for More Resilient Leadership. 31 January 2018 Resilience is an essential leadership quality. And it's hard. Enhance your resilience by coming to know your always-available sources of greater resilience - and the 5 simple disciplines to embed that knowing. #BreainBasedCoaching

1. Page 1 of 3
+44 (0) 7976 751 095 dan@danbeverly.com http://danbeverly.com
Bulletproof. 5 Powerful Perspectives
for More Resilient Leadership. 31 January 2018
Resilience is an essential leadership quality. And it's hard. Enhance your resilience by coming to know your
always-available sources of greater resilience - and the 5 simple disciplines to embed that knowing.
Resilience - that is: the capacity to bounce back from
difficulty or disappointment - is an essential leadership
quality.
Why? Because leadership, in all its forms, is necessarily
about the capacity to initiate (and create) an alternative
future.
To lean into (and challenge) the status quo. To ask (and
answer) the hard questions. To do the difficult (but
necessary) work.
And Resilience is not just essential. It's hard.
Why? Because it requires:
▪ Courage. To confront harsh truths and painful
realities.
▪ Faith. That the as-yet unknown solution will
become evident.
▪ Tenacity. To persevere in spite of feelings of
hopelessness and helplessness.
▪ Quality of Thought. To maintain an expansive
and outward-looking growth mindset - when the
instinctive response to setbacks might be a
negatively fixed and inwardly-focused mindset.
Resilience is an essential – but difficult to achieve –
leadership quality.
So, what can we do to help ourselves become more
resilient? …
3 Sources of Resilience
Resilience is not a thought, feeling or behaviour. It's all
three. And that's a useful thought: because if I want to
improve my resilience, I want to work on all the sources of
resilience – and not in isolation, but in combination.
1/ Cognitive Resilience.
Managing my resilience-
building thinking.
Consider how you do your thinking when you're 100%
resilient, aka "bulletproof". It goes something like this:
▪ Choosing the meaning I give to an event.

2. Page 2 of 3
+44 (0) 7976 751 095 dan@danbeverly.com http://danbeverly.com
▪ Adopting empowering beliefs about the situation.
▪ Dropping into helpful thinking patterns about
outcomes.
▪ Reframing with optimism and positivity.
▪ Engaging in the challenge of problem solving.
This is what cognitive resilience means. And this "quality
of thought" is a thinking skill we can consciously work on.
So work on it.
2/ Emotional Resilience.
Managing my resilience-
building feelings.
Again, when you're in your "bulletproof" state of being,
where's your emotional strength coming from? 3 places.
▪ Self-awareness. The ability to notice - and accept
- your emotions, whatever they may be.
▪ Emotional literacy. Having the language to
communicate, make sense of and healthily express
your feelings.
▪ Relationship skills. Masterful skill at building
strong relationships with others - starting with
yourself!
In all scenarios, take the many opportunities throughout
the day to practice and build your emotional intelligence.
3/ Behavioural Resilience.
Managing my resilience-
building actions.
Times that call for resilience are, by definition, some kind
of setback, challenge or other stressful situation. And in
those moments when you've been in your "bulletproof"
state and handled the situations with grace and mastery,
notice the instinctive behaviours and setups that supported
you:
1. Pre-installed support systems. That you can lean
on, in times of challenge.
2. An instinctive move towards your strengths.
Those areas on which you can rely, when under
pressure.
3. Self-care. As a routine discipline that, in the face
of a setback, you're glad you have in place and
can now call on.
In this moment of calm right now, take time to imagine
being faced with a setback. What do you wish you had
in place?
And get to work setting yourself up, now, today!
5 Powerful Perspectives for
Resilient Leadership
Here are 5 perspectives to practice and adopt (and, of
course, we mean: the kind of practice that leads to
adoption at a DNA level ) to give yourself ready-access to
your most resilient self:
1. Accept failure as both inevitable and essential.
Coexist with failure. Like a Navy Seal, say "wow,
that was lucky … "
2. Fixate on and commit to who you want to be.
Then courageously act that way. Courage is the first
virtue towards resilience.
3. Master your situation by first mastering yourself.
As in so many things: the obstacle is nowhere else, but
in you.
4. Focus on what you can control.
Starting with you and your breath. And then your
other fundamentals.

3. Page 3 of 3
+44 (0) 7976 751 095 dan@danbeverly.com http://danbeverly.com
5. Stop searching for your resilience. Start creating it.
Resilience is not lost, waiting to be found. It must be
forged.
There is no bouncing back
Definitions of Resilience - including the one I gave at the
head of this article - very often include the idea of
"bouncing back". But for me, the more usual thought it:
"There is no bouncing back. There is only moving
through."
We cannot go back in time. We cannot undo what has
been said or done. And even if we could: would we want
to deny ourselves that valuable learning and enrichment?
We cannot go back in time. We can only move forward.
So practice the [thinking + feeling + acting] disciplines of
resilience to accelerate and achieve your leadership
agenda.
Dan Beverly is an expert leadership and performance coach. He works exclusively
with women, helping them to pivot from autopilot to peak performance.
Dan has coached scores of high-performing high-achieving women over many
hundreds of coaching hours, partnering with them to advance their leadership
agenda, accelerate development and achieve extraordinary, career-long success.
His mission is to inspire impossibility at the pivotal moments, helping us to excel
in a high-performance career – and high-performance life.