Culture eats recovery for breakfast
And nine other surprising things I’ve learnt about resilience
Resilience has become a buzzword in recent years but it’s a topic that’s long fascinated me.
My interest began when I was training for an Ironman more than ten years ago. Preparing to swim 2.4 miles, cycle 112 miles and run 26.2 miles is not the sort of distance where you turn up and “wing it”. So I explored my food, mindset and how to best recover between work-outs.
Over the last ten years I’ve continued to explore physical resilience doing events like 5K races, marathons and long distance cycling trips. More recently, I began training as a psychotherapist which is helping me to better understand mental health and emotional resilience.
This passion has now become my job. I work with CEOs, directors and founders of start up companies to explore their resilience and what it means for them to thrive in their work. I also work with teams and support company wide resilience programmes.
As part of my approach I use heartbeat analytics to assess people’s resilience. The wearable technology provides amazing insights into each person’s unique areas of stress and sources of recovery.
Each day I’m going to share one of the ten most surprising things I’ve learnt about resilience after doing more than 200 of these assessments. The observations are based on personal accounts rather than objective data or quantitative research.
I would welcome your feedback if you have any comments that support or disprove anything I’ve written in these insights.
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Insight #4 — culture eats recovery for breakfast
I am sure you’ve heard the phrase culture eats strategy for breakfast.
Well, in my experience culture eats recovery for breakfast too.
I recently worked with a group in the insurance sector and was amazed to discover that everyone was stressed when they were in a meeting or writing a business report.
I discovered that their organisational culture was one with a high need for control. They needed lots of data and meetings to support any sort of business decision. This meant everyone felt overloaded processing metrics and working late after spending a day in back-to-back meetings.
This was happening to everyone I measured, irrespective of whether they worked in the finance department, marketing or HR.
The same was true of their seniority. Personal assistants and graduates had the same stress response as a senior director in the group.
I was just as fascinated to find that they all recovered when they had space in their diary. Unstructured time during their day was the antidote they needed. It meant they could get on with their actual job.
Click here to read insight #1 — one person’s stress is another person’s recovery.
Click here to read insight #2 — life is more stressful than work.
Click here to read insight #3 — introverts should be more introverted.
Tomorrow I will share insight #5 — exercise isn’t always good for you.
