Christiane [00:00:00]:
Welcome back to the Happy Healthy Hustle. In today's video, I have a very special guest, and we're actually going to share some amazing tips to boost your resilience. My name is Christiane Schroter, and I help busy professionals streamline their schedule, enhance productivity with effective time management and resilience skills. So let's get started right away. My guest, Maria Thomas Keegan, she's going to introduce yourself. Maria, thanks so much for being here.

María Tomás-Keegan [00:00:33]:
Thank you for having me, . I love your podcast. I've listened to several of the episodes. I just love how you share what people think their superpower is, and then and then how it it unfolds in their lives and in their in what they do for a living. I was very challenged a little bit to think about what mine is. As said, I'm Maria Tomaskegan. I am a career and life coach for professional women who are navigating transitions in their lives. We all go through a lot of them.

María Tomás-Keegan [00:01:12]:
I've been through my share and, maybe we'll talk a little bit about that.

Christiane [00:01:17]:
Now that we know you have that expertise under your belt, And you already indicated that you listened to the episodes letting us know, but what do people think their superpower is? What do you think your superpower is, Maria?

María Tomás-Keegan [00:01:31]:
Well, it's interesting because I never really owned this. I think one of my Superpower is instilling calmness in uncertain situations. So I have been told that I have a calm demeanor and a voice that soothes for a very long time, since I was young. And I've dismissed it so much of that time, I just kind of shrugged my shoulders and said, oh, thank you, but didn't really know what to do with it or what it really meant. But as I got into my career, I found that it served me well to be a calm force when everything around me felt chaotic. So that happened a lot in my in my work. I was, a marketing leader. And when you have clients who are pushing your buttons, there's a lot of chaos.

María Tomás-Keegan [00:02:33]:
And I had the opportunity to kind of bring that calmness. It also served me well when tragedy stuck or struck or when I got divorced. It was kind of a tragedy. Or I experienced significant loss in my life also when I got laid off. So I learned to let the initial panic kinda settle down and let my emotions swirl around a bit as they often do, because emotions need motion. And then those emotions can move up and out. Then I gave myself grace to breathe and to figure things out. And looking back, I realized that I've used this calm approach since I was a child.

María Tomás-Keegan [00:03:35]:
So now I own it. It's my essence.

Christiane [00:03:39]:
Emotions need motion. That's really beautiful. And what I envisioned in front of my eye when you talked about this, because I'm a visual learner, is I saw this jar where there is, water swirling around, and it might be quite muddy swirling around. And then, eventually, when you don't stir the glass anymore, it tends to settle down, and the sediment kind of settles to the bottom of the glass. And that came to my eye when you talked about the fact that you are calm. So you're essentially letting the emotions move, but then over time, letting them settle down. And once they settle down, you can maybe look at the pieces a little bit and see, oh, what is really going on? Because with a calm mind, we have a completely dispersion perspective Mhmm. To a situation than when we are in the moment when we are really agitated.

Christiane [00:04:37]:
And when everything is swirling, we don't even know exactly the background.

María Tomás-Keegan [00:04:42]:
Yeah. And I I love that visual, . If those are the emotions that settle, we have to be careful because they could get stuck there. That's the way it feels. It feels chaotic. It feels like we are out of control.

Christiane [00:05:00]:
So maybe adding on to our little, swirling jar with water and sediment the way that you have to look at it, and that's the same thing in a river. To really get things moving, you have to swirl it every so often again and then start Yeah. Flushing things away. You have to pick them back up and transport them to a different spot, maybe ideally even to a spot where they can become something beautiful, like a gem, a pebble that becomes something gorgeous when the river creates it.

María Tomás-Keegan [00:05:33]:
It get polishes it. Right? Yeah. And and, you know, it's this environment where we if we create that calmness for ourselves, that's the environment in which we can problem solve. Right? We can see things more clearly, and we can see the possibilities more clearly.

Christiane [00:05:54]:
When you are in this situation and you take that step back and you become more calm about it, that it also creates a certain energy about you that others will feel. And you described to me a time when you really needed that superpower, a time of challenge. And how did you overcome that challenge?

María Tomás-Keegan [00:06:18]:
The one that, kind of captured my own imagination the most, causing me to wonder why I, responded to it the way I did. It was when I was laid off after nearly 20 years at my last corporate gig and it came as a huge surprise. And at a time in my life when I was planning to make my own move, I was planning my own departure. Right? My exit strategy was in the works. But the company forced my hand, and I had to take early retirement. And I was I was thinking, you know what? I'm not done yet. This is not retirement is not what I want next. That just didn't feel right to me.

María Tomás-Keegan [00:07:09]:
So I I had to figure out what is right for me. Going back into corporate, that didn't feel right. I felt like I was done with that. I had to figure out how to reinvent myself. And I wanted to continue working, and I wanted to find something that would just light me up. In the layoff, I was very fortunate that the company provided a service that included a career coach, and I took them up on that offer. Now I have known the value of being mentored and mentoring because I've done both my entire career. And I had experienced therapy and counseling first to try to save my marriage and when that didn't work to navigate my divorce, but I had never been formally coached.

María Tomás-Keegan [00:08:06]:
What that helped me with is to focus on what I love to do. Do you kind of sort through all of the stuff I know how to do and focus on what I love to do and figure out what I wanted to do next. And, that helped me take a leap of faith, and I started my own coaching practice to support professional women in their career transitions. That was 11 years ago. I still love bringing that calm voice into my client's sense of chaos, and it's all, you know, in gratitude to the the coaches that I've had.

Christiane [00:08:52]:
So if you think back of that time when you were laid off after working for 20 years, 11 years ago, are you nearly grateful for that moment that it happened? Because otherwise, you would have never been a coach now.

María Tomás-Keegan [00:09:09]:
You know, hindsight, the, you know, the old adage, hindsight is 2020. There are almost always silver linings in every black cloud. All of those adages are true in my experience. Things happen for us, generally speaking, not to us. And if we look at it that way, if we change our perspective, and we look for the silver lining, then we could almost always find 1. And I am so grateful. The company made the move when they did because quite honestly, I'm not sure I would have had the courage. And, you know, we spoke about resilience earlier.

María Tomás-Keegan [00:10:01]:
I would not have built the resilience that or exercise the resilience muscle, right, that I had established, I had created along the way through my transitions. I got to I got to exercise it again big time when I got laid off. And bouncing back is that is the that's the motion we take, Right? When things are not working in our favor, and we are trying to figure out what do I do with this? What do I do next? What are the possibilities? And then opening that up and bouncing back, bouncing up to greet it.

Christiane [00:10:47]:
I think that the hindsight, even though it's painful to look back at the moment when you experience a challenging transition, let's use maybe that description, is sometimes painful, at the same time, it's also something I so encourage, especially with my children, because it makes you learn of how you overcame the Challenge. And at the same time, it also makes you appreciate that during the transitions were those positive moments when you grew as a person. Because learning is not always positive. It's also the pain that makes us stronger. You mentioned the word boosting, which I really adore, that we look oh, our armor is built with all these little facets and pieces, and they are also built because we went through trauma ourselves. And how did we overcome it made us stronger, made us who we are right now.

María Tomás-Keegan [00:11:40]:
Think of this as kind of a patchwork fabric, a confidence quilt. Mhmm. And this quilt is made up of small pieces of fabric, all different shapes and sizes, all different textures, all different colors, all different threads, gold threads, silver threads woven in them. And on each piece of fabric, there is a word. And that word are some words that people have used to describe us. We are awesome. We are helpful. We are whatever those words are.

María Tomás-Keegan [00:12:22]:
We are confident. And when we put all those into a quill or even a cloak, right, and we can wear the cloak when we are feeling unconfident, just put it on and feel the weight and the the love that was created by all those people who said all those great things about us. So when we wear our confidence cloak, we can stand in that confidence. And it's just a a visual way for for us to remember that we are all of those pieces, all those piece parts, right, that we have accumulated in our lives. And that's what makes us confident or resilient.

Christiane [00:13:14]:
I like the cloak comparison, and it also made me think about the word clouds that I frequently create with my students in the classroom where I say write down one word, and then we look at a word cloud. And in a word cloud, the one word that gets mentioned the most tends to be in the middle.

María Tomás-Keegan [00:13:34]:
Right.

Christiane [00:13:35]:
And that could be then a descriptor for you that maybe you mentioned calmness earlier as your superpower. Frequently, we're not aware about our own superpowers because we don't have the confidence to dig down deep and really explore what they are. So if you ask others, what do you really appreciate about me? All of a sudden, there will be this one word in the word cloud that keeps rising to the top, speaking about our little sentiment here. Right. So you have the swirls, and then you have something that rises to the top. And that's the one you really need to hold on to, whether you write it on a sticky note and put it in a mirror, or maybe you have a thank you note from a friend and you put it on your shelf. And during those moments of, let's maybe say, Challenge, to use that word, you can reread that thank you card, or you can look at your word cloud, and it reminds you about how amazing you are. What helped you to get through the challenge when you were laid off in your job? Was it a book, a person? I'm really curious about this now.

María Tomás-Keegan [00:14:40]:
I learned early on the power of association, who you know matters. But here's what I learned, who they know matters more. So it's always, you know, when I'm talking about the power of networking with my clients, I'm saying to them often, you know, connect with people and ask who you who do you know that I need to know? Because it's that power of association that that helps to expand us. We grow through listening to others, asking advice. I believe everyone can benefit from having a different perspective. We get too close to our situation sometimes that we can't clearly see what's next, what we want to do next. But they they change when we look at things in our world from a different viewpoint. And that's what having people sur that you surround yourself with, people you trust, people you admire, people you believe in, people who believe in you.

María Tomás-Keegan [00:15:58]:
Right? Those are the people when you surround yourself with people like that. I call them our our personal board of directors Because we are all the CEOs of our lives and every CEO needs a great board of directors. So these are the people we choose to surround ourselves with. They were my lifeline.

Christiane [00:16:19]:
The way that I look at it is, like, there are these little rocks that you can use as a path to cross a river, and these people are your rocks that you're holding on to Yep. And they help you through. And, actually, I have to say something really important because I do a lot of research on networking. There might be even rocks that you realize are slippery that are not good rocks to hold on to.

María Tomás-Keegan [00:16:42]:
The people you surround yourself yourself with need to be positive people who have your best interest at heart. Not the naysayers, not the ones who are trying to hold you back, but the people who are trying to push you forward gently in the direction that you want to head. And then when there's a detour, they're there to bring you back on the path. Or if the detour turns out to be the right path, follow you there. Having people around us who believe in us, they are our life's blood.

Christiane [00:17:22]:
The true friend will also let you know when they might not agree with something that you do. And that is so valuable because we thrive on positive criticism, and that includes also constructive criticism. Maybe somebody that says, you know what? I'm not sure that that would be the best thing for you. So you need those people that are essentially your filters sometimes when maybe your own vision is blurred a little bit, and they let you know, I know you really well, and I love you. And because I love you, I'm going to tell you this is not ideal.

María Tomás-Keegan [00:17:59]:
And and, hopefully, what that will instill in us is a sense of curiosity that we will then look at that as an opportunity to examine exactly what it is we think we wanna do and make our own choice. But based on not just blind faith or or moving along a path because someone else said it was what you should be doing, but really being curious and examining that for ourselves and asking really good questions of the people that you have surrounding you. Right? Your mentors, your coaches, your family, your friends, your professors.

Christiane [00:18:46]:
That that board of directors, they will not always agree

María Tomás-Keegan [00:18:50]:
That's right.

Christiane [00:18:50]:
On everything. Are the pros outweighing the cons, or is it maybe I should wait with? Because it's sometimes not even the right moment for it. I say this it. Time, it could just be that the pro and con list needs to be revisited in a month, in a year from now, and all of a sudden things have changed, and it might look completely different. So a no now doesn't mean a no forever, and sometimes life just takes a different turn and just all of a sudden will look very different. I'm really curious now with the audience which one of these tips resonated most with them, so you can put your comments down there. To Maria, thank you so much for your time here today. How can viewers and listeners get in touch with you?

María Tomás-Keegan [00:19:44]:
The best way is to go to my website, which is transition and thrive with maria.com.

Christiane [00:19:52]:
Wonderful. We look forward to, staying in touch. Thank you so much.

María Tomás-Keegan [00:19:57]:
It's my pleasure. Thank you.