By Kendra MacDonald, CEO of Canada’s Ocean Supercluster.
I recently had a discussion with someone who suggested I need to work on my resilience. This caught me a little off guard, as I have always considered myself a resilient person, and I have been reflecting on it ever since.
I am of a generation of leaders who were taught to separate their work life from their personal life and bring only my most positive self to work every day to motivate others. I thought I did that well throughout my career. I also thought my ability to keep my personal life away from work was a demonstration of resilience. Not unlike many leaders, I have faced personal challenges:
• My dad was diagnosed with Lupus when I was young and died more than 20 years ago. He suffered with the disease for many years, which also caused my mom to suffer from depression, and those two things shaped a lot of my childhood and early career.
• I wanted to be a mom. What should have been easy became several rounds of fertility treatment, hormone shots and other medications. It was also a significant emotional roller coaster.
• My mother is now suffering from vascular dementia. I am lucky that she remembers me most days, but she does not remember how to answer a phone and has started to forget my daughter. I feel it is only a matter of time before she forgets me, and it breaks my heart every day.
Why am I sharing these things? I want others who might be suffering through their own personal challenges to know they are not alone. These things are hard, and the additional mental health impacts of the global pandemic over the past few years have made many of us feel even more alone as we work through the challenges we face.
While I have managed these life challenges for many years, until the pandemic, I never really gave a lot of thought to the tools I used to maintain resilience. Based on my own experience and things I’ve learned along the way, there are a few ways you can work to rebuild your resilience:
Surround yourself with a strong network.
Pre-pandemic, I took that network for granted. I had built up strong relationships across the countries and cities where I had lived and worked, and, with my travels, I had the opportunity to connect regularly. For many people, the pandemic impacted connections with both family and friends. For me personally, I tried to maintain virtual connections, but we all have busy lives. So, I relied on those relationships less and less, which drained more of my own emotional energy without the opportunity to rebuild it.
To be more resilient, a strong network is critical. Challenge yourself to plan time with people in your personal network at least quarterly, the same way you would maintain professional connections. Look back at the end of a quarter to assess success and plan for the next quarter. Additionally, try to force yourself to reach out to someone to talk through an issue rather than tackle it just in your head. Treat building and maintaining your personal network as equally critical to your professional network.
Take care of yourself.
Between homeschooling and working during the pandemic and trying to keep everyone else on track, my own health fell down the list. I was slow to book annual medical checks and wasn’t getting to the gym. What was temporary dragged on for months and then years. As a frequent flyer, it is true what they say: You need to put on your own oxygen mask first and then help the people next to you. I lost sight of my oxygen mask.
As a leader, protect your self-care appointments in your calendar. It’s easy to let them be the first to be canceled because they don’t impact anyone but you, but, instead, defend them as ferociously as you can because they are the most important appointments, not the least. If they have to move, move them—don’t just cancel them.
Be positive.
My background is in risk management. I have an amazing ability to imagine everything that can go wrong and try to mitigate it. During the pandemic, that was particularly exhausting. Believing in endless opportunities and that things will work out creates its own emotional energy.
Being positive can require a lot of self-discipline. Something I do that others can try is to timebox the time I spend worrying about what can go wrong, and if someone frustrates me, I try to be more empathetic to the other person’s motivations to reduce frustration and remind myself to be grateful. It is easy to get caught up in day-to-day frustrations and forget to be thankful for the many things we take for granted every day.
Have fun.
Even though I travel for work, I love to explore new places for fun, be surrounded by strangers and experience new things. We traveled during the pandemic mostly to see family and help my mom as she transitioned into a home. This was important but it was another thing that had to be done. Find the things that bring you joy and energy.
As I reflect on these things, they seem straightforward and easy to do. But I know from my own experience of trying to be superwoman that they are also very easy to lose sight of when your list of things to do and people to take care of gets longer and longer. Being resilient does not mean being invincible, and with the complex environment currently facing leaders, by taking care of yourself, you give everyone around you permission to take care of themselves, too.
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