Why did it count backwards?
Oh no, we're now recording.
What?
Hello Captain.
Come fly with me, let's fly, let's fly away.
What are we going to talk about?
I don't know.
So, leadership, life and everything else.
Yeah.
And we're live.
No, we are recording again.
Welcome aboard Captain and the Clown.
Today's destination.
Today's destination, resilience.
No, I don't think so.
I like it, today's destination resilience.
Hi Michelle.
Hi Guy.
Captain.
And the Clown.
So, we are still up in Darwin.
We are.
Yeah, we went to Parup Markets this morning.
Yeah, big recommendation, take cash, which is, because not many people take cards.
A sun hat.
Yes, lots of water.
A portable air conditioner.
And a smile.
Yeah.
Because everyone's friendly.
They were very friendly.
Yes, considering it's just the start of the wet season.
Yep.
I wonder how it'll be in a month or so.
No, very nice people.
So, we're going to talk about resilience, because yesterday I was running a resilience workshop
and you came along and did a fantastic little talk inside the course.
Yeah, but it was a great reminder and it was well received.
I really, you know, a lot of people were open to more resilience, like what it is, how resilience
works.
So, what's your definition of resilience?
My definition of resilience.
Well, it's changed.
So, I've recently read a book by Nassim Nicholas Taleb.
Anti-fragile.
Yes, yes.
Great book.
Recommended it to you.
It's not light reading, but it's great changing the idea of resilience.
So, I used to think that resilience was the opposite of fragile.
So, bending, not breaking.
That's it.
Yeah.
And I suppose that is, but it always comes back to the original, what it was.
So, the bend, not break.
But I, so that I suppose is resilience.
What I would aim for now is anti-fragile.
So, the opposite of fragile, which means, so fragile being easy to break.
And then once it's broken, that's it.
It's useless, so to speak.
And then resilience would be coming back to the original state.
Anti-fragile.
So, if you've broken, but it's made you better stronger or stressed.
Yes, yes.
It's come back stronger.
That's right.
I love that.
Yeah.
And as human beings, we're under stress.
So, there's good stress and there's a certain amount of stress we need.
But it's that getting, using the stress for good, I suppose, makes me stronger.
Yeah, because I used to aim for resilience because I wanted when things came along, when
stressors came along that affected me, that I would bounce back.
I'd go back to normal.
But reading that book and the concepts in that book, every complex system, when there's
a stressor, it doesn't come back the same.
It comes back stronger.
And I guess one of the best ways to look at it is if you plant a tree in a biodome, that
tree will grow and grow and grow, but it will eventually fall over.
The reason why it falls over is because it hasn't been exposed to any stressors like
wind.
And when a tree is exposed to wind, it grows very deep roots to hold on, hold onto the
ground.
But because in a biodome, there's no wind, the tree will grow and grow and grow and grow
as it's meant to do.
But because it's got no stressors being the wind, it doesn't grow the deep roots and just
falls over.
And so, it's not becoming resilient, that tree.
It's actually becoming anti-fragile.
Yeah.
And so, I love that concept.
Well, even just to use it in current situations.
So, with a lot of people have lost their jobs, been made redundant, et cetera, due COVID
or other reasons, other factors.
And so, that thing of being unemployed, the fear was, what can I do?
I'm unemployed.
I'm back to square one.
But you're never back to square one because you're-
You have new skills.
That's right.
Experience.
Experience, skills, et cetera.
So, you're square one plus three squares.
So, your new normal or falling back is never back as far as when you originally started.
So, you are stronger.
You're anti-fragile.
You're actually...
I don't know about that word and it's not even-
Anti-fragile.
It's not even a word.
Yeah.
It's a term.
But yeah, I like the idea.
I really do.
Getting stronger from adversity rather than returning to where you were.
That's right.
I guess it'd be important to dissect stress, though, to start with.
Because if that's what we're being resilient or anti-fragile from, it'd be important to
understand what stress is because you can't be stronger unless you've experienced stress.
So, stress, many people, if you ask them, what is stress?
They'd say, oh, it's feeling frustrated.
Well, no.
The frustration feeling is the result of a stressor.
But I looked it up one time and I found this fantastic definition.
Stress is inappropriate responses to real or imagined threats, whether emotional or
physical.
Yeah.
No, that's true.
Yeah.
So, if you dissect that a little bit, inappropriate responses, not responding appropriately,
to real or imagined threats, whether emotional or physical.
So let's look at our threats.
What percentage of our threats are these days physical?
I don't know about you, but I didn't see any lions or tigers wandering around the parrot
markets.
So the majority of our stressors are emotional.
And then real or imagined, if you think about it, right now in this moment, you don't have
any problems.
No.
All problems exist in the future or the past.
That's right.
So therefore don't exist at all, which is very deep.
So most of our stressors these days are imagined and they're emotional stressors.
And so resilience these days isn't from being attacked by marauding tribes coming over the
hill trying to steal your resources.
It's, you know, I've got two emails or I've got a tight deadline with my boss.
Yeah.
Or the mortgage is due or the rent's due or interest rate rises, et cetera.
So they are a stress.
They're coming.
And at the time, you know, the effect that it has, physical, et cetera, is real.
Yeah.
But it feels real.
It does.
Yes, it feels real.
But it has a real effect though, physically.
Physically, absolutely.
Because your mind can't differentiate between what you vividly imagine and actual reality.
So yeah, when we think about our stressors, even though they're not real, the effect in
our body is real and we go into fight or flight.
So resilience is really about learning to reduce our stressors by, I guess, the first
thing, changing our mindset about things.
Yeah.
That's right.
If you can change the way you think about it to reduce or eliminate completely that
fight or flight response.
So change your mindset.
Yeah.
And one of the things I love talking about when I moved from Albury Wodonga, which is
in the country, to Sydney, the thing that annoyed me the most was traffic.
So I'd be sitting there in a car and I'm all frustrated.
I'm paramount of road and we're not going anywhere.
I remember I'm coming home one day and I thought to myself, you know, I was really stressed
there.
And then I realized, you know, I teach this stuff.
So I thought, well, why am I stressed?
Well, it's because I was thinking that traffic is a nightmare.
But traffic is just an opportunity to spend time in a car doing something you enjoy.
You can't do anything else.
You can't control the traffic.
You can't control how fast traffic's moving.
And so what I did is I realized that traffic is just simply an opportunity to do something
I love.
And what I love is learning, as the same as you.
And so I just started to listen to audiobooks and podcasts in my car.
Now I love traffic.
Yeah.
So all my stress disappeared simply because I changed my perspective about it.
Text messages.
Yep.
So I'm not a fan because you can read anything you want into it.
You can read any tone.
That's right.
Yeah, that's it.
The time, whatever you're feeling, your emotion at the time, it's then, you know, that's the
voice that you read it with.
Projected onto the text.
Yeah, absolutely.
And so I was getting a text from a person or getting text messages from a person and
my, I immediately went into fight or flight.
Like I'd hear the ding.
And...
Round one.
Yeah, yeah.
That's right.
So the text message would come in and I was ready for battle, you know, and I hadn't even
read it.
But I was immediately, that was my response and it was a stressful thing.
It was my body, you know, I'd constrict everything and I'd almost get a sick feeling in my gut.
And I had to stop giving that text messaging, that power over my body.
And more content that was there.
That's right.
So yeah, similar to confidence with the feedback thing, it and information, I had to look at
the text message as though it was just written.
And now, you know, tone of voice can change it up.
And so just highlight, almost highlight in my mind, the important facts and then take
the emotion out of it.
And that reduced the stress for me.
And then I suppose as far as resilience goes, I could then be a normal human.
And respond differently.
Yeah.
Because when we're not resilient, we can become very reactive rather than proactive in our
responses.
Absolutely.
Another perspective change that I had, and it was quite a big one, COVID affected all
of us and a lot of people lost jobs or stopped working.
And you know, our, my industry, the training and speaking and our industry, the speaking
industry shut down.
Yeah.
We weren't doing conferences.
We weren't doing keynotes.
We weren't doing what we love doing.
And so I had a lot more time on my hands at home.
And at first it was stressing me.
It was getting to me.
And then I realized I had an opportunity to use that time that I typically wouldn't have
to do things that I wouldn't have time to do.
So I read a lot more.
But the best thing about those years where we weren't really busy with work, if at all,
it was to spend time with my son.
And so I traded that now, he's nine.
And I had two years of good quality, solid time with my son that I would not have had
if it wasn't for COVID.
And so at first I was very stressed because I was focusing on the fact that COVID was
stopping me doing things I love.
Then I changed my perspective.
And now I look at it as a fantastic opportunity.
It was obviously a horrible period of time for many people, losing loved ones and the
lockdowns.
The isolation.
The isolation and everything that people endured.
It was horrible to think of what people were going through.
But we can look back at it now.
And I certainly have changed my perspective.
It gave me some fantastic opportunities.
I certainly learned to meditate more.
Yeah, yeah.
I've meditated for, oh, since I was a teenager, I suppose.
But it was a good reminder because my aviation career ended and I was attached.
My ego was attached to that identity.
But I had that opportunity to sit with myself, with my ego and process it.
And again, similar to you, my kids, I'd had years and years of being away for work.
And now I was able to be at home for my children, wholly, solely, not miss anything.
And it's just that lovely reconnection with them.
And I know they appreciated it.
And lockdown wasn't that hard because I did have my kids.
And yeah, just playing games and just chatting.
That's right.
Well, we were going through renovations at the time as well.
So it was, we were living in my bedroom basically for 12 months, which was fun.
We kind of did it like a sleepover.
You've labeled it as fun rather than labeling it as a chore, I guess.
Yeah.
Which is a great perspective change.
Yes.
I had a funny incident with a lady in a course years ago.
I said, does anyone have a perspective that it's causing them stress that they can't change?
And she said, yeah, I've got one for you.
I said, what's that?
She said, getting the kids ready for school in the morning, it's stressful.
And I said, okay, so tell me more.
She said, well, I get up in the morning, I put their clothes on their bed, I put the
Weet-Bix in the bowl, I yell at them to come down and eat their Weet-Bix.
And five minutes later, they're having it in their breakfast and I'm dragging them to
school.
And getting the kids ready for school, stressful.
She said, fix that.
Everyone else in the course was laughing because she was quite passionate about it.
And I said to her, all right, well, challenge accepted.
I said, what about this?
Why don't you look at it like this?
Kids are here to teach us how to slow down time.
Kids operate on a different time scale to adults.
You remember school, nine to three o'clock was just such a long time.
But nine to five goes like that, Monday to Friday.
We're just about to put up the Christmas tree and I feel like I've just taken it down.
And so I said to her, what about this?
How about just get up a little bit earlier?
So when it was my turn to get my son ready for daycare, I'd just wake up 15 minutes
earlier.
I'd go into his room, I'd open his blinds, I'd get out a couple of t-shirts.
So he's got a choice, set up his little train set and he's woken up.
And I said, mate, do you want to play trains?
He goes, yeah.
So we played trains for a couple of minutes, five minutes.
Five minutes of trains for a kid is like hours.
And then I said, mate, which t-shirt you want to wear?
So he's got a choice.
He feels in control.
We go downstairs.
Mate, do you want porridge or wheat bix?
And he gets to choose what he has for breakfast.
And then I said, hey, do you want to go to school a little bit early and play on the
equipment?
And he goes, oh, okay, dad.
And so we go to school early and he's got control over the fact that we're playing together,
not rushing.
We're in his timeframe.
And then I say, see you mate.
Tonight when I get home, more trains.
He goes, yeah.
And that was a great start to the day.
But if I ever tried to get my son into my timeframe, come on, mate, get out of bed.
That's got to mean, come on, come on, put your shoes on.
Have a foot, mate.
And he'd be, I don't want to go to school.
I'm guilty of that.
I'm very guilty of that.
So I said to her, kids are here to teach us how to slow down time.
And she said, I'll try that.
But then about six weeks later, she contacted me and she said, oh, you've changed my life.
I said, I haven't.
You have.
She said, oh, but when you said that in the training session, I hated you.
I said, I know.
She said, how'd you know?
I said, I was looking at your face.
It was that obvious.
Yeah, she was giving me the death stare.
And I said, can I guess why you didn't like what I said?
She said, sure.
I said, how many people have you told how stressful it is getting the kids ready for
school?
She said, everyone.
That's all I talk about at book club and in the morning.
And I said, so when I said what I said, you felt that I was telling you, you were wrong.
And she said, yeah.
I said, I wasn't.
I was saying there's one way to look at it and you get this result.
There's another way to look at it and you get a different result.
It's about choosing a different result.
It's not about right or wrong.
It's about changing your perspective.
Yes.
Yeah.
Yeah, that's right.
Well, yeah, even just 15 minutes earlier, isn't, it's not hard.
And yeah, although those people that, you know, struggle to get out of bed, it could
seem like a big thing, but just do it.
It's a mindset.
Yeah.
Just go to bed 15 minutes earlier, wake up 15 minutes earlier and slow down in the morning
because kids operate on a different time scale.
Yeah.
What's another perspective?
I'm going to put you on the spot.
Yeah.
What's another perspective that has reduced your stress levels or changed the way you
see things, which helps you be more resilient to events?
Yeah, probably the traffic thing is a big one because I, when I take my kids to school,
it's a 30, 35 minute trip.
Yeah.
And yeah, we listen to podcasts or music and then on the way home, the other side of it,
we chat about the day, we listen to music.
It's good.
It's an opportunity that we didn't have before with school being, you know, only a couple
of minutes away.
It's even further away.
We did.
Yeah.
And it's so that that's a nice thing because I, you know, the first couple of times we
did it, it was, we did it begrudgingly and thinking, Oh my goodness, I've got months
of this ahead before they go change schools next year.
And but yeah, having that mind shift change and my kids love it too.
So they tell their kids, their kids, they tell their friends.
Yep.
That, you know, every morning on the way to school, they go over the Harvard bridge and
other kids with their friends, they're like, no way, you know, that's really cool.
And so they, they now have that thing of it's cool.
They, you know, they, they do that every morning and, and then we, we come back home.
But probably even my attitude to exercise in the morning and getting up early.
Yeah.
So I've been a morning person, but the making it an hour earlier, the daylight saving shift
was a little bit of a struggle there for a week, but got there.
And so getting up at 5am is, and I used to always get up at six, but 5am gives you so
much more time.
So doing breath work, doing lemon water, exercising, so a walk.
So morning routine.
Morning routine, definitely, and it's reduced the stress because I know exactly what's going
to happen.
And same with the kids.
Making your bed.
Absolutely.
That's the first thing.
So, you know, tumble out of bed some mornings and talk about this these days, don't they?
Yeah.
Well, even I'm on my knees basically, cause my back's a bit dodgy and I'm, you know, pull
up the, the covers and my partner's on the other side, pulling out the covers and it's
just, it, it makes it easy.
One less thing to think about.
Plus I come home, the bed looks amazing with the 50,000 pillows.
What is it with, with ladies and pillows?
I have to ask, what is the function of all these extra pillows?
Oh, it looks like a display home.
Oh, it's like a display home.
Okay, just for you.
That's right.
No function at all because you can't dare put your head on the pillow because it, or
on the cushion because it would cost so much money.
Okay.
But the, just, just doing that routine.
So my little boy, he really, really does well on routine.
And if it's something outside of the scope of a routine, it throws him.
And I probably myself felt a little bit like that.
Cause he feels out of control.
Out of control, definitely.
So it's that control thing.
So if you know what's coming next to a point, or you can put time towards, you know, allocated
time to this, you know, one hour is this and anything can happen within that.
But it's that's dedicated to that, you know, activity then, yeah, it's just let's decisions
and you know, Steve jobs did the same.
Elon Musk does the same, you know, wears the same outfit, et cetera.
It does exactly the same thing.
Puts his, you know, she's in socks on the same way every day.
It's that routine, not having to think about it.
Which then saves you decision making muscle.
That's right.
And also reduces stress because it's all, you know, what's going to happen.
It's that control thing.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
I've got a morning routine as well and it's the best start to the day.
It makes you resilient for what's, if anything comes up during the day and you've had a great
start to the day, you're much more resilient than if you've just, oh, I've got to get
a bed now.
Cause you slept through your alarm or you forgot to set your alarm and you know, start
the day in a fight or flight sort of state.
Yeah.
So much better to have a morning routine and own the morning.
I do the breath work as well and meditate during the breath work and make sure that
I'm setting myself up for success during the days.
Another thing I do at the end of the day, I call life university is I look back through
the day and I see if there's anything that I've done or if I've, if I've reacted in
a way that I aren't proud of or if I've reacted in, in so the difference between reacting
and, and acting.
So I like to be proactive rather than reactive.
What I mean by that is if something happens, I don't want to react straight away.
What I want to do is I want to pause and then think and then choose my response.
And that's something I'm constantly working on because being an insecure little kid, I
found myself to be quite reactive.
Yes.
And so at the end of every day, I just look at how I went during the day.
Where did I react in a stressful way?
Well, it also does take confidence to be able to stop, pause, to think about your response
and it can be practiced and it can be learned.
And it's powerful because instead of being the victim and blaming whatever happened,
you now realize that you're in charge of all of your responses.
And so yeah, my, my routine is at the end of the day to look at the day and think, okay,
did I behave in the way I wanted to, but want to behave in a resilient way?
So if something bad happens, something happens that you weren't expecting, something left
field comes in that typically gives you a bit of a shock or a bit of stress.
What I want to do in those moments is pause and then choose the best response.
And so if I ever find that I haven't done that at the end of the day, I just look back
at it and I think, okay, what will I do differently next time?
And then as I fall asleep, I've programmed my mind so that in the future, if that sort
of event happens again, I'm more likely to behave in a less reactive way.
And therefore I'll be more resilient and more proactive in the way I respond to stressors.
Oh, that actually, that makes sense.
I've had situations, I don't know if you have where someone said something to you and
like half an hour later after that person's gone past, it's like, oh, I should have said
this.
I wish I'd said this.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
Well, yeah, that's your opportunity to think, all right, in the future.
So rather than, I used to try and rewrite history.
I used to go back in my mind, oh, I should have done that.
Rather than thinking like that, what I do now is okay, if that happens again, this is
how I'm going to adjust.
And so that's you being proactive into the future rather than reactive.
Sounds like training for the simulator, which is what we do for flight.
So if an emergency happens, we've practiced it, we've trained for it, we've gone over
it, we've dissected it so that if it does ever happen for real, then it's not the shock
of never seen it before.
You've actually practiced it.
So it's for me.
Armchair flying, that's right.
And you can do that with anything.
Same with doing speeches on stage, any sort of training, even you're going out to meet
someone and you can kind of run through and rehearse a little bit how you'd like the day
to happen.
And it's that feeling of control, again, basically the resilience, you're taking less, less,
actually that's not at all.
That's okay.
Right, rewind.
And back to you, Michelle.
So we've spoken about resilience today.
I think we're getting to the end of the podcast, but I think there's a lot more here that we
could talk about.
We could unpack a lot.
But probably the takeaway from today would be if you can create a routine, then the resilience
in that is that you've got something to fall back on, to go back to.
And that's in your foundation.
Correct.
And you're in control of that to a degree.
And the other key takeaway is your mindset, your perspective.
Just analyze your perspective on things because stress isn't what happens to you, but rather
how you choose to view what happens to you.
Nothing is good nor bad, but thinking makes it so.
Thanks, Shakespeare.
Yes.
Excellent.
Okay.
So how do we sign off these podcasts?
I don't know.
We still haven't figured it out.
We just press stop on the recorder.
All right.
Lovely to see you again, Michelle.
Love you.
See you too.
Okay.
Take care, everyone.
Bye-bye.
Have a great week.
So Michelle, where can they find us?
Captainandtheclown.com.
Where you'll find links to our websites for keynote speaking and corporate training.
Yes, that's captainandtheclown.com.
Well, that was fun.
That was fun.
You're such a clown.
The clown.
Lady captain.
And who's going to listen to this?
Maybe our mums.
Thanks, mum.