Resilience: Bouncing Back from Failure and Wrestling Emotion Out of the Driver’s Seat
Brené Brown recently said that if we’re brave with our work – or our lives – we’re choosing to fall. (Actually, in true Ms. Brown style, she also said you’re gonna get your *** kicked.) And…“The moment you start to learn from it, a failure ceases to be a failure.”
That’s where resilience starts.
Building up resilience, building up our tolerance for failure, allows us to choose to be vulnerable and authentic. It’s what allows us to say something in that meeting; to question assumptions; to inspire the team to try something new; invest ourselves in a mission or even in another person.
What Does It Feel Like to Fail?
We’re not just talking about failure on a big presentation at work. Our brains run through the same processes whether we’re failing a test, failing to show up to a party on the right day, experiencing heartbreak, or just a major disappointment. (I’ve done at least three of these.)
When something difficult like this happens, it changes how we show up. It changes who shows up. Our emotions get the first crack at understanding it. Emotion is driving; cognition and behavior are bound and gagged in the trunk (I have to give Brené Brown full credit for that very apt analogy.) The bottom line: in this moment, our brains demand a story in order to understand what’s happening, to eliminate ambiguity and achieve certainty, regardless of accuracy.
Brené calls this story the SFD. The Shotty* First Draft (*substitute a grown-up word as you prefer). Let’s say Susan doesn’t greet you at the coffee station tomorrow morning. SFD begins. Clearly, Susan no longer likes you. She must be mad because you didn’t share your chocolate with her yesterday. She’ll probably not say anything nice in your next 360 review. And then you won’t get that next promotion. You have to get on top of this right now. And on and on it goes. Meanwhile, Susan is experiencing morning sickness and can barely hold her head up and didn’t even see you and would like nothing more than for you to be extra nice to her. That’s the power of the SFD.
After Failure, What Does It Take to Get Back Up?
Brené Brown’s studies bring some Texas tough into a research-backed model for resilience: the reckoning, the rumble, and the revolution.
First comes the reckoning. This is our moment to recognize emotion. To see that emotion is in the driver’s seat, we need to get curious about the emotion, what it feels like, and why we’re feeling it. Is that anger in the pit of my stomach? Am I clenching my jaw? What is going on for me right now?
The reckoning is also the moment when we must pay attention. When we feel ourselves slipping into emotion, we pay attention to that feeling and how to bring ourselves back to center. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve used the mindfulness breathing exercise since Austin: in for four, hold for four, out for four, hold for four.
OK. Back to center? Next comes the rumble. This is where we own our story – we challenge the conspiracies and confabulations our minds have cooked up in our SFD in an attempt to quickly understand a difficult thing. Ms. Brown’s research found that 70% of the most resilient men and women wrote down their SFD. When you write it down, you can fact check it with a clear head. You can look back at it later. You can start to find patterns in your SFDs. And, as Ms. Brown notes, you know your SFD is real if you know you'd be mortified if anyone ever found it.
Now you’ve got your SFD, you’ve wrestled it to the ground, it’s time for therevolution. Because, as Brené told us in Austin, “When we deny our stories, they define us. When we own our stories, we get to write the ending.” The revolution is where we write the new ending. We’ve changed how we understand what we’re experiencing and now we get to change how we engage in the world. We go from being characters in our stories to being the authors of our lives.
Want to Learn More?
Read: Rising Strong by Brené Brown and Writing to Heal by James Pennebaker
Connect: Check out COURAGEworks, Brené Brown’s platform for connected learning
Listen: The Readitfor.me OneBook Podcast: Rising Strong by Brene Brown
This was the final installment of my three-part series on what I view as the pillars of leadership: authenticity, vulnerability, and resilience.