99. ReVisionary Thinking with Courtney Clark

Transcript – Episode 99: ReVisionary Thinking with Courtney Clark

Joe:
Sometimes you have to change your plans to reach your goals. That’s the real work of resilience and one of the many brilliant insights shared by today’s guest. It’s happening now on Boss Better Now.

Jamie:
You’re listening to Boss Better Now. This show is sponsored by Joe Mull and Associates. Now here’s your host, speaker, and author, Joe Mull.

Joe:
Welcome back BossHeroes to the show that aspires to be food for the boss’s soul. Each week we share advice, humor, and encouragement for leaders who go to work every day and create the conditions at work for people to thrive. And hey, we know that’s not always easy. We know that most days are a blur of putting out fires and too many emails or meetings and some team drama or boss drama or customer drama, and you have to navigate it all. And we’re here to help you with that. And this week I’m excited for the conversation that I’m about to have with my guest, Courtney Clark. Courtney helps organizations adapt to change and crisis when the stakes are high. She’s a speaker, an author, a consultant, a cancer survivor, a former girl scout, and a dog person. So good human alert. She’s the author of the new book, Revisionary Thinking: When You Have to Change Your Plans to Reach Your Goals. Please welcome to the show Courtney Clark <laugh>. How are you, my friend?

Courtney:
Good, thanks.

Joe:
My pleasure. I had to drop that little applause sound effect in for you, cuz I know as a speaker right, it’s what we love. We love it when people clap for what we do. Right? 

Courtney:
It feels good.

Joe:
<Laugh>. Well, listen, I’m so grateful for you taking the time to join us today. As I told you before we started recording, my co-host Suzanne is traveling right now. And so, for our listeners, every once in a while, I get to bring a guest on the show. And when I thought about who I might want to invite to talk with me for this episode today, Courtney was the first person who popped into mind because she’s got this great new book out. And she writes about resilience, but she does it in a really evidence-based kind of way. And I thought it would be a lot of fun to invite you onto the show, my friend, to talk about this. So why don’t we start here? Tell us the story of how this book came to be.

Courtney:
By accident. Like anything…

Joe:
<Laugh>

Courtney:
We put out into the world. I had this whole series of challenges starting at age 26. I was diagnosed with cancer for the first time. I’ve since had cancer four times. They found a brain aneurysm. I knew I couldn’t have children the typical way. So, we adopted a teenager and through all of these challenges, I got really interested in these concepts of resilience and why do some people have these hiccups in life, but still manage to be successful? And then why do other people really seem to struggle with these setbacks and, and maybe never recover or never get back on the path or it changes their outlook on life? What’s, what’s the difference? Is there a secret sauce? And so, I have been researching, interviewing how to research team talk about what, what are these special moments? What are the inflection points where we can either become resilient or not? And so that work led to this book ReVisionary Thinking. And it’s the whole concept of specifically what do we need to do to change our plans in order to reach our goals.

Joe:
I love that the genesis of this book is rooted in your own struggles. And you know, I imagine that is gonna mean so much to anybody who gets their hands on it, right? This isn’t just somebody who just decided to write a book that encourages people to, to you know, tackle your challenges and you can do it and you can get through anything. You just rattled off a list of personal experiences that would derail even the most optimistic or idealistic person. And so, when you, when you think about bringing all of that, those personal struggles to writing this book, how does that, how does that translate to people’s own stories? Do you understand kind of what I’m getting at here?

Courtney:
I think so. I think you hit the nail on the head when you said the word derailed.

Joe:
Hmm.

Courtney:
Because I was. Yeah. Derailed. I don’t have a magic power that other people don’t have to not be derailed. I got derailed and I talk about that I think pretty honestly, about all of the times that that happened including a, a divorce Finding out that I wouldn’t be able to have babies, and all of those pieces where life doesn’t turn out the way that you expect. And so, my hope is that we show people that it is okay to get derailed. Yeah. Not avoiding derailment is not the goal of a successful life. The key is how do you either get back on that path or how do you go out there with your machete and make a new one?

Joe:
I like if you’re watching us on YouTube friends, I like that Courtney just swung her imaginary machete at the brush hanging in front of us because that’s really what it is sometimes, right? Like, you know, it’s easy to say we have to carve a new path, but it takes work, it takes effort, physical effort, mental effort. Tell us a little bit more about that. When people figure out that they’re gonna have to adapt, how do we go about it and do it well?

Courtney:
Yeah. So, what I found in the research that I thought was very interesting is that this successful creation of a new plan really relied on not thinking of change as one moment of a thing that we have to do, or even one item that we have to do successfully. It’s actually three stages. Let go. Think up. And move on. And you can’t skip a stage. Most people really wanna skip that middle stage, think up. They don’t wanna spend any time there. And there’s good reasons for that, right? We have a cognitive bias called action bias that makes us just wanna do and so, so if you move through those three stages, if you actively let go of the plan, which can be very hard right off the bat. That’s a, is a big one. A lot of times we don’t wanna let go of the plan. We may even think that we’re letting go of the plan, but we’re really keeping the plan in our back pocket. Because when things go back to normal,

Joe:
I like the air quotes. Thank you.

Courtney:
We can pull it out again and be like, oh, hey, I got my, my trustee plan. And so, in my research found different types of people struggle with letting go of the plan if personality types age actually can make a difference in which one of the stages you might struggle with more. So, all that was really interesting. So, you let, actually let go of the plan. Yes. and then you gotta spend some time doing what researchers call idea generation or option generation to come up with a new plan. And then you enact your new plan, you select which plan you’re gonna move forward using input stories from other people. And we found when you do all three of those things, you are able to create a really successful new plan, maybe even better than your old plan.

Joe:
Hmm. I’m so grateful that you acknowledge that. Like different personality types are going to have different types of struggles with this. So, if you’ve used any of the, like the four quadrant different types of research-based assessments, anything from disks to Meyers-Briggs, right? We know there are some people who are the naturally occurring differences in, in some innate preferences they have in their personality will make it easier or harder for them to let go of the plan. For example, like I tend to be a little more stick to the plan. Like, we had a meeting, we made a plan, there’s the plan, it’s right in front of us, we made the notes, this is the plan, and why are we moving away from the plan right away? But you’re, you’re so right that if we can see in look in the mirror a little bit and recognize that maybe we are hardwired to hold onto a plan for a little bit longer than we actually should. Doesn’t that in and of itself make us more adaptable?

Courtney:
Yes. It one hundred percent does. And I really, I don’t wanna tell you this, Joe, but the older you get, the more you’re gonna wanna cling to the plan according to my

Joe:
<Laugh>. Yeah.

Courtney:
That’s what we found. There’s a, there’s an age correlation and it makes sense when you think about it because the longer you’ve been in your line of work.

Joe:

Yeah.

Courtney:

The more, hey, you might have been the one to create the plan.

Joe:
Yeah.

Courtney:
Or sticking to the plan may have made you successful. It may have gotten you where you are. So of course, that plan feels very valuable to you, more so than it might someone who is newer in their career.

Joe:
Right.

Courtney:
But what we discovered is that when you can help shift somebody’s thinking so that they’re no longer, I, I, I go always go back to the phrase, go with your gut.

Joe:
Hmm.

Courtney:
Right. We know that phrase about how we make decisions. We go with our gut and that is a good thing. Your gut is very helpful when you’re solving problems that you’ve solved before.

Joe:
Ah-Huh. <affirmative>,

Courtney:
When you’re in environments you’ve been in before facing challenges you faced before, your gut is a wonderful resource. So, I’m not telling you don’t go with your gut, but when you’re in a changing environment, like mm, I don’t know, coming off three years of a global pandemic or the supply chain is bonkers or it’s very difficult to hire right now, when you’re in an environment that is unusual for you, your gut hadn’t been here before mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, your gut may not know the right answer. And so, if you only go with your gut, then you’re gonna be stuck with the way we’ve always done it.

Joe:
Yep. Yep. I love what jumps off the page for me in the book is that you say right out of the gate that success isn’t determined by how good our plan is or was, but rather by how willing we are to design a new one when we need to. How do we know that it’s time to redesign the plan?

Courtney:
Oh, will, you may be getting a lot of flags about that, right. Because you may be hearing it from other people mm-hmm. <Affirmative> and it’s time to design the plan. You may be having metrics that are showing you that it’s not working. You may have trouble hiring or retaining employees. Yep. Something’s not working. Right. So, when there’s a friction point in the way that you’ve been doing it and it’s worked for 20 years and it’s not working now great time to reevaluate. That’s the perfect opportunity to reevaluate. Or if things are going okay, but you’re hearing rumblings, or you know that your competitors are making some changes and you don’t wanna be on the backend of whatever transformation’s going on in your industry mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, let’s start to pay attention to what a new plan could be.

Joe:
Right. I, I wanna go back to the, the let go think up move on for a couple of reasons. And the first is, so many of the folks who are listening to this show are frontline and mid-level leaders in an organization. And so, it’s not uncommon that the plan was dictated to them. It was handed down to them by somebody who thinks they know better or believes in the plan without necessarily being on the front lines and seeing that it’s time to adapt that plan. And so, our, our BossHeroes, which is what we call our listeners, they’re gonna have to turn around and maybe go back up the org chart and make a case to let go for folks who are wanna listen to their gut or folks who aren’t seeing that the time has come to redesign in all the ways that you just described. So, what advice can you give them for encouraging someone else in the decision-making process to let go?

Courtney:
Yeah. Oh, I had that a lot in my work in nonprofits when I was a nonprofit leader that managing up. Yes. Right. How do you feel like I’m seeing this cause I’m out here mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. so, what I have found that has been really successful is if you can show those metrics that we talked about that say like, hey, here’s a thing that’s not working, and I’d like to try X, Y, and Z. And sometimes you can even say, listen, I tried it your way mm-hmm.

Joe:
<Affirmative>,

Courtney:
Right? So, you can, you can head off and they’re, they’re gonna say, oh, well if that’s not working then you know, we gotta do the, these things we’ve always done. You know what, I’ve actually tried that.

Joe:
Yeah.

Courtney:
I’ve, I’ve tried that. Where I think that the three steps of revisionary thinking, what I’m calling these three stages it works no matter where you are on the org chart, even an individual contributor Right. Can think up new ways to navigate a tricky situation that that is an activity that can be done by yourself. And then I mentioned that this third stage implementing really involves using other people’s stories to help winnow down our options. But as an individual contributor, you could still gather stories from other people to help you take that up the ladder and say, I’ve talked to this person, I’ve talked to this, I’ve done my research. Yeah. I’ve interviewed some people and that is why I am proposing this.

Joe:
Yep.

Courtney:
So, all along the way, it’s not one person ever going with their gut. Right. you’re not taking a stab in the dark. You’re really taking a moment to say, okay, I’ve done my due diligence about how I think we might approach this problem.

Joe:
We, it’s such a perfect fit for a lot of the, the same kinds of conversations we’ve had on this show over many episodes about how you get the people above you to buy into something a new behavior or a different agenda. Right. And so, we’ve talked a lot on the show about two types of strategies in particular. And the first is creating line of sight between the new behavior or change that you want and what’s most important to that leader. Right? Like if you know that leader goes to bed every night and thinks about revenue or thinks about the schedule or, or the customer experience, you’ve gotta connect the dots with this. Right. And then Courtney, and I’m gonna kick it over to you cuz I can see you going. Yes, yes, yes. The other thing that we talk about on the show a lot is whenever possible, see if you can make it their idea, right? Where you go to that person and you say, you know, I was talking to a couple other people in the organization about whether we should be staying with this plan and, and I wonder if, you know, cuz I’ve heard you say a lot that we need to be adaptable, you know, and I wonder if it’s time to adapt. And I wanted to check with you on that because you seem to have a really good instinct for when it’s time to change, right? You, you make it their idea. Is this a, a, a worthwhile tactic to use, creating that line of sight or making it their idea?

Courtney:
Hundred percent. <Laugh>. Hundred percent. You, you absolutely have to couch everything in terms of what people value.

Joe:
Yes.

Courtney:
Right. So, I, I could spend a year trying to make a case for why my boss or why my employees that I manage should care about this thing that I care about. Or I could say, hey, you know, embracing this, this is really gonna impact the bottom line. This is really gonna impact this thing that makes a difference to you. And then I can slide if I, if I have a different agenda that dovetails with it, I slide that right in together and we all get to be successful.

Joe:
Yes. Okay. So, here’s what we’re gonna do Courtney, we’re gonna pause for just a minute, but, but in the second half here we’re gonna talk about a couple of things that I know our, our listeners are gonna be excited about, especially can you hire for resilience? And what makes a team resilient and how do we gift some of our team members, some of these strategies that you’re talking about here? I want to ask you to, to talk in a few minutes about your stop, drop, and roll strategy for dealing with chaos. I think that’s gonna be of great value to everybody who’s listening.

Joe:
But first, we have to pause for a tradition here on our show that we call the Camaraderie Question of the Week. Bosses build camaraderie on teams by making it easier for people to find things in common with each other. That’s why on our show each week we present a question that leaders can use at meetings to facilitate connection and build comradery. And listeners, Courtney has graciously agreed to play along, and I did send her the question ahead of time so we weren’t just springing it on her here. And so here we go. Here’s the question. Courtney, if you could meet and interview anyone alive today, who would it be? What say you, my friend?

Courtney:
Yeah. I thought about this after you sent me the question and I realized that it isn’t anybody that I admire in my field. Yeah. What I really wanna do is interview someone from one of the professions that I thought that I wanted to do like a zookeeper or a Broadway performer because to, I love gathering the perspective of people with totally different lives than me.

Joe:
Right. I love it. What an interesting conversation that would be.

Courtney:
Yeah. Yeah. Cause we wouldn’t have touchpoints in common.

Joe:
Yeah. That sounds like a really interesting podcast.

Courtney:
Well, did you ever wanna be a firefighter?

Joe:
I think every kid at some point wanted to be a firefighter. Right?

Courtney:
Not me.

Joe:
<Laugh> not

Courtney:
That brave. Dude, I’m look good and red, but I’m not that brave.

Joe:
Not ready to run into the building and know and fight fires. I think that your point about gathering the perspectives and the experiences of people who went on a different journey than yours could be really compelling. I think that’s one of the reasons that we, we give these questions out every week. I think that’s one of the reasons why this question could be really captivating at a team meeting. Or even just in one-on-ones with direct reports where we ask folks like, hey, if you could like sit down and talk to anybody in the world alive today, who would it be and why? Why did you pick that person? I think you could get some really interesting answers.

Courtney:
You could. And then now you have another question to ask, which is, what are all the jobs you thought you would have growing up in your life 

Joe:
That’s Right.

Courtney:
That you couldn’t pursue?

Joe:
Listen, Courtney is bringing the value this week. She just gave us like a double bonus camaraderie question of the week. Well, one of the things that we’re notorious for doing here on our show when we do a camaraderie question of the week, I am very guilty of this. My co-host Suzanne, is very guilty of this, is we will often have two answers, right? So, we will often double dip. And so, I’m gonna double dip right now with my answer to this question. My first answer was Barack Obama. I would love to sit down and have a conversation with the former president. And I know that not everybody agrees with his politics. But I’m a big fan of the man. I have always admired his grace under pressure and the thoughtfulness that he brings to his words and his actions. And I think if we can agree regardless of p political persuasion, that that job is probably the hardest job on the planet. It might be like the, you know, the, the, the nature in which your whole life and your family’s life gets assailed by media and people who will hate your guts and say horrible things about you just because you’re not in their political party. I, I think it’s just a really interesting perspective that he is someone I see who has just been able to maintain grace under pressure. And I think that would be an interesting conversation. But then I thought, Courtney, it’s kind of a boring answer, right? Because like most people, a lot of people would say, yeah, I’d like to interview a former president. And so, I have a second answer and it’s Dave Grohl of the Foo Fighters. Okay. I, yeah. I’m a big Foo Fighters fan. I’ve, so Dave Grohl did a biography last year, a great book called Storytellers. And it’s, it’s a beautiful book about his growing up and being raised by his schoolteacher mom. And if you don’t know this, Dave Grohl was the drummer for Nirvana. So, he has been in not one, but two of the biggest bands in musical history. And just seems like a really good dude. And I think it would be really fun to sit down and talk to him about music and life and growing up and all that sort of thing.

Courtney:
That’d be super cool.

Joe:
I think So Dave Grohl if you’re listening, come on the show brother. Let’s do this thing, right? If anybody out there has a connection to Dave, well then, I would probably just fanboy out and not be able to pull off that conversation.

Courtney:
We gotta ask Dave Grohl what he would’ve been as a career if he wasn’t Dave Grohl. That’s

Joe:
Right. Yeah. Like what were the three jobs you thought you were gonna have and that you didn’t end up having? And do you have any regret that you don’t have? I mean, he of course not. He hangs out with Paul McCartney and like, you know, you don’t know.

Courtney:
That, Joe.

Joe:
That’s true.

Courtney:
You don’t know.

Joe:
Yeah. He might be like, yeah, I, I kind of totally regret that I wasn’t able to be a plumber. He might, might say that. Absolutely. <laugh>. And that’s the Camaraderie Question of the Week.

Joe:
All right folks, before we jump back in with Courtney here, don’t forget that twice a month we send out our BossBetter Email Newsletter where we share videos, articles, the latest research on what the conditions are that lead employees to join and stay and care and try at work. It’s like continuing education for leaders who aspire to be better bosses. And if you aren’t getting those emails, in addition to not getting all of that great content, you’re not getting the special VIP access to the various BossBetter Virtual Summit events that we do twice a year. So put yourself on that list. Just text the word boss hero to 6 6 8 6 6. That’s BossHero. All one word to 6 6 8 6 6. You’ll get our twice-a-month BossBetter Email Newsletter.

Joe:
All right, Courtney, you sent me something enticing, and I started to encounter it in the book, and I wanted to hear you talk about it here on our show. What is the stop, drop, and roll strategy for dealing with chaos?

Courtney:
Yeah. So, you know, we were talking about firefighters earlier,

Joe:
Perfectly teed up, well done.

Courtney:
I mean, look at that. It all sinks together. <Laugh>, the top and roll theory is when I was researching what are the strategies that help us deal with like stress and chaos. And we all know the strategies of, you know, take a mental health break, right? You know, to pick up a hobby, do some mindful meditation, take a walk around the block, the, and those are all good strategies, but what I found is that doesn’t fully address the root of the problem. It doesn’t do anything for our long-term stress resilience. What I found is the, the appropriate method involves what I realized is stop, drop and roll. Just like you learned when you were a kindergartner and the firefighters come to your school and they teach you what to do when you catch on literal fire.

Joe:
<laugh>.

Courtney:
So, when you catch on figurative fire,

Joe:
Yes.

Courtney:
You can also remember to stop, drop and roll. What that means is, of course, stop, just stop what you’re doing, freeze in place. And a lot of people’s response to that is like, well, I don’t have time to stop because if I had time to stop, I wouldn’t be so stressed out in the first place. Right. Totally. That, but when you are stressed, your brain floods your body with adrenaline and cortisol. Yep. And the problem with adrenaline and cortisol, that’s those fight or flight hormones Yep. That you hear people think about. The problem there is that when you are high on adrenaline and cortisol, your brain isn’t making very good decisions. It actually sort of blocks that higher-order cognitive processing Yeah. In your frontal lobe. And you’re left with that prehistoric lizard brain fight or flight mode is sort of that prehistoric, animalistic response. Yeah. Well, guess what? Prehistoric animals aren’t super well known for their great <laugh>. They would make terrible bosses <laugh>. Right. Wait, so you have to stop because you, you have to pause and hit stop hitting the panic button that is sending the flood of adrenaline and cortisol through your system. Yes. And then the drop moment happens, because guess what? Adrenaline and cortisol don’t just evaporate the minute you stop hitting the panic button. A doctor, I guess would tell you that it takes like 24 hours to clear that flood of hormones outta your system. I know you don’t got that kind of time, but the worst is over in about five minutes. So there, in those five minutes, maybe you can’t leave, maybe you can’t take a walk around the block, take a coffee break do some deep breathing, but you can at least be aware for that five minutes that you are making decisions under the influence of adrenaline and cortisol.

Joe:
And it’s such a great point to make that, that advice, to take a breath, close your eyes, bring yourself down, or take a walk around the building. It sounds trite on its surface, but it’s not, it’s rooted in science because you’re gifting yourself the chance to start to move away from that more frenetic thinking that’s negatively impacted by the presence of these hormones and, and the brain’s natural response.

Courtney:
I found a lot of that in my research stuff that gets painted with the paintbrush of being touchy-feely. Right. But if you look a little deeper, it has a, a biological basis, a sociological basis, and you go, oh, it, it sort of got lumped in with sing held in hands and singing kumbaya around the camp. But there’s like a real reason that if you are stressed, you’re just not making good decisions and it’s not even your fault. Yeah. It’s just literally not your fault. Your biology has programmed it so high on adrenaline and cortisol. You are using this tiny little prehistoric part of your brain Yep. And not big juicy gray matter that allows you to be the leader that you are.

Joe:
It turns out that when we tell ourselves we need to chill out, we’re doing science. All right. So, let’s go to drop and roll. What’s, what are we doing there?

Courtney:
Drop is that five minutes. That’s what we just did. Gotcha. And then, but you can’t just stop for a second. You do have to like to drop back Got it into here for about five minutes. But then we can roll forward. Right. We can pick back up with what we’re doing, and we just have to do one thing differently as we roll forward over our to-do list, we have to do it with something that’s called an internal locus of control.

Joe:
Hmm.

Courtney:
Yeah. So, locus of control, that’s the story that you tell yourself about who’s the boss, right? Like who, who’s in charge here? Who’s driving this boss? So, you can have an internal locus of control or an external locus of control. And if you have an, you’ve got an internal locus of control, then you believe that things in life are happening because of your hard work, your intellect, your blood, sweat, and tears. If you have an external locus of control, then you might be telling yourself that things that happened to you in life are because of luck, fate. Your mom, your boss, <laugh>, you’re rising into Venus. Right. I always say like, if you’ve parented a teenager, which I have teenagers can be classic external locus of control. It’s not my fault. My teacher gave me that grade. Right. No recognition that you may have earned that grade. Right. So that external locus of control studies have shown that two people can have the exact same to-do list, and the person with the internal locus of control will get more done and be less stressed. Jackpot!

Joe:
<Laugh>. Wow.

Courtney:
Wow.

Joe:
I, I keep thinking about the success that people who are able to differentiate between what they can and can’t control have in navigating stressful situations. And that comes down to this internal locus con of control too, doesn’t it? The ability to catch yourself when your brain is making up a story about what’s happening or what people are gonna say or all the different bad outcomes that this situation could have that are either imagined or completely out of our control. And it seems that some of us either have a gift for or have learned how to stop and say, I can’t control that, so I’m not gonna worry about that. How does that connect to what you’ve just shared with us?

Courtney:
A hundred percent overlays each other because knowing what you have control over having an internal or external locus of control has nothing to do with how, where you are on the org chart.

Joe:
Right.

Courtney:
How you know how much control you have over other people. You could be the biggest boss in the world. You could be the richest person in the world. You do not have control over everything.

Joe:
Right. Despite your best efforts. Yeah.

Courtney:
<Laugh>, despite your best efforts, despite my best efforts. Right. Let’s remember, I come at this the hard way. I’m not just a scholar. <Laugh>. Yes. I’m learning what I need to know. And so, when we can realize that we can still have an internal locus of control, even if we don’t control everything, because we’re never gonna control everything. So, the idea is these are the things I do control and I’m gonna focus on those, those are the things that I am gonna do. Yeah. When I get diagnosed with cancer, that’s out of my control. But what I can control is choosing the right doctor. What I can control is picking what kind of surgery that I’m gonna have or setting myself up for success when I come home so that I heal faster, and I don’t pull my stitches and I have the food that I need to nourish me. Right. You know, what do I need to do at work so that the wheels don’t come off while I’m recovering? Those are all things that are in my control.

Joe:
Yes.

Courtney:
And if, if I think that the one big thing is out of my control, and so I just throw my hands up and go, oh my gosh, I don’t deserve this. Why do these things always happen to me?

Joe:
Yep.

Courtney:
Only focus on that. Boy. I sure am gonna be in a really dark place.

Joe:
Yeah. Yep. All right. I wanna talk about teams before we have to let you go here cuz you’ve given us some wonderful insights and gifts, even just for some of the, the self-talk that we need to move ourselves through when we’re facing any number of difficulties. But let’s talk about our teams at work. Courtney, can you hire for resilience? Is some of what you’re talking about innate, or can it be taught? And if so, should we be teaching this to our teams?

Courtney:
Ooh, I think that we can teach it.  And, and I do think that some people are naturally more resilient than others. This is something that I found in my research is that certain people are naturally more prone to be optimistic. They are naturally more prone to have an internal locus of control. And you can hire for that. You can absolutely. You know, it’s those great open-ended interview questions about, tell me about a time when right. You were forced to change your approach to something. Tell me about a time when something wasn’t working and you, you know, figured out what to do. So, you can ask those questions and be listening for that internal locus of control. Yes. Hearing, you know, is it, oh, it’s outta my hands. There was nothing I could do. Or did somebody find those leverage points, those things that they could control. So, you can listen to that. You can listen for people who identify opportunities. You can also, what we found is that the folks who were the most creative problem solvers were more likely to be adaptable. So, folks who come up with not the right answer, but see multiple possible right answers that has a correlation to adaptability. Yes. Right. Cause that makes sense. We tried it this way, it didn’t work. Well, don’t worry though. We have a plan B and a plan C. So, you can see those people who are better at idea and option generation could be prone to be more adaptable and therefore more resilient.

Joe:
I so appreciate that. You, you talked about this in the context of those open-ended interview questions that so many of us know we should be using when we’re hiring and meeting people and considering them to fill positions and asking them to tell us about a time when. But you landed on something that is so important that we don’t always do, which is to ask a follow-up question about, so what were you thinking when you were in that situation when you got that directive? Or what were you feeling? What, what, what were you telling yourself? And then being able to tune into some of that self-talk, some of those reactions to, to key in on whether or not they are bringing some of this hard wiring with them, or whether you’re gonna have some work to do as a leader to, to build this out for them.

Courtney:
Yes. And that further questioning can also help refine whether the outcome was successful because of this individual person, or just because the team was successful mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. and so that’s really what you’d want to distill. Yes. If you’re interviewing someone not, you know, was the outcome, great. That’s important. But like you say, what was their self-taught? What was their contribution to that? And, and they didn’t even have to be the biggest contributor, but you wanna know what was going on in their mind when that was happening. You know, were they, were they panicked, and heels dug in or were they trying to get in front of the train and be like, okay, we could do this. Well, what about this?

Joe:
Yes. Yes. All right. I wanna make sure I ask you about this before we run out of time. We have so many folks listening to this who have been in high-stress situations now, as you alluded to earlier, for coming up on years. And let’s name the elephant in the room, which is that there are a lot of people who do not wanna hear about resilience anymore. Right. I’m on a team. I do not want my company or my boss to give us another program on resilience or ask us to be resilient. Right. we’re underpaid, we’re overworked, we’re burned out. So, what are the habits or routines or behaviors you would encourage the leaders listening to this podcast to sort of stealthily engage in that we know are helpful for building and renewing resilience in our teams without them talking about quote-unquote resilience?

Courtney:
Absolutely. Far too often conversations about resilience are actually a cover for we’re not going to make things better around here. Yes. So, you just need to be tougher.

Joe:
Hang in there. Kitten. Yeah. <Laugh>.

Courtney:
That’s not really what resilience as an organization ought to be about. That’s putting a lot on the individual. So, what I would say we can, we can get at the root of resilience without ever talking about resilience or attitude or optimism. My personal definition of resilience is that resilience is not the sense of superhuman internal strength. It’s not sucking it up when things suck. And it’s definitely not this concept of like toxic positivity. Oh, life doesn’t give you money. You can handle, you know, hashtag blessed <laugh>. It’s not that what resilience actually is, is just figuring out the next version of the plan.

Joe:
Yes.

Courtney:
So, we can do that without ever putting the name resilience on it. If people are burned out of that what we can do is create a space for idea generation and option generation. Right. And that’s reinforcing when people bring good ideas to the table. That’s making it known that even if plan A is working right now, we might wanna have plans B and C in our back pocket. So, thank you for coming up with that great idea and bringing it to our attention. And what I also found that I referenced before is that sharing of stories Yes. Allows us to be more resilient. We talked about how different things can feel touchy-feely when you enter this category. I found some really cool research that the US military did about sharing stories. Hmm. Obviously, they, US military, very touchy-feely <laugh>, you all know they used to, they have historically trained recruits with something called errorless training. Which is skills drilling. But they started, they experimented with something that they called error exposure training, which is exposing their recruits to the stories of other people. I was here and then the enemy was here and this, these were the supplies that I had. This is what I had. Or I had this HR issue, and this person was this and da da da. And I made that I was the wrong decision. I shouldn’t have said that. I just said this instead and da, da. And so, what they found when they tested the recruits who were trained the old way with the recruits who were trained, the new way they put them in the simulations and they found that the recruits trained by being exposed to the stories of other people, they made better decisions faster. Yeah. Under pressure, because they could like tap into things, they’d never experienced themselves before. But they could be like, well, that reminds me of the story that that general said. Yep. And so, when we allow story sharing between other people, we are, first of all, we’re giving meaning to why we’re all here. Right. Not everybody gets forward facing. Not everybody gets great client stories. So, we share the good things, we share the bad things, and that actually helps people build their bank of what should I do in this tough situation? What should I do when everything has changed around me? Oh yeah. Somebody else I know has been in a situation similar to this.

Joe:
Well, and when we invite people to share the stories of their mistakes, of their lessons learned, it’s an essential ingredient in creating psychological safety. And so, we as leaders are able to encourage not just ourselves to share our stories and other leaders to share them with each other, but team members to share their stories with each other. Because then we, we benefit at, at all of those levels, right?

Courtney:
Correct. Correct. That’s a, the Pixar leaders, they do that when they bring in their –they start sharing these stories of the mistakes that they made. Because it’s like if your boss’s boss’s, boss’s boss’s boss <laugh> Yeah. You can say culpa. Yeah. Then you can too. So, it’s just tremendous to have that to tap into. And you don’t ever have to call it resilient. You don’t have to talk about positive attitude, because sometimes it is okay to be stressed out or be downtrodden or overworked. That’s reality.

Joe:
And I love the model of the, the, let’s go think up, move on. Did I get it right?

Courtney:
Let go. 

Joe:
Because it’s really the shape of the coaching conversation that a leader has with an employee who is struggling. And, you know, we can sit there and give feedback and say, well, you need to let go and then you need to think up some new ideas and then you need to move on. But really, we get farther when we engage in a coaching approach, which is to start by asking someone, hey, how are you gonna know when it’s time to change the plan and have that conversation? And then the next coaching question is, okay, so what are your options? And then the next coaching question is, okay, what are your next steps then? Right. And so, you’ve really given us this wonderful shape of a coaching conversation that we as leaders can, can go and have in a very simple kind of way, ask a question or two about, let, let go ask a question or two to help people think up and then ask a question or two to help them move on.

Courtney:
Yep. It can absolutely be applied to individual folks who are struggling. It can apply to your group as a whole. It applies to yourself. Yep. and so that’s, I my hope is that it really helps people because I believe we’re at a time in so many industries for so many humans where the ground beneath our feet is not the same as it was just a few years ago. No. And it’s so universally true in a way that it certainly hasn’t been true. I haven’t felt it to be true in my adulthood. Mm. We seem to all be experiencing it in some way right now. So, I’m hopeful that this can, can be a tool to help us all be better humans and certainly be better leaders and bosses.

Joe:
Well, the, the book itself is a terrific tool and all of the insights in it that only a, a, a little bit of which you shared with us. So please tell folks where can they get the book and how can they follow you, learn more from you, connect with you if they’re interested.

Courtney:
Sure. So, the book, revisionary Thinking is available in all your bookie-buying places, Amazon Noble, target all those good things. And you can follow me. I am on Facebook; I am on Instagram. I’m not great on social media. I can’t lie. I, I mostly just share stories about eating French fries and hanging out with my dogs, and doing volunteer work <laugh>. But I’d love to call you, come join me there.

Joe:
And if they wanna touch base with you more about any of the training, speaking, or consulting that you do. What’s the website? My friend

Courtney:
courtneyclark.com. C-l-a-r-k.

Joe:
Wonderful. Thank you so much for being here. I’m thrilled by everything that we uncovered in this conversation. I greatly appreciate it and I’m sure our listeners did too. All right, folks, that’s our show this week. Don’t forget to hit that subscribe button that way you get new episodes of Boss Better Now delivered right to your device with that little red notification circle with a one in it that says, hey, a new episode has just dropped. Listen to it now. You can do that on whatever platform you are listening on. Thanks so much for being with us this week, and thanks for all that you do to care for so many.

Jamie:
This show is sponsored by Joe Mull and Associates. Remember, commitment comes from better bosses. Visit joemull.com today.