The concept of how to build resilience is a method I teach in my Resilience Course. Check it out here.
The wait was agonising. I needed someone to answer the phone now. I didn't know how unwell my wife was, and I didn’t know what risk that would carry over to our baby she’s carrying.
After a wait that felt like hours, but my phone tells me was scarcely minutes, I was connected to Lauren. Lauren was one of those emergency services voices that oozes this-will-be-alright-ness.
“Your name?” Lauren asked me.
“Foxley,” I responded. A brief moment of hesitation from Lauren.
‘Foxtrot, Oscar, Xray, Lima, Echo, Yankee,’ I declared into the expectant silence.
As awful as the fear was that there was something wrong with my wife and baby, the thrill of being able to deliver flawless NATO phonetic alphabet to emergency services is second to none.
Truly, it’s an attention-seeking-know-it-all’s oxygen.
Despite my heart wrenching concern about my wife and baby’s health, I knew the operator hadn’t spoken to such a clear communicator of letters that day.
Who knew? Smugness is a fantastic balm for fear.
Lauren passed us around to a few specialists on the phone who advised an in person appointment to verify this was nothing serious. Cue a trip to the hospital’s Urgent Care clinic for a 23.30 meeting with the Doc.
Once we knew we actually had nothing to worry about, I made use of the cough ample cough NHS waiting times and reflected on the past few hours.
It all started in the morning.
My wife alerted me to a pain in her calf. Usually this is nothing to worry about, but in pregnancy, the risk of Deep Vein Thrombosis (DVT) is elevated. This can lead to a Pulmonary Embolism which… ain’t good. “For 25% percent of DVT cases,” one website reported, “the first indicator of its existence is sudden death from the clot entering the lungs.”
That sentence is not the most relaxing to read for a Dad to be.
As Harriet limped around the kitchen, I made the decision to phone the truly wonderful people on the NHS’ non-emergency helpline, 111.
That call led me to a crazy revelation about mental toughness and resilience.
Why Business Owners Shutdown Or Get Angry When They Get Stressed
What fascinated me whilst we sat in Urgent Care was not just the people who somehow break their wrist or ankle at midnight on a school night, or the choice of one patient to conduct a full volume phone call back home in a dead-quiet waiting room. What fascinated me was how calmly I had reacted in the face of stress.
See for as long as I could remember, I had frozen under any situation where my body felt danger.
The first time I could remember this happening was at school. Fists were raining down on me from above, and I just lay there, unable to move. I disassociated from the experience. I literally and metaphorically shrunk into a ball, and effectively played dead.
Since that first experience as an 11-year old, I remember countless times where my body chose immobility instead of action.
Worst of all, when I experienced stress in my business; a slow month, or a miscommunication, or giving a talk on a big stage, I found my body and mind freezing once more. This compounded whatever issue existed to begin with.
When the world demanded action, my body gave me extreme fatigue, indecision, confusion and essentially paralysis. The effect of this was a slow growing business and a perpetual feeling that I couldn’t handle the situation I found myself in.
Yet I handled this medical situation with ease. Years ago, I suspect I would have crumbled. So what sparked the change? It wasn’t due to having ‘a big enough why’ or anything so cerebral.
It was because over the past 5 years I have deliberately trained my window of tolerance for stress. Each of us has a personal window of tolerance. This is the amount of stress you can experience without either going nuclear and losing your shit, or hitting complete shut down and playing dead.
When you’re within your window of tolerance, you can engage with the problem at hand. You can play with it. You can figure out novel solutions and think and act creatively. In other words, you can figure it out.
Outside of your window of tolerance, you have two states you can be in: hypoarousal or hyperarousal.
Hypoarousal is the state I described on the playing field when I was being beaten up. It’s shutting down to protect yourself. For a business owner, this means avoiding the problem you know you should work on, fatigue that gets in the way, and a desire to escape or just give up.
Hyperarousal is going fully fight or flight. It’s anger, anxiety, panic, fear and frustration. Hyperarousal is characterised by heightened energy and looks to the business owner like frantic yet ineffective hustle and grind.
Success as a business owner, and every other role you take in life that is in any way demanding, relies on you being able to expand your window of tolerance.
A slender window means that you can only tolerate a tiny variation in the intensity of events around you. Anything can tip you over the edge; a client leaving you, a visit from your family, or an extra coffee.
A large window gives you the ability to successfully navigate the challenges that growth demands of you. Doing anything worthwhile involves stress and perceived danger. Without a large window of tolerance, you will be unable to thrive under that stress.
A window of tolerance shows your level of Resilience: your ability to positively respond and adapt to stress. Resilience is the foundation of mental fitness, and the great news is, it’s trainable.
You just have to do two things consistently:
1 - Expose yourself to ever more stressful situations, and
2 - Perform exercises that allow your body, mind and nervous system to positively adapt to these stressors and make you better.
If you’re ready to train your Resilience with the same intentionality as you train your physical fitness, my Resilience Course is for you. This course helps you thrive under challenge and build mental toughness and your capacity to handle what the world demands of you.
It allows you to build a massive foundation of mental fitness and thrive in your business and wider life.
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