Resilience helps you cope and bounce back from adversity, but transilience provides you with the capacity to endure, flexibly adapt, and positively transform.
Do more than just survive. Let yourself thrive. Surviving is a reactive way of being whereas thriving is proactive. Resilience is primarily about survival. Transilience takes you further—beyond resilience.
Increase your capacity to embrace change in the forms of volatility, uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity, and hyperconnectivity (VUCAH). How might a serendipity mindset help you see opportunity in the unexpected or bisociative thinking help you connect seemingly unrelated facts or events? For you or your organization, consider how you might challenge assumptions, stress-test ideas, and strategize to discover feasible alternatives to be ready for whatever the future could hold.
Develop your ability to be antifragile—when exposure to chaos and uncertainty, stressors, or risk results in making something better and stronger than before. How might embracing discomfort help you develop your antifragility?
It's unfortunate that unhealthy workplaces reward people for overworking. High work demands, too few resources, and unrealistic expectations can create long hours and weekend work that can go beyond overwork to burnout. It's now known that burnout is not actually a personal problem, but an organizational one.
Maximize utility to prevent burnout. Work should nurture, not encumber, the other aspects of your life. What else is important to you? Who are you outside of work? What good is an "A" in work, if you get an "F" in life?
Think about how you could be sustainably excellent at work and role model this as a leader to help others do the same. How might you better manage yourself to be most effective at work to get what's most important done well without sacrificing the rest of your life? Moreover, what can you do to cultivate your well-being that will enhance your productivity and performance at work?
You can "have it all" over the course of a lifetime, but it's unrealistic to have it all at once and be able to keep it up. Recognize the seasons of your life and what matters most to you for each point in time.
Imposter syndrome is a systemic scam that exacerbates normal feelings of self-doubt and fails to recognize the impact of systemic bias and exclusion on women in workplaces. It's more pronounced for marginalized identities—the more intersectional, the more compounded the marginalization will be. If you're working for an organization that hasn't yet addressed imposter syndrome, you can still improve your ability to navigate it at work.
Recognize that you don't need to be fixed because there's nothing wrong with you. Your level of confidence and outcomes aren't commensurate with your competence as a professional. You may not believe it yet, but you are more than good enough.
Develop healthy confidence for your own well-being and avoid fake confidence and overconfidence. "Fake it 'til you make it" is bad advice. Instead, face it 'til you ace it. Self-confidence results from not betraying yourself, consistently honoring your own needs, and keeping commitments to yourself.
Be willing to take calculated risks and practice self-compassion to support yourself whether you succeed, fail, or something in between.
Effective leadership requires innovative thinking and doing. Most of us tend to default to leading the way we would want to be led and primarily stick to drawing upon the knowledge and experiences that are comfortable and familiar to us. To challenge ourselves to level up our leadership, we can choose to lead by design by adapting different styles of leading to best suit the situation and stakeholders involved.
Find new or unusual ways to leverage your strengths effectively. You can't get the most out of your strengths and reach your potential if you just stick to using them the way you always have.
Discover your typical leadership markers first. Then challenge yourself to move out of your comfort zone to choose different combinations of leadership markers for certain situations that allow for authenticity, adaptability, and help strengthen how you want to be perceived.
Strategically analyze your stakeholder network to engineer how you can build your influence by considering stakeholders' levels of influence and where they fall on the spectrum between support and opposition relative to you.
1:1 Coaching for Emerging Leaders & Executives
—Comprehensively build all 12 competencies of emotional intelligence
—Red team your strategy to find opportunity in the unexpected, connect seemingly unrelated facts or events, challenge assumptions, stress-test ideas, and strategize to discover feasible alternatives to effectively navigating complexity and disruption
—Leverage Gallup CliftonStrengths based on your Signature Themes or all 34
—Holistically cultivate your leadership to be personally sustainable
—Strengthen yourself as an inclusive leader
—Strategically position yourself to develop influence and leadership/executive presence
In-Person or Virtual Speaking Engagements | Podcasts
—How Emotions Can Help You Lead More Effectively
—How Women Can Be Empowered Through Emotional Intelligence
—How Wellness Sharpens Your Ability To Lead
* Speaking topics may also relate to or include references to my published articles:
• Why Multidimensional Self-Care Is Essential To Better Leadership
• A 5-part article series that begins with the introductory article of How Women Of Color Can Leverage Emotional Intelligence To Level Up As Leaders to 4 successive articles on women of color for each of the domains of EI: Self-Awareness, Self-Management, Social Awareness, and Relationship Management.
In-Person or Virtual Workshops
—Leverage the Gallup CliftonStrengths of your leaders, managers, and teams
—Cultivate workplace well-being and foster sustainable excellence
—Navigate difficult conversations, effectively manage conflict, and communicate assertively
—Build emotional intelligence (EI) through team-building activities
—Maximize your organization's social impact (the effect of the actions of an organization on the well-being of communities or society while still earning a profit)
—Disrupt and dismantle unhealthy workplaces and inequitable systems to create psychologically safe and inclusive organizational cultures