Welcome back to Resilient Entrepreneurs, the podcast that features business people from all around the world and from all walks of life sharing their expertise and tales of their business journey, with the hope that what they share will resonate with you in some way to make your journey that much richer. Russell Harvey is joining us today from Leeds in the UK. He's an engaging Leadership Coach and Facilitator, he's a public speaker, a Managing Director and podcaster of a podcast called How To Build Your Resilience, and he's a radio host. Russell is passionate about positively affecting 100,000 people by the year 2025, and has already impacted more than 14,000. How do you not lose count of that? Well, welcome, Russell.
Thank you so much. Thank you so much. I actually need to update that because it was just over a year ago, the 14 - I've got to like 40,000, so it might be about 42,000 now.
How do I measure it? Thank you so much for letting me on. How do I measure it? It's in that space of, I adore and I love supporting people, it's why I do what I do, so when somebody in front of me has a realisation moment, or a light bulb moment, or actually they have a moment that when we've chatted or supporting and they've gone, ‘Ah, I know how I can use that’, and you can see that their mind is working about the practical implication of what we've talked about, that goes into the bucket of ‘positively effect’. So everything I do, I'm just aiming to get to, let's have a target, 100,000. It did start out with, ‘I just want to sort of positively impact people’, and then the world, the sensors in the world went, how would you measure it? We have to make it S.M.A.R.T, and I was like, oh, gosh we have to make things SMART, so that's where the 100,000 by 2025 came from.
Well, if you're almost halfway there, so it might be time to update that goal again.
So Russell, you specialise in resilience, and we are certainly in a world of uncertainty, ambiguity, let's start our conversation on that. This is normally our last question in other episodes. The question is, what is resilience? What does it mean to you?
What it means to me, it means everything. So that’s one answer to the question it’s literally, it's about the human condition and it means everything because if we aren't resilient, then what are we? Or if we don't build and grow resilience, what do we do? And as well, the meaning of resilience to me is also about springing forward with learning. I always talk about springing forward with learning, just from my years of experience around resilience, I'm not a fan of this idea of bounce back. So if we think about it, we go through life as human beings, things happen to us, happen around us, and then if we say okay, I’ve faced into that, that was an enjoyable thing, not an enjoyable thing, I'll now go back. I'm sort of standing there or sitting there going, just wait, just hang on a minute, okay if you go back, you can't. What did you learn essentially? So there's a risk, there's a bit of subconscious instruction to the brain, if you bounce back you won't learn from the experience. So I'm on a one person mission, which you can join me on, about changing that to resilience is springing forward with learning. Now to do that from all of life's events you need to be able to pause and reflect, which is where the learning is, and re-energise and recuperate. So if you imagine that you do something that you love doing, you're tired, it's a nice tired, and how do you re-energise from a nice tired? But then you do something that’s actually really difficult, really challenging, that you really struggle with, you're a different version of tired, you're a little bit broken. So how do you re-energise from that really difficult, horrible, tired, and there'll be different things that you do. So deciding to make the choice of buying into springing forward where you're learning, so you pause, you re-energise and reflect. My question for everybody is, how would your life be better when you choose to do that? So for everybody who’s listening now it's like, ‘What will you have more of, if you choose to do more spring forward with learning, learning about resilience, where you weren't resilient, what worked for you, what didn't work for you? How would your life be better? What would you have more of that you would like to have? So it means everything to me, because I'm The Resilience Coach and I’d also like people to think about springing forward with learning. That's where I come from around the whole resilience piece.
I really liked the idea of the spring forward, because you pull back for a spring to get it to shoot forward, right? So it's that pulling back where you take stock, you learn, build resilience, and go forward. That's brilliant, it's so simple and so clear. How else do you work with your clients? In what ways do you, and what type of clients do you work with?
Perfect ideal client is, so without doing any form of sales pitch, it's somebody that's got the job title of Head of… so it doesn't matter what industry that they're in. So it's somebody who's got Director of.. or Head of, that’s you know, a leadership coach. So that anybody that's thinking, actually, “You know what, the job's going really well, it’s brilliant, everything seems to be working”. Actually, in those moments you need a coach to go, how clear is it to you, about how come it's working? What's the why, what are you doing well? And then others, it's a case of if you are finding actually that facing into a volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous world is depleting you and diminishing you, and you're just like, pfff, I've had enough, I don't quite know what to do, then they are also my ideal clients, and how I work with them, is then taking a strengths-based approach. It's really curious around how much do people genuinely understand what their strengths are, those natural things that energise them, that they really enjoy doing. I use a psychrometric to do that, you don't necessarily have to, but I use it because it's a good conversation tool essentially, for them to specifically clarify what their seven significant strengths are out of 24. And I may also get people as much as possible to think about their top three. So the idea is that when you can spend as much time as possible utilising your strengths, the things that you love doing, you naturally enjoy doing to achieve all the things that you want to achieve and you've harnessed them, they build natural resilience, and natural confidence. And one of the dimensions of being resilient, I have a Resilience Wheel that I talk about, is confidence as well . So that's how I work with clients in the first instance, just to understand where they are now, classic coaching, it's like, where would you like to get to? And how can we manage you to get there. So I work with individuals and I work with teams. And it's also about taking a general line management and leadership approach. If you understand your strengths as a leader and a line manager, how clear is it to you, all of your team's strengths? So we do look at people's weaknesses, but we think about it differently. So sometimes, well the vast majority of time when people look at their strengths profile, their eyes go to, where am I weak? Where are my problem areas? Where do I need to focus it? So it's absolutely fascinating and it's brilliant that the volume of my clients, when I say to them, ‘Stop doing that, your personal development plan going away from our conversation is for you not to focus on your weaknesses. I want you to just put those to one side for now. These are these things here that you've identified, you love doing, you're doing them naturally, and you're good at them, and they excite you and infuse you and you enjoy them, but your personal development plan and your tasks now is to do more of that.’ And a load of people turn around and go, “What? You want me to do more of the things that I love?” Well, yes. “You don't want me to spend loads of time on these things that I don't like doing?” No, why would you bother? We will over time need to revisit the things that they don't enjoy doing to make sure that there's not some things they need to really watch out for, if there's something really important they need to do for their job or life, but it doesn't energise them and they're really not good at it, but they got to do it, then we do need to face into that and look at it, but we look at it from a strengths-based approach.
That’s quite revolutionary.
I can see the two of your brains are going Oh, right. Okay.
It's a rhetorical question for the both of you but are you really clear on what, if you could only do a few things for the rest of your life that you love doing, what would they be? And if you could spend more of your time doing those, and you utilise those things that you love doing, to support you with the things that you don't enjoy doing, imagine that, what would happen, what would be different?
It's exciting, isn't it? I think my biggest trouble would be working out what the top three are. There's a lot of things I love to do and I'm lucky that I get to do them, and a lot of them are work related right, because we are working for ourselves, and we are building our own business and of course, we're going to gravitate towards the things that are most fun, or that are the most rewarding, that feel good to do. I think if someone's just building a business, which a lot of our audience is, they're solo entrepreneurs, they're doing this all on their own, they feel like it's all on them, and quite often it is all on them until their budget allows that to be different, so your recipe for success, from the sound of it is, they should keep doing more of what they enjoy, and the rest takes care of itself?
So to start it can, so similar, the clients that I work with are business owners, so absolutely with the caveat of like, the principle would be if, when you've identified those things that you're really not great at and really don't have lots of natural energy for, the idea would be actually, well you get somebody else to do that or you find a way to maybe systematise that if you can, if it's possible. So I appreciate budget wise, but the principle being well hopefully over time. So for everyone who is listening now, and yourselves, so just imagine a grid, horizontal line and a vertical line. So the activity that you do is, it's from a point of view of running your own business, do post it notes, or do a list, think of every single thing that you do in terms of running your business on a daily, weekly, monthly and quarterly basis. For each individual activity that you do, put each one of those individual activities on a post it note, and what you're going to do is, you're going to plot these post it notes on this grid. So the top right hand side of the grid is things that you love doing and are good at. So the vertical axis of the grid is your strengths, it’s this word Energy, and the horizontal axis is this word Skills. So the top right of the grid is that you love doing them, highly energised by them, and you're good at them. The bottom right of the grid is things that you are good at, but you haven't got the energy for it. It's if you're asked to do them, you're like, mmm, meh, have I got to? However, people ask you to do them because you're good at them. So ironing, I'm good at ironing, but I don't have a lot of enthusiasm for it, I have to lift myself up and then the bottom left hand side of the grid are those things that you are neither highly energised by nor good at, but you need to do them, it's not yet something that you could delegate. The top left of the grid is something that you love doing, but currently you're a bit naff at it, you're not very good at it right now, but you love it. So if you imagine that you took up playing a new instrument, which a lot of people did through the pandemic, to start with the sounds and the noises they made were terrible, however they were highly enthused by it. So you plot all of your post-it notes on this grid, and it's not about trying to have something in every one of the four spaces, it's just a case of where do your post-it notes go? And so Step One is to notice as a business owner, or anybody that's listening now, actually, what's the makeup of your grid, where's the concentration of the post-it notes, and then you work through it over time to get as many things in the top right hand corner of the grid as you can, the things that you love doing. And then it's about strategies about what you do with the things in the bottom half of the grid. So this is not a tool to move things from the bottom to the top because if it's in the bottom that's where it stays. If you don't have natural energy for something you can't magic it out of anywhere. You just recognise these things are in the bottom half or they aren't. If I'm being a bit sort of extreme, if you've got a business owner there, they've literally got the vast majority of their things in the bottom half of their grid, and just one or two in the top right, then they need to really understand actually, at the moment, if they can't pay others to do it, or they can't delegate it, just how much of their time is going to be deenergising for them, and is going to just weigh them down. So with spring forward with learning, they're going to have to do lots of reenergising because each time they face into their business, the fair amount of it actually could be draining for them, and holding them back.
And what you want to do over time, is get your post-it notes mostly in the top right and have strategies for the bottom half. The only thing that will shift is something from the top left to the top right, because if you love doing something, you love it, but you're currently not very good at it, the more you do it, you'll get better.
Yeah, you've got to put in those 10,000 hours no matter what, to get really masterful at something.
Yeah, there's some repetition, yes, that you need to do. Yes, the 10,000 hours thing is interesting, sometimes it gets misinterpreted, but it's just, you do need to put in some effort and repetition around things. But please don't do 10,000 hours on something that you hate doing, because it will absolutely batter your resilience.
That's a really good point and something that new entrepreneurs really need to listen to. And I love this idea of the grid of really taking stock of where you're at, and what you love and what you don't because we often talk about finding your zone of genius, staying in there, delegating out what you're not good at, because like you said, it keeps you energised. And we had a podcast guest not too long ago talk about Adrenal Fatigue Syndrome, which is the medical term for burnout, which was a big aha for me, not realising how much burnout actually is a medical thing and recognised as a medical problem. And often what leads to burnout is doing all these things that we have no energy for, we're not good at, we hate but we still have to do. Finding that balance, how do we figure it out, which is where coaching comes in to really help people I think, I understand.
If you also think about the three words that are used in resilience around coping, surviving and thriving, which I know there's lots of buzzwords in it. So the thriving, I work with clients to go what really just thriving mean to you and a resilient you mean? It's about getting them into the top right. So the top right of the grid is where thriving is, actually really loving life, enjoying it, facing into challenges, you feel good. So when you're in the thrive and the top right, your optimism has improved, your confidence has improved, your natural resilience has improved. So what you used to see as challenges potentially may be diminished. So in the bottom half of the grid, that's where you could be coping and surviving. And from my years of, about 15 years now working with the word resilience, sometimes I've noticed that people believe that they are ‘being resilient’ when they're coping and surviving. Now I would like people to start to think more about that isn't really resilience, that is keeping going regardless, and it's really difficult in those moments to do the pause, and do the step back and go actually, I am just batting my head against a brick wall here whilst I believe I’m being resilient. Myself and many others are going that's not really the resilience that we want people to think about, you want to understand actually being in the top right is where the true resilience piece is. And there’s a significant amount of research that how you get, as well into thrive, is around the lovely word of adaptability, openness to change, one of the key components of being resilient. But there's research that shows that actually those people that are in thrive, they spend a third of their time working upon their openness to change.
So we're in the space of actually, everybody's listening now, how much of your time do you actually spend working upon about the idea of doing something new? The idea of challenging yourself, the idea of facing into something that you don't like or you don't enjoy, or you're not sure about, but you're going to it try out, trial and error essentially. So yes, the adaptability.
You're suggesting that people can train themselves to like change.
Also I’m always making sure in this that I don't, because in the Learning and Development field we can often say yes, really quickly, so I'm pausing. People can't see it now but over my shoulder I've got something called phrenology, which is somebody's head. So there's an old bunkum idea from way back when, it’s different parts of your head, it tells you at the back right is love, in the middle is stress and then… it's rubbish. So I'm pausing while I’m just making sure Vicki that I definitely am comfortable saying, yes, you can train yourself to like change more.
And that's part of being resilient, to like change more.
Absolutely. Yes. So all of the aspects of resilience, so I've mentioned the Resilience Wheel, there's seven aspects to it and it's built upon research from Robertson Cooper, when you play around with all different aspects of your Resilience Wheel, they're all interconnected. So when you work one bit of it, it improves another bit. So when you're building your general resilience, you will be more comfortable with doing more new things. But if you try doing new things from a depleted state, a tired state, the idea of doing something you just go, ‘No thank you, I just haven't got the energy for it. So this is why spring forwarded learning, pause, reflect and re-energise, that's why I keep talking about resilience in that way. You can train yourself to like change more and different types of changes, more.
And what about resilience? Is it something that some people are born with more than others or do we all learn it?
So there are three types of resilience, there is our natural resilience that we're born with, that is out there, were born with some, and then life circumstances, are then actually how much of that resilience do we retain. So then that's the whole sort of nature-nurture debate of like, we go through life. There is also interesting research that shows that those people that have had more challenging upbringings, if somebody in their lives, either by happenstance or on purpose, encourages them from an early age to play to their strengths, even though that they have had a difficult upbringing or difficult background or some challenges, they are more resilient than those that aren't encouraged to do that from an early age.
So we've got the natural type of resilience we’re born with, the whole nature-nurture debate is about that, then it is about actually working on our resiliency skills, just our resiliency, all of it, everything to do with the resilience wheel, the hundreds of 1000s of resilience skills that are there, emotional resilience, optimism, anything else you can think of around tips to build your resilience is work upon those essentially. So we are born with some but we also have to put some work and effort into it as well.
And no doubt coaching helps with that.
I'm totally biassed but yes.
So you might know somebody who could help coach somebody into more resilience?
I do, I think so, I think I’m standing very close to them right now, I think.
So let's talk about coaching just quickly, the statistics show that 80% of executives who receive coaching have reported increased self confidence and 70% of them improved work performance. So why do you think that is, what is it about coaching, what happens for an executive or anyone who's coached versus someone who isn't?
Yeah, so I try and role model, so I ask for a lot of feedback about my coaching with my clients, because I really want to know what I'm doing well, and what we can do more of and less of, and the thing that, I don't know why it surprises me, but the thing that's most common in the feedback is “The type of conversation I have with you, Russell is unique. I don't talk to anybody else in my life the way in which we talk to each other.” So I think it is actually genuinely what goes on in a coaching conversation, it's the fact that somebody is getting a very different, better form of support and positive challenge in that conversation. It's highly independent, it's one of the ethics of coaching is that you need to make sure that you hold all of your clients in unconditional positive regard. So the lack of judgement there is in a coaching conversation, it's really free. That is absolutely my intention is that people can say and do and think what they need to and it's okay, it's alright. Then it's about actually how useful are these thoughts and what you're saying, what you're doing, how are they benefiting you? How will they not benefit you? So that's the bit I've had lots of lovely feedback but the most common thing is that I've noticed that many times clients will say, “Just the conversation I have with you is different, better than any other conversation I have in my life.” So I think that makes the difference essentially, and as a result of that people can leave the conversation and actually genuinely behave differently, better in the way that they need to to achieve the things that they need to achieve. And quite rightly, when you feel good, your self confidence, your belief in yourself, your strengths, your skills, what you're capable of, you’ll be going away saying, ‘Do you know what, I've been spending my whole life working on these things I hate doing,’ and somebody says, well stop that.
That is revolutionary, I think people will be “What?” Mind blown. Is there a type of client you can't help, have you ever had to fire a client?
So yes, I don’t think I've had to fire one, you ask a good question. Yeah, I think through the contracting that you do, we do talk about actually, if it's not working, how we depart from our relationship, so I have brought that to an end earlier, which kind of surprised the client. It goes down to state of readiness, although there was actually, so there are some clients you don't take on. There were a couple of clients that have come along and said, “I want to work with you Russell, because I've seen so-and-so in my business work and behave like this, and they get ahead. And then they tell me the behaviours of the person that they want to copy and be like, and I'm going, I don't want to produce another one of those types of people in the world so I'm not going to take you on, which was a light bulb moment for them to go what on earth are you on about? I’m like, I don’t think those behaviours are necessarily the right behaviours to be doing to get ahead so if you want to copy that I don't want to support you to get there. So that was one. So it's the state of readiness of learning. So that's where I know in those moments, I'm not able to support them because if you keep talking about things but actually if there's no shift and you can't work with a person to get them to understand that their willingness to shift is not there, then that's when, for my own personal wellbeing, I need to step away. Because coming to those conversations it's not great for me, well I have to understand, when I have all of my coaching clients there needs to be that I'm adding some value, that I'm actually enjoying it, we may have absolute some really difficult subject matter sometimes with clients about where they are, and what's going on for them, but you can work through those, and they're part of ultimately enjoying shifting somebody into a different place. So it's the state of readiness to actually take some ownership and responsibility. If that's not there then we need to part ways.
So the reason I asked that is because so many entrepreneurs are really afraid of saying no to a client, especially when you're starting out, you still gotta pay the bills, you don't have that buffer, you don't have the oversubscribed client list waiting to work with you and a client comes along and they've got the money, they're ready to pay you but you know, you can't either work with them or impact them, or like you said they're just not ready. So it's a really hard thing for a lot of entrepreneurs to say no but the reality is, we also know that by saying no, you open yourself up to more yeses.
Absolutely. And so for me, I'm reminded there of one of the dimensions of being resilient is the Purpose. So hence that's why I've got ‘to positively affect 100,000 people by the year 2025’. So for me to achieve my purpose, because that's my purpose, that's about my value system, who I want to positively impact, where I want to work, clients who I want to say yes to and no to, so it's about my value system, who I will work with and who I won't work with. So in terms of me running my own business for eight years now, it has had to be trusting the process of, ‘if you live to your purpose Russell, and your values, the clients where you can add yourself most value, get the most return, get the greatest feedback and get more clients, is about actually understanding who you will and won't work with. Hand on heart, pragmatic, there are times when I've worked with people because I needed the money in the business, it's a commercial business. So absolutely striking a balance between I can't sit there eating fresh air for tea, because at the moment there aren't the clients that I want to work with, I have to pay the mortgage, but in the round of growing my business is actually making sure that as many right now, all of the clients that I work with are in that space of actually I can do something to support them and there is some connection around our values.
You must have values aligned, because that's when you know that you're on track with the right client.
Absolutely.
So values I think are quite easy to come by, I wouldn't say easy, but it's easier, in my opinion, it's easier to identify your values than it is to identify your purpose. Would you agree?
I suppose they're a bit like chicken and egg to me. They come up in the, when you ask the question, what's your purpose, I think people retro-understand, retro-pick out what their values are, by defining their purpose, so I think they just sort of happen in sync.
Okay, so that wasn't my experience. So I could say, yeah, I know my values. I know what I believe, my beliefs are, what's right in the world and what I want to see for this world, but finding my purpose and articulating that has probably been the Holy Grail. That's the one thing that's always off as far as the horizon, you never quite get to it. So as a coach Russell, I'm not going to ask you to coach me here on the spot, that would take too long and it could just get a little too revealing, but as a coach, how do you help people find their purpose?
So hopefully, without being facetious, literally ask the question first of all, have you got any idea what your purpose is?
And they say, heck no.
And it literally is, I don't know, feels about 50/50 of yeah, I've got some idea, it’s this, and the others are like, what on earth are you on about? Okay, so then it's a journey of discovery. It’s multiple questions around either what's important to you? Or what do you like doing? Or how come you get out of bed each day? Why do you do the things that you do? Tell us about the time in your life when you’ve felt most proud? That one's a really great one. So once again everybody listening now, feel free to do this - start to think about actually, in your whole life when have you had that sort of warm, fuzzy feeling that there was something that you were involved in and actually made you feel really good, it had given you this feeling of pride. So think back through your whole life, in and outside of work, in and outside of school, and just pick one. Some people find this really easy, some people have to go away and think about it lots but once that door opens, nine times out of 10 it cascades, when you think about the first one others come. And just pick a number, you might want ten stories, five stories, a number of stories of pride in your life and then you break them down into the acronym of Challenge, Action, Result, C-A-R, car. So when you thought about that thing that made me feel proud, it's right, just break it down. At the start of this story, of this experience you had in your life, what was the Challenge? What was the problem? What was wrong? What were you challenged to do what you're asked to do? What's the starting point? Then what were your Actions? What were you involved in? Were you a leader? Were you a follower? How did you behave? What strengths did you use? What skills? What conversations did you have? What did you enjoy about it? What were your actions? What were your behaviours? And what was the Result of what you did? You know, Challenge, Action, Result? And then three, five, ten of those examples, just think about actually some form of headline to that story. What was the starting point? And then as a result of that, keep looking at the letter A the action bit, because in there is all of the gold dust around value and purpose. Because what your strengths were, what you love doing, the conversations that you had, when it was tough what did you do? How did you behave? What were you actually working on? Who were you working with? What did you like about the people that you worked with? And if it was challenging, what was that about? And in there when you do a few of these stories, there'll be some similarities and that will link to who you are as a human, your values and your purpose because you say, right if we take all of those things in the letter A from your example if you could do that, for the rest of your life, that's where the purpose would be. And so all business owners that are listening now, and entrepreneurs, it's just thinking about you set up a business for a reason. It might be useful to double check, if you did Challenge, Action, Results, all the things you felt proud of in your life, how much of that is still the case with the business that you've set up in the business that you're doing? Because sometimes you might feel as though you've lost your way so it's an opportunity for entrepreneurs and business owners to go, Actually I realise I've been taken off course, circumstances have taken me down some paths I didn't want to go down, so then you could regroup, spring forward with learning, pause and reflect and re-energise, do the stories example, Challenge, Action, Result, and then you can spring forward with more energy for actually doing, ‘Well my business was for this purpose. I started out like that, I remembered that, I'd forgotten it along the way, and actually, I need to go back and focus on that was my reason for setting up the business and make sure that I do more of that.
Yeah, I think that reflection, especially after you've been in business for quite a while, everything's just kind of ticking along. And you kind of feel like urgh. I think as an entrepreneur, we're very much wanting to build the next. I think it's kind of a natural entrepreneurship trait, that excitement in the build, the growth, the startup, we kind of love that phase. But I really like that question to ask What are you proud of? And I recently heard that's a great question to ask a teenager, instead of what do you want to be when you grow up? What are you going to do when you graduate? What are you going to study? Start asking them what they're proud of doing and it's even in the small things where I think it comes out, like one of the things like what are you proud of doing and maybe a kid answers, “Well, my friend fell on the playground and got really hurt, but I comforted them. And then I went and got the ice pack.” And because my daughter talks like this, she's 10. And so I ask her these questions and she tells me stuff like that, and something’s in the back of my mind, maybe the medical field for you, you might want to think about it because you love that and you love helping and caring for people. Or maybe they teach somebody something and they're really proud that they helped somebody to understand something they didn't understand, well maybe education is a great thing to go into, or when you're older it’s, what type of business you might want to build? I think that's brilliant. I love that question. I think I'm going to ask that a lot more often now.
Absolutely. Well, you know, with all of your clients - about your business, what makes you proud? Then how would the two of you support them will be linked to that, they're telling you essentially, what they want you to help them with at that moment in time.
Anybody that's marketing, marketeers, or social media, or, you know, business development support, there's loads of clues in there.
Russell, what are you most proud of?
So I'm proud of the fact that The Resilience Coach is still here after eight years, I'm really proud of that. Most small businesses fold after three years. I came through the pandemic, did lots of pivoting, I’m really proud of that. I'm proud that I'm living my values. And a specific piece of work is that recently I did a Leadership Development Program for a retail bakery in the UK and we delivered a program, a modular program to lots of leaders and we had a provable about fourteen hundred percent return on investment. There was half a million pounds, there was 500,000 pounds worth of provable return on investment as a result of the program. Somebody said something to me many years ago, decades ago, “We never know if learning and development actually adds any value”, and that annoyed me. It got on my wick!
So as much as humanly possible, there's two times when I've done that, so when I was working in the corporate world, I was leading a whole program that was UK-wide, where in its first year it was a 4.2 million pound return on investment, but this, many years later with this retail bakery firm piece of work that I did with them, it was a half a million pound return on investment, and that really made me feel proud, gives me that warm and fuzzy feeling, essentially.
So I do have a question for you. Was there ever a time when you just thought you weren't going to make it?
No, there were absolutely times when it was proper scary, it was really scary and I wasn't entirely sure where the next bit of work was going to come from. And it never went into me going, do you know what I think I'm in that box of a failed business owner. In those moments and in terms of learning myself, it's that behaviour in those moments I did something different. So those moments of, ‘I really don't know what to do next’, drove me to try something different, in those moments they made me do, Pause, Reflect, Spring forward with learning in a different way. You can't, you have to adapt, Russell, it was the self coaching element. I have an underlying element, I'm so lucky of optimism, but I think I'm also really lucky because I’ve spent all my time talking about this word resilience, and all the time I do that, ‘So Russell, are you a hypocrite? Are you doing this? So you're working upon this?’ So I really try and make sure that I am. And the optimism piece is something that I really believe and I've worked upon, which I'll talk more about in a second. But whilst it was really tough and difficult, I never wanted to quit, but in those moments it drove me to actually do something different, either I’d ask for help or go do something that really scared me or put me in a stretch zone essentially. And so my learning is actually don't use that absolutely sheer terror moment, to wait to do that next time. So my learning is actually this change that you did, or a different way you behaved or somebody different you asked, or you changed your approach, it's actually, I need to be more open to changing my approach, spending more of my time working on my openness to change, helped me in those moments.
What got you into being a resilience coach? What was it that led you in that path?
So my whole career has been learning, leadership, organisational development, so always supporting people.
You're a lifelong learner.
Been there. Then my last permanent role was at an organisation called the CO-OP Group. So cooperatives all over the world, the CO-OP is a big retail, insurance, pharmacy, funeral care business in the UK. And it was a corporate role, leadership development corporate role, not long after I joined the business, so nothing to do with me, historical decisions that the business had made came to light that put them in an incredibly, incredibly difficult position, as a whole business. This is an enormous business that has an almost 200-year history and it came close to not being there anymore. So I was there when that happened, it came out to go, ‘we're in trouble’. So all of my clients in the business were literally coming to me with their heads in their hands saying, What on earth do we do? I was going, don't worry I've been looking at this word resilience and I've been looking at this acronym called the VUCA, V-U-C-A. The world we live in is volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous, and I went, our solutions are in there. In VUCA and resilience. So trust me that's where our answers are. We role model those, we roll our sleeves up, we think about those, we understand truly what resilience means because we're going to have to do some coping and surviving, but we need to move into the thriving, so let's not get stuck in the coping and surviving. So I did that for a number of years with the CO-OP Group and I also knew that my time with them would come to an end, so much change that was going on, there was an awful lot of restructuring and there's an awful lot of redundancies. So I knew that that would come my way too, and it did. And it was in that moment that when the timing was right for me to set up my own business, I went and did that and I did another coaching qualification, a diploma in coaching and did some navel gazing about who am I, what's my USP as a business and I went, ‘Oh, you're The Resilience Coach Russell. You've literally just spent the last five years just working on resilience, so you are the resilience coach, hence the marketing name. I'm not any old resilience coach, I am The Resilience Coach.
I like it, emphasis on ‘the’ absolutely and it's such an incredible alignment for you to join us today because we're big believers in everything you've said.
The Resilience Coach, or the Happy Chappy. It's just so fun listening and talking to you.
Thank you. I appreciate that. It’s nice,l I like it.
The optimism piece, you were saying that optimism is important to you.
So the optimism piece, it's just thinking about the real nuance between optimism and positivity. So they're highly interconnected. If you look up the definition of optimism in the dictionary, positivity is part of the answer. But what I'd like people to think about is, optimism is grounded in reality. So the starting point of optimism is like, if we've got this challenge you absolutely must be clear about what the challenge is, how difficult it is, but not put yourself in a place of giving up or depression, you just need to be clear on this, the size and the scale and the state of the challenge we've got, so grounded in reality. And then from there, you think about what strengths and skills and capabilities and experiences and attitude and mindset and resilience that I have, and the people that are around me have. And actually as a result of understanding what all of that is, you weigh it up against, there's the challenge and here's all of our strengths, skills, capabilities, attitude and mindset. And actually as a result of looking at that I genuinely believe, I’m genuinely hopeful, not false hope, that we'll be able to face into this challenge and overcome it. And as a result of that, you get feelings of positivity. So it's just moving away from the knee jerk reaction of here’s a problem we just need to be positive.
Just think about it actually. Let's be really clear about what the size of the challenge is and then think about everything that we've got to counteract the challenge. And is there enough of that for us to believe that we can come out the other side? And then when you go, actually you know what? I do, I do, and you suddenly feel positive.
Thank you. Wow, we've had The Resilience Coach on Resilient Entrepreneurs, it couldn't have been a better fit. It's such a joy listening to your stories, and not just stories, but absolutely sage advice. I'm actually going to relisten to this episode on numerous occasions and I'm going to press pause, and I'm going to do the exercises that you've offered us so generously. Thank you Russell, this has just been a joy to have you on Resilient Entrepreneurs.
My absolute pleasure and I love the idea of the happy chappy. I'm cool with that. That's good. Thank you so much for having me on. And yes good luck for everybody in just trying things out around springing forward with learning.
Thank you.
