Adam Markel starts the new year strong with his latest book, Change Proof. In this episode, he provides a sneak peek at its contents, created as a result of extensive leader assessments of Fortune 50 companies and start-up organizations. Adam breaks down what it takes to take a leap of faith and live the life you truly want, more energized and inspired than ever. The book dives deep into the importance of regeneration and time off, the myths surrounding resiliency, the dangers of always outrunning everyone, and the best approaches in addressing burnout. Adam also invites everyone to take his free resilience assessment to determine where your mindset currently stands: http://resiliencerank.com/.
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Adam Markel’s Latest Book: Change Proof
It is 02/22/22 on the show and that’s not all it is. It’s also the launch and the release date of the book by the same name, Change Proof. It has been a long and beautiful road leading up until this moment. For those of you that have never given birth to a book, it is excruciating, beautiful, magical and wonderful when you look back on it that it comes to fruition because there are so many pitfalls along the way that can derail a project like this.
For many of you who have been listening to the Conscious Pivot Podcast over the last number of years, you know that I wrote a book by that title, Pivot, and it became a big bestseller. It was a wonderful experience and an incredible journey. I don’t think I’ll ever stop talking about the principles of pivoting. In some ways, it is resembling the analogy of giving birth to something because there’s a lot of pain associated with it but at a certain point, like in the case of my wife and the four children that she gave birth to, you forget the pain and what it was like at the time. You think, “Wouldn’t that be a good idea to do that again?” You get to revisit that whole process and it is a glorious process. I feel incredibly blessed to have engaged and embarked on it. It has taken a village for sure so I don’t want to imply for any second that I did this even remotely on my own.
Change Proof is a book that I feel meeting the moment. I don’t know that we could’ve ever planned or certainly could have predicted that this book would be so timely, that it would be such an important topic and so relevant in the lives of many people at this time in history coming out of a pandemic. We’re still in the midst of the challenges facing businesses, individuals, anxiety, uncertainty, and the constant air that there’s still another shoe to drop or something more that we have to brace ourselves for.
There’s a great deal of that concern, fear and discomfort out there, and the constant and never-ending disruption that seems to be the order of the day and has been that way since. It is with great pleasure that we are releasing and launching this book. I dare to say that it’s a wonderful book because it is. I say that not so objectively, I suppose. I don’t know that I could truly be objective about that, but the book isn’t about me.
Change Proof: You can learn something from the future, just like how past challenges taught you how to grow and move forward.
It is so rich with the stories and insights of other people that it’s not much for me to make that leap in making that statement, and to take the leap of faith even that many other people are going to find this book so valuable, that they’ll want to share it with their family members and team, and that organizations will use it. It is in so many ways not just a sign of the times that we’re talking about how it is that we deal with the uncertainty, that we are looking to create more resiliency in our daily lives and in the lives of the people that we are working with, the people that we’re leading, and the people that we are being led by.
It’s a book that has fundamental, tangible and tactical ways to develop ourselves personally and professionally, ways that we can engage in the pursuit of the things that we want in our lives with so much more energy. Ultimately, this book is going to reveal a simple yet profound process for how it is that you can regenerate your energy at such a level and capacity that you will be able to get more accomplished without becoming exhausted in the process. That is the true epidemic in our world. The fact that in our way of doing things or way of being even, we’re perpetuating an old paradigm and an old model that doesn’t work anymore.
It’s an exhaustion model. It’s the idea that somehow or another, we have to continue to do more and more ourselves, and there isn’t time for anything other than meeting the demands and responsibilities of the day. That’s fundamentally flawed logic. Resilience is not about endurance as so many people think. They think it’s just about how you can outrun the catastrophes and disruptions, and outlast your competitors. That is fundamentally inaccurate.
I say that because this is a book about what we’ve learned in researching this topic and more than 3,000 leaders that were good and kind enough to provide information to us through our Resilience Leadership Assessment. Through those assessments, we’ve learned that it is not even remotely true that trying to outrun the challenges in our professional or our personal lives ever works. We never can outrun those things. We certainly can’t outrun them forever any more than the virus of competition that we have always been dealing with, and have been brought up to feel that we’re truly in competition with others.
The heart of resilience is about recovery, not endurance. It's not about bouncing back from setbacks but your capacity to bounce forward, learning and growing in the process of working through challenges. Share on XThat way of competing is about outlasting, outdoing or outworking other people. That is an old paradigm and it’s time for it to be dismantled. The paradigm of trying to outrun, outlast or out-compete only leads to burnout. In the end, it leads to the same place. All roads lead to Rome in that sense. They lead to exhaustion and ultimately, to burnout. I know that from my days as a workaholic attorney. I didn’t spend just a minute in that profession. I was there for eighteen years so I know it both individually and in seeing what it looked like on the faces and in the bodies of the people I was around and my colleagues.
All of our research had taken place over the last several years. With thousands of these leader assessments from companies, leaders all over the globe, and everything from Fortune 50 organizations to startup organizations, we found that the heart of resilience is about how we recharge. It’s about recovery, not endurance. It’s not about bouncing back from a setback. It’s about our capacity to bounce forward to learn and grow in the process of working through the challenges that we all will face now and forevermore. That’s why the title of this book is Leveraging the Power of Uncertainty to Build Long-Term Resilience.
In many ways, this book is about the future, and that’s one of the things I love about it. We can learn from the future. I don’t know that everybody necessarily knows how it is that we can learn from the future but. I’ll give you one great example to make this point. At any point in your life in the past where you were worried, in doubt about something, maybe even had some fear about something or something was a pretty serious challenge, there was one thing that you could have learned and known at that moment about the future that the future would have taught you. The future is something that can teach us, believe it or not. It is something we can learn from.
The future would have taught you, just like it would have taught me during that period of challenge from the past, that you were going to learn and grow from that situation. That situation would have run its course and would have led you forward. You wouldn’t be here reading this if that wasn’t the truth of it. I look back at any situation in my life as challenging, difficult, heartbreaking, confusing and terrifying as it might have been at the time.
Change Proof: Many people deal with exhaustion and anxiety today because of the overwhelming feeling to keep up with seemingly endless tasks.
I look back at those situations and think to myself that if I’d asked the future, “What can I learn? What is the wisdom that the future would have shared with me?” It would be that I would grow from that in the process. The future would have said to me that whatever is happening in the present is net positive in your life, business and every way, shape and form that you can think of. It ultimately would prove to be something valuable to you. Whatever it is that you and I are going through is the same conversation and wisdom that we can gain if we consult the future. The future will tell us that everything that’s happening in the present is net positive and is going to be something we look back on at some point and see what we’ve gained, what we’ve learned and how we’ve grown.
Resilience is not about how we endure, bounce back or do anything other than utilize what’s happening for our forward progress or momentum. It’s about how we bounce forward, in other words. The way we bounce forward is to recognize how it is that we recover. I don’t mean just taking a vacation because that’s easy in some respects and difficult in others. Many people want a vacation or love a vacation but they dread it because they know that when they come back from that vacation, they’ve got piles and piles of work waiting for them. Maybe they have fallen behind or missed out on things. They have a fear of missing out or falling behind. It creates great stress even in the process of taking time off.
This book will debunk some of those myths. It will share the tactical ways that you can recharge mentally, emotionally, physically and spiritually even in an average day. From moment to moment, minute to minute and hour to hour, we can drive greater resiliency. We’re able to create rituals for recovery in those four important resilient zones, which are our mental resilience, emotional resilience, physical resilience and spiritual resilience. Ultimately, when we’re doing that or when we’ve created these new rituals for our recovery, holistically speaking, we are stronger.
We have allowed the miraculous process of slow change to create compound improvement. In every area of our lives, our capacity grows. Our ability to think critically and creatively grows. Our ability to respond instead of reacting to things increases. Every area of our life begins to blossom in new and different ways because we have given ourselves this all-important ingredient to our development. That is this rest, recovery or regeneration.
The paradigm of out-trying, outrunning, outlasting, or out-competing other people only leads to burnout. Share on XIf you don’t water a plant or don’t allow plants to have sun, it will eventually wilt and then beyond that, it will die. We know that in nature. That is the rule of thumb and yet, we don’t water ourselves and give ourselves the sunlight that is required for us to continue to reach the light or even our highest heights.
I’m so thrilled that this book is launching. I feel like we’ve got an amazing team behind it. Many people have put their efforts and resources into seeing that this book reaches an audience of people who are both doing well and those that are not doing as well as they can be, even those that are struggling because there are a lot of people that are dealing with exhaustion, anxiety and the feeling of constant never-ending overwhelm.
If you’re one of those people, this is a book that you’re going to love. It’ll be something that will have the opportunity to talk about and engage in conversation about for a long time to come. This is not the last of the great disruptions that we will face. That resiliency truly is the foundation for how we will deal with things in the future.
If you’re a leader or somebody that’s operating an organization, whether it’s your organization or a larger outfit that you’re a part of, we have to model these things for the people that are with us. The members of our team have to first see it in us that we care enough about our wellbeing to take care of ourselves so that they can learn how to take care of themselves.
Change Proof: If you are running an organization, make sure every team member is cared for properly, inspiring them to look after their own wellbeing too.
If we model the opposite or win the Night Owl Award as the thing that we should all strive for at whatever cost that takes, then what we’re doing is we’re perpetuating this exhaustion model. That’s a great reason and part of why we’re seeing a Great Resignation. People intuitively know that employers are looking over them, not after them. We have to look after the people around us. People have to know that you’ve got their back.
When we are consulting with organizations and creating continuity programs after a keynote or a workshop that I’ve delivered, we often talk about how it is that we create and perpetuate a got-your-back environment. It’s cultural for people to believe and feel at their core that the people around them have their backs or that the organization itself is fundamentally concerned about their wellbeing, not just about their output. The Great Resignation is a sign that there’s a lot less confidence in that concept from an employee standpoint than maybe there has ever been. There’s no fear there either because I believe that we are in a great moment of learning. There’s great learning that is taking place.
To go along with the Great Resignation, there is great learning. Ultimately, we will see a Great Restoration. This Great Restoration is going to be this concept that I’m talking about. It’s the idea that you help to create a change-proof culture in your organization. You help people to be change-proof. Whatever comes their way, they are able to utilize it. They are able to embrace change, the unknown and uncertainty because they don’t simultaneously see it as threatening to their very survival. When people are coming from a place of greater resiliency, they will be restored. Faith in the organizations and leadership will be restored.
The Great Restoration is what I’m planning for and what I believe we’ll see soon down the road but we’ve got to commit first to these principles. We’ve got to cascade it out and speak about it redundantly even so that folks know that it’s not just some idea du jour. It’s not just ticking off a box to say, “You brought this guy Markel to talk and teach about concepts of resilience and becoming change-proof.” It’s got to be more than that. There has to be a commitment to it long-term or continuity, in other words.
By taking a break, you allow every area of your life to blossom in different ways. Share on XI invite you all, wherever you are, to determine for yourself how resilient you are. We’ve created a free tool to help you to do this. It’s our Resilience Assessment. More than 3,000 leaders from all over the globe have taken this. You can go to ResilienceRank.com. In three minutes, you’ll be able to get your score. They are sixteen very simple questions that you can answer in a matter of seconds each. When you’re done, you’re not only going to get a score but you’re also going to get a resource kit to help you to make some small changes in the way that you are taking care of your resiliency, mentally, emotionally, physically and spiritually.
It’s very helpful, at least that’s what we’ve been told by many people. It’s entirely free and there are no strings attached. That’s ResilienceRank.com. It’s simple enough. Take your resilience assessment, get your resilience score, and then take a look at the abundant resources that are going to be provided in this resilience kit that you’ll get as well. I am nothing but net positive about the future and the way that our lives are going to unfold and evolve. I’m so happy that I get to have this opportunity to speak about this with all of you and certainly, that you’re joining this community or a member of this community already.
If you know someone that could benefit from these principles, feel free to refer them to the book, Change Proof. You can go to ChangeProof.com to order your book and get some wonderful limited-time bonuses that are there for you. You can go to AdamMarkel.com. Not only find the book there but find out more about the kind of work and services that we provide for organizations worldwide including keynotes, workshops and continuity programs like the got-your-back programs that we help organizations create for their workforce for many months.
I look forward to getting comments as well about the book itself. One of the bonuses that is part of the book-buy is a Walk with Adam program. It is something you’ll get as part of that. There are no additional costs other than the cost of the book itself. I have recorded a walk where I’m reading the book but I’m also doing some other things that you won’t get in Audible. It was a tremendous amount of fun for me to do. This is one of the bonuses.
It’s taking me on a walk with you and I say that because walking is one of the things that I do to restore my energy at various points in the day to bring myself back to homeostasis or equilibrium. It’s a vital part of my ritual for recovery at any given moment of the day. I wanted to take you all on a walk with me so I created this audio that’s part of that bonus package. I hope you love that and enjoy it.
If there’s somebody that you think would benefit from the book or the show, please feel free to share it with folks. Subscribe and let other people know. We’d love to get your reviews and comments. That’s the world to us. Feedback is oxygen. I want to say thank you for the opportunity to be able to share this all with you.
I’m looking forward to us all becoming a little bit more change-proof in the weeks, months and years ahead. We’ll be back to a regular cadence for our episodes as well. I look forward to getting your feedback on those episodes and any recommendations that you might have on people that we could include in our interview lineup. It’s a blessing. Enjoy your reading. Here’s to becoming change-proof.
