Strategies for Building Resilience at Work - 6 Simple Steps to OVERCOME ANY OBSTACLE

You're here because you're interested in minimalism and you're interested how it can help you overcome obstacles and become more resilient. Now as a speaker on drama in people's life and at work, I've been fascinated by this idea of minimalism and how people use it as a way to physically declutter their life to free up more space. But can we use it as a way to declutter our minds in the form of mental minimalism to free up more space for us to make better decisions? And in this case, get that waste out of the way or that drama out of our minds to overcome obstacles. Now let's look at obstacles. All of us, as you know, we run into them. It doesn't matter what you commit to in your life, the next thing that comes after you're all in is something that you gotta stay resilient to and overcome an obstacle to be able to achieve your goal. So I'm gonna give you the six simple steps to stay resilient, overcome obstacles as a mental minimalist. Number one, it might sound obvious, but you gotta identify the obstacle. One thing I've been working on in my life is I want to do more meditation. I learned from a course how to meditate and I think it'll be a great thing to add to my life and so one obstacle I have is that I'm not consistent with it. And so for these steps, let's use my meditation as an example. So my obstacle is being more consistent when I meditate. Number two is truly be all in to do whatever it takes to overcome the obstacle without conditions on that buy-in to do what it takes. So in my example, I am all in to meditate as long as, and I have a list of 100 conditions I put on doing that, which is as long as I'm not nervous for something I do for work, as long as I'm not too busy, as long as it actually feels good, as long as my wife's not upset at me. I have all these conditions on my buy-in. As you line up these conditions, these will eventually become such a mess in you being able to overcome obstacles. Number three, use resilience to stay the course instead of persistence. Now with my meditation example, I was trying to do all I knew to make it happen and it was not working. I was not staying consistent. Now a word I'm hearing out there a lot is hustle culture where if it's gonna happen, it's all up to me and I'm just gonna grind and I'm just gonna push through and that is what persistence is and that is exhausting and that really wears us out. Resilience is completely different. In today's world, resilience is the key because it's two things. You have the ability to reach out for help early and often when you're stuck and you have a big network of positive relationships. So how this works is when you're stuck, you be resilient and you ask for help to everyone you see about what's their one best tip to overcome this obstacle you're struggling with and that language is so important. What's your one best tip you have for me to overcome this obstacle? Now imagine, when you're being resilient, you start to crowdsource to everyone you see. I do it with everyone I talk to. Maybe they have something they could help me with for a tip and I just ask. Maybe they have a piece of advice I haven't heard yet. I go on to Google. I go on to YouTube. I am a part of associations. I have people on social media that I reach out to and if I'm persistent, I do three things to overcome that obstacle. If I'm resilient, I get about 100 ideas back from all of those people I crowdsource to and the key in all of this is persistence was really hard. Resilience was a matter of sending an email or asking a question. It took a few seconds and it was effortless. That leads us to number four. Take action on those recommendations without judgment. Now why do I say without judgment? The moment you get all these ideas back from those you've asked for their one best tips, your mind jumps in, especially when it's not being minimal in its thinking and it starts to judge everything. That'll never work. I've tried that before five years ago. That's a stupid idea and it just shuts down all of this action you can take. So when I got those tips back from people on how to become a meditator or tips to keep my habits sound, I quickly judged a lot of them and only took action on a few that I thought were easy and this really reduced my resilience. Then comes step five. It's stepping out of that process of taking action on those ideas and taking ownership on have you made any progress? How are things going? What have you done that's helped? What's been hurting in us staying the course? Now when I was persistent and I only tried a few things, when someone asked me how's meditation going, I got all defensive. I got all frustrated. I'm like, don't talk to me about that. It's impossible. As I start to become more resilient and I am crowdsourcing and I take action on 50 ideas, I notice my mood changes. I start to say to people, I'm not there yet. Here's what I've tried. Do you have any other ideas? So in this case when I'm resilient, I'm open to that ownership and more ideas when I'm persistent, I then am very defensive and I don't want anyone to even bring it up. So ownership, this number five piece, is key to be honest there. Number six is taking all of that new learning you have from that ownership phase and re-looking at the obstacle. Are you past it? Has it moved? Does it even exist anymore? Do you have more information from people now that you don't even have to worry about it? What's going on there? And then start to seek out your next obstacle that you can commit to overcoming and that sends you back to step one of this process. And as you get better at this, as it becomes daily practice, as a mental minimalist, this will become second nature and you'll be able to go through these six steps without any hesitation. I hope you found this video really helpful to reduce the drama around overcoming obstacles and declutter your thinking on what to do in these situations. It's six simple steps. It's effortless, just follow them. In the comments right now, put an obstacle you're currently having and let's use that as a playground to practice what you just learned and we'll have people put their best tips for you to overcome that obstacle. Thank you so much for watching this video and to all my mental minimalists out there, let's keep ditching the drama.