More Resilience through Tribe-Learning

In these challenging times, resilience is a basic skill that everyone desperately needs. Resilience is the competence and energy you need to deal constructively with changes, disappointments, criticism, crises, fears, stress and challenges.

The competencies that build resilience are:

  • A reconciled past
  • Realistic optimism
  • Solution orientation
  • Working with your talents
  • Discipline
  • Passion and self-awareness
  • Relational skills

In our book Resilience you will find an extensive toolbox with which you can train and expand each of these competencies.

And in addition to the skills you need to develop resilience, you also need “energy” to enter and stay in a healthy training mode. Here we distinguish between:

  1. Social energy resources
  2. Structural energy resources

In this newsletter I would like to take you into the wonderful world of ‘social energy resources’ and how ‘tribe-learning’ directly contributes to unlocking these energy resources.

Energy resource 1: Positive friends

If you are part of a ‘Learning-tribe’, you are surrounded by people who have chosen to purposefully learn in this ‘team’.  As a result, positive relationships can arise and develop quickly and easily. Because in a learning-tribe you are not forced to work together, but already see thinking and learning together as an opportunity, more positive relationships arise here than in a normal team.

Energy resource 2: A culture of appreciation

Where you regularly know and feel appreciated, your healthy self-awareness grows steadily. A learning-tribe is a place where you grow together in the regular and well-founded appreciation of each other.

Energy resource 3: A culture of feedback

Resilience grows because you also get regular feedback from people who can give it in a constructive way. Every person needs to get feedback on the quality of their work. This is where you as a professional continue to grow in your craftsmanship. And it is precisely this feeling of ‘growth’ that produces a deep form of intrinsic motivation.

The art of giving feedback is developed with each other and under the guidance of a facilitator. In this way the tribe becomes a safe place where you can learn to give and receive feedback.

Energy resource 4: Inspiring Leadership

Every person learns from others, and certainly also from people who are an example in a certain area. In a learning-tribe you will search together for examples and heroes that can be sources of inspiration for your field. But also, the team facilitator and each member of the learning-tribe is in his or her own way an example from which you can learn directly.

Energy resource 5: Mentors

Resilience is a work and lifestyle necessary to complete the marathon. As we live in the 21st century, life expectancy for those born after 1955 is somewhere between 90 and 100 years (see Lynda Gratton’s The 100-Year Life). And currently this is the people who are in the work force or will be in the coming years. That means that most of the ‘working’ people in the 21st century is allowed to work between the ages of 25 and 80. This is another reason why resilience is becoming an essential and indispensable quality that you and I need. On that challenging long journey, we will always need one or two mentors to guide us through important decision making moments, especially during the current crisis.

In principle, the learning-tribe is also a ‘mentor-tribe’ where all participants experience mentoring from the team facilitator and certainly also peer-mentoring by the other tribe members.

Summary

In order to continue to grow in resilience, you need the following elements:

  1. The 7 resilience competences
  2. Social energy resources: all five can be found in the learning-tribe
  3. Structural energy resources: these five can also be found in the learning-tribe. More about that in the next blog.

A warm invitation:

Sign up for the tribes starting 15 and 29 May 2020, and start your growth towards VUCA proof professionalism. Here are more information on the Company Leadership Tribe.

Contact us at info-sa@xpand.eu or 079  434 9030 to sign-up.

Sincere greetings,

Xpand South Africa Team

Empowering individuals and organizations to thrive.Â