect you as a senior leader to be communicating to your team as quickly as possible, and to try to tell them what's going on. If something has happened. get the information out quickly. And then you can make adjustments as you go work with your team to develop a plan. But continue to provide information to your team that's out there. Don't hold back information and don't delegate it to somebody down below you. When you're a leader, you take charge when you're in charge of an organization, you get a team around you, you determine courses of action, you determine what the correct and relevant information is quickly develop that course of action and then take decisive action and get it done. And of course, that's the army officer and me talking. don't respect leaders who sit on the sidelines during a crisis. I believe that transparency during adverse conditions is the minimum expectations going forward.

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overcoming adversity will be the test of new leaders, you can overcome adversity with the right mindset, that is knowing yourself strengthening yourself to deal with stressful, challenging situations. And then when faced with a challenge, what do you do? I believe that you have to become a problem solver and you have to take charge of the problem immediately. You have to issue tasks, issue guidance issue reporting requirement, I believe you can be better prepared to overcome adversity. If you build your resilience becoming resilient is the ability to bounce back and overcome an adverse event. How quickly can you recover from an adverse event? Or how quickly can you recover from an emergency or a crisis? There are many options that you can choose to build a resilience plan for yourself.

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The first thing that you can decide upon are the physical changes that you can make and of course those always relate Upon your diet, your exercise plan, how much sleep you get, how much water you're drinking, and pretty much just taking care of your mind and your body? are you setting yourself up physically and mentally to be able to deal with an emergency for the crisis with a stressful situation? And it always starts with are the things you're taking into your body, the rest, that you're getting the water you're drinking? Are you exercising and getting that stress out? In that way? Are you doing those things, those minimum physical things to take care of yourself? And also you minimizing the intake of harmful items into your body?

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Are you giving your body and mind the right amount of rest?

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Are you taking in the right types of food? Are you eating a balanced diet and doing everything that you can from a physical standpoint, so that you can so you can build your resilience, and you can handle stress just a little bit better.

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And there's a lot of research out there on different ways you can help your body through diet and exercise and sleeping and the right amount of sleep for you for your type of body and how much water you need to drink. But I'm going to leave that up to you. You can do your own research based on your requirements. And based on your needs. I know what I need.

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Second thing is improving how you view yourself. Now I talk a lot about mindset. And if you change your mindset, you'll be able to change your ability to handle an emergency to handle a crisis. Do you view yourself as competent? And do you view yourself as having the ability to overcome something that's stressful. The third thing is to have a very realistic view of life. And realize that setbacks are a part of life. You can learn from each setback or failure. And we can learn from setbacks. And we can apply those lessons as we move forward. This also helps with improving our mindset. Not everything in our life goes perfect. Not everything in our life goes according to plan. So if we have that very realistic view of our life, and as we go through the many things that come into our life, then we can have the ability to train ourselves to be able to handle things as they come at us. And we just have that kind of viewpoint that things are going to go great.

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And sometimes things are not going to go so great. And we're going to overcome them no matter what. Number four, who the people that you're associating with, are the people you hang around with, are they positive people? Are they optimistic, I suggest that you make strong connections with people who are optimistic, and also people who care about you, people who have your best interests at heart, when you deal with them, not people are going to hurt you harm you mentally or emotionally, people who really applaud you when you have something good in your life Go on, or something where people are encouraging you to do well, and are encouraging you when something goes well in your life. And also when something happens like a setback. And they also help you get through those situations, but they're always in your corner, you don't want to be around people who are going to use you or hurt you or try to make themselves feel better by how your life turns out that you want to have this mutual understanding and mutual support for each other. So just continue to look at the people that are in your inner circle and the people you hang out with. Are they positive and optimistic and if not, then I would suggest moving on to a better kind of friend a better kind of people to hang around with. And that coincides with number five is that not everyone who you associate with really wants you to win. This is probably another off topic issue. But we have to realize that we should not be working for the approval of others. But we need to ensure that those who are closest to us are the people who want us to succeed. And I suggest that you watch the people who don't applaud you when you have an achievement in your life to celebrate take note take action move on. Number six is that we need to learn to embrace change, change is inevitable change is going to happen continually. So I would suggest that you continue to be open and flexible. And how many of you feel comfort in the steady everyday pace of life or life doesn't operate from a standstill position, there will always be changes coming. It could be a new boss, it could be a new senior leader in our own personal lives. We have changed constantly. Life doesn't stop life moves on. Friends move on, friends grow you people move to different jobs. Your relatives develop and grow and they move on and they have children and get married and things change constantly. And so we have to be continually ready, ready to embrace change as it comes at us. Once we get that in our mindset, then we get to be a little bit more comfortable. As situations arise. Some kind of different thing happens in our life and then we can embrace that kind To change a little bit more easier, and the last thing that you can use in building your resilience plan is to establish and write down your goals and then review them continually. And I would suggest, at a minimum, you should be doing this quarterly.

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But I also prefer to review goals monthly, and just keep looking at them, that'll give you hope for the future. That'll give you a sense of accomplishment as you mark off a goal that you have, you have completed it. And it'll just continue to help you with a focus of continual self improvement, continual assessment, and just know where you are at and know that you have a plan of action. And that you're accomplishing things, you're moving towards your ultimate career goal or a personal goal, and that you have some kind of a pathway to that, and it'll give you hope, every day, as you go through life, I want to tell you a little bit of story about myself. Now, the army taught me to overcome adversity. And to become more resilient through very tough situations, very tough training, the army taught me to be more flexible in my decision making, and that is to act and not to react. And also to make adjustments as conditions rapidly change. The very act of seeing yourself be successful is done by viewing the end state of an operation. And that gives hope, we act with extreme motivation and decisiveness to achieve our goals, we clearly define the end state of an operation and then we backwards plan until we can see the entire operation. That's what I like about the military is that we see the end state of an operation, what do we want to achieve, and then we backwards plan to the current state. And we create all the steps backwards to where we want to be in the future. And we kind of view it, we visualize it, we plan it, we rehearse it, and then we create a plan. And then we create plans around the plan with the various options that come at you. And that builds your ability to overcome something as you go through the operation. And the I would say the most valuable part of military training is understanding that the actual plan you developed may never work as designed. And that's why you have developed and rehearse several different scenarios, so you can quickly adapt. And that helps us to overcome the adversity of dangerous and complex operations. Now, of course, this is coming from my army experience, you know, you're sitting in an office and you have a team, you may not be necessarily dealing with daily dangerous and complex operations, dealing with training or dealing with something that you would an army person would be dealing with overseas. But you can see how it will help you to develop that resilience to whatever you're facing whatever emergency your organization faces, whether it be a changing market, or a very big and broad situation that we're dealing with now in 2020.

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And it was during numerous army training scenarios that allowed me to grow confidence in myself to overcome tough situations, the objective to training is to work through challenges in a safer environment, even though army training is very dangerous training, test you and your systems and test your ability to make decisions while everything around you is falling apart. Of course, not everyone has served in the military and has had the opportunity to experience this process like I have. But I believe a key part of my resilience building plan was to always look to the future, I often use hope as a way to become more resilient to tough situations that I believe that tomorrow will be better that I believe that an operation that I was on in the army that I knew and and visualize that end state and I that gave me hope. And I knew that it was going to be better. Once I got through whatever this challenging situation was going to be, it will always be better through planning. And through making the right decisions today, I also have an inner drive where I don't want to fail, I rely on that inner drive, I want to prove it to myself that I can get it done, I can overcome any situation that has been presented to me that I will not fail, I will not feel myself I will not feel my team. And I can't identify with just one part of life. I have made up of different things and one failure and one will not dictate how I feel about myself I will not over identify with whatever job I have or anything else in my life when regarding one particular piece or compartment or one aspect of my life I will not over identify with that one aspect. If I fail in that, then I'm not a failure overall, I will overcome that situation, whatever it is, and I will continue to live my life. And I understand that change is inevitable. And when one area doesn't work out, I know there's something better will become available soon. I determined my own fate I determined my own story. So for an easy win. I challenge you to build a personal plan for resiliency.

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How are you going to become more resilient to tough times? How are you going to deal with rapidly changing conditions, I discussed seven different things that you can use to build out a resilience plan. I'm sure there are others. But these are seven things that I believe that were important. That's the physical changes you can make in your life, diet, exercise, sleep, drinking water to is improving how you view yourself, that's a mindset. issue. Number three, have a realistic view of life.

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Number four, who are the people that you are associating with you hanging around really positive, optimistic people. And number five goes with number four is that realizing that not everyone you associate with is gonna applaud you and you win.

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So you need to be paying attention to those people.

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Number six, you need to continue to embrace change. And number seven, you need to establish and write down your goals. Next, I want to share with you a couple of statistics that I found, I found an article called the special report why developing resilience may be the most important thing you can do for your well being right now. And it's by Abby Ellen. And it was reviewed by Dr. Allison young, it was an everyday health. And this is an article that was published on April 6 2020. And it was about resilience research that was conducted by Ohio State University. And what they say in the report is that Americans overestimate their own resilience. And in the report, it said that 83% stated they were resilient, but the way that they went through the test and the way Ohio State University scored it, that they actually believe that only 57% scored as being resilient. So again, 83% initially believe that they were resilient. But according to the research that Ohio State University said that only 57% scored as being resilient based on their answers. So why is this important? Because the growing research shows higher levels of resilience are directly related to better outcomes when living through a crisis. So what Ohio State University did was they surveyed 3583 people aged from 13 to 73, through the use of an online survey, and what they were trying to better understand was that how Americans define resilience, what challenged our resiliency, and what makes us resilient. And they basically said, Why is this important? And this is right from the report right from the article. Because growing research shows higher levels of resilience are directly related to better outcomes when living through a crisis, managing chronic disease and chronic pain and improving emotional and physical health.

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So building your resiliency is incredibly important to your own health, to your mental stability to your ability to overcome anything that comes at you such as an adverse event. So this is why we're talking about this today. So I'm encouraging you to build that personal plan for resiliency. Today, we talked about the new kind of leader that's going to be expected. We talked about overcoming adversity, and then building a resiliency plan. Next episode, I'm going to talk about critical soft skills that every leader should be developing. I hope you enjoyed this episode. I am dedicated to helping you grow your leadership. You can find this episode wherever you find podcasts. Please join our community on Facebook, the finance leader podcast Facebook group, this will be our community to grow within the finance and accounting profession. And until next time, you can check out more resources at Stephen McLain calm and sign up for my updates so you don't miss an episode of the show. And now go lead your team and I'll see you next time. Thank you very much.

Bonus Episode 10: Resiliency

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