All Episodes

January 31, 2024 16 mins
"I’m Russell Harvey, and I am a Resilience Coach, Facilitator and Public Speaker.My Purpose is to positively affect 100,000 people by the year 2025 (Right now I am at 14,003!). This could be by developing a client’s self-confidence, providing clarity and direction to their role, providing them with the tools and techniques to create the right conditions to apply “transformation” to their department or company, and much more. I have had a 20 year career in Learning, Leadership and Organisational Development and my overall style is influenced by positive psychology and a Strengths-Based approach.When working with my clients, I aim to strike the right balance between:· Pragmatism· Creativity and Playfulness· Support, Challenge and ProgressIn addition to the work I do with my clients I am the Chair of Governors of a local primary school and a volunteer with Leeds Young Authors. I also run public speaking and confidence workshops in schools."

Mark as Played
Transcript

Episode Transcript

Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:14):
Hello everyone, and welcome to LondonLeadership Podcast. Today I'm with Russell Harvey,
who's a resilience coach, and overthe past few weeks you've been talking
about this sub this topic of failure, how we can view failure, how
we can overcome failure, how wecan look at and think about a fear
of failure. So today we're goingto continue talking about that. But Russell,

(00:36):
tell us what does it mean tobe what is it? What is
a resilience coach? Well, yeah, you know, marketing wise, it's
it's the resilience coach. Fernando,It's not a it's just not any old
resilience coach. On Yeah, it'sthe resilience coach. So yeah, what
does it mean. It means thatI have a very privileged life life in

(01:00):
terms of supporting clients. That's oneof the things it means. You know,
I had a great coaching session withclient this morning. It was in
Chang Mai in Thailand, doing loadsof traveling because they've shifted from being stuck
in an absolute rut to completely transformingwhat they wanted to do with their lives.
So seeing something with this huge smileon the face, that's what it

(01:23):
means is incredible. It means thatI get to think a lot about my
own personal resilience, so you know, the old physician healed myself. It
means that I've meant a lot oftime going, oh am I doing how
many of these things am I doingthat I'm sort of talking to my clients
about? And yeah, it getsto essentially get to do the things that

(01:46):
I love doing, of like supportingpeople to work through their challenges and get
into this place called thrive. Really, rather than believing that resilience is predominantly
about coping and surviving, resilience ismore about shifting, really shifting into life
might be challenging, and I cangenerally say that I'm feel like I'm thriving.

(02:08):
I'm in a good place essentially.So if the resilience is not just
coping and surviving, but thriving inthe midst of adverse circumstances, is that
what you're saying, Yeah, itis, it is. There's just there's
been a little bit over these sortof decades or centuries around resilience, like
sometimes people feel that they're only beingresilient when essentially we're sort of they're hanging

(02:30):
on you know I'm getting through andmyself and many many others actually would like
people to understand actually is a bitmore than that. You know, there
are times in life when you absolutelyare coping and surviving. However, they
are resilient people and able to getthemselves through to this other side of thriving.

(02:51):
Resilient people are able to get themselvesthrough to this other side of thriving.
Great, well, I think that'sincredible to think about. So let's
think how do we how do webuild a resilient mindset that's able to get
through to the other side of thriving. What would you say, I like
key components for someone to build aresilient mindset. I do this sport called

(03:14):
CrossFit, and it's filled with adversemoments and circumstances and daily having to get
through it and not just cook andsurvive, but thrive in the midst of
it. But what would say,like in life? Yeah, yeah,
so there's so there's how I defineresilience me personally, which is about springing

(03:36):
forward with learning. So it's notabout bouncing back for me, because we
can't go back, you know.So I appreciate it to play on words,
but is sometimes what I observe inpeople is like, Okay, so
I'm going through a challenging event,I'm facing to life, and now I'll
bounce back, and it's like,it's just a risk risk that you're going

(04:00):
to I'm going to go back tohow I was. When people are not
sort of saying when it gets backto normal, it's like, in the
nicest possible sense, it never willever. Yeah, there will always be
things that will be coming along.So the simple thing is about how I
define as it is springing forward withlearning. And then the more long winded
answer, which we haven't got timefor today, is it's not about one

(04:21):
singler thing. And if it's okay, I talk about the thing called the
resilience wheel. It's seven aspects onit. It's on my website. And
so if you want to build aresilient person, the short answer is get
the seven aspects of your wheel intoa good place and then they're all interconnected
and they'll help you to thrive.Well, you might as well go and

(04:43):
just talk us through just to mentionthe seventh, but just to say I
do think that springing forward with learningis an incredible way of thinking about resilience.
Rather than bouncing back. Because yes, because I think you're defining it
as that resiliency are I'm moving forwardinstead of resilience, I'm going backwards.

(05:04):
No, in the midst of this, I'm going to learn from this and
move forward, which is I think, really it's a real different mind shift
of hard to view it. Butgo on, what are the seven I
think that's interesting. So this isa build upon the old of research from
Robertson Cooper. So the heart ofresilience is our attitude and our beliefs.

(05:24):
Then you've got resilient people have apurpose. So mine is by the twenty
twenty five to positively affect one hundredthousand people, and right now I'm up
to forty three two hundred and twelveish. Then there is the word of
confidence, so resilient people work onand build their confidence. There's the word
of adaptability, which is openness tochange. And then the research also shows

(05:46):
that those people that spend a thirdof their time working upon their adaptability they
get into thrive. Then is thesupport network. Who have you got in
your life that is supporting you yourbalance of radiators and drains, and what
are you doing about those people thatyou might be draining you. Then there's
the internal storytelling we do as humanbeings. So the meaning that we attach

(06:10):
to events, how we describe livesevents to ourselves, is that in a
spring forward with learning approach. Andthen there's this word energy, which is
about playing to your strengths, thingsthat you naturally energize, buy, It's
about your diet and exercise, It'sabout how you recuperate and reenalergize yourself.
Is about your circadian rhythms and yourbi rhythms. So when you get each

(06:34):
of those seven aspects of your wheelinto a decent place, then you can
have this real fantastic sort of resiliences glow around you that will enable you
to face into lives of events.Brilliant. Well, I would encourage everyone
to go on this website and theResilience Coach dot co dot uk to find

(06:56):
those seven aspects of that will.But okay, so let's so resilience,
your definition of resilience is springing forthwith learning. Okay, so how do
we how do we think about resilience? How do we think about failure through
the lens of resilience, Like whatwould be your what would be your definition
of failure without trying to be facetious. So I was thinking about this before

(07:21):
talking to you today. It isthe definition. So absolutely I'm not I'm
not of the mindset like there isno failure. We absolutely there is,
and there's also what's our opinion ofit? How do we feel about it?
You know? How okay are wewith this word failure? Whenever we
say it? Are we? Youknow that you're not going to be in

(07:43):
just two camps. But if youneed a camp of like failure makes me
bad, negative self talk impacts andconfidence, you know, then that feeds
the negative. If you can getyourself into the mindset of you know,
this went wrong, but okay,it went wrong. Are always going to
go wrong in life and literally everysingle day, all day, every day

(08:03):
is an opportunity to learn and thenmove forward with it. So it's for
me whilst failure exists and you mustfail, you must get things wrong because
that's the only way that you're goingto learn. It's not about having any
negative connotations around it. But thereal challenge around that, though, is

(08:24):
that we have a negativity bassis humanbeings. So apparently fifty thousand thoughts to
day over half of those are negative. Ninety percent of our thoughts are from
yesterday, and over half of thoseare negative. So our spring forward learning
in our reflections, in our discussions, conversations, reflections around what's gone wrong,

(08:48):
our failures. It's about actually,how do we strike a balance between
you know, learning from it andchurning it into reframing it and something good
and understanding that we're going to havea bit of a negative look at it.
But how do we stop ourselves fromgetting into a negative spiral? How
do we stop ourselves from getting intoa negative spiral? Self talk? Fifty

(09:09):
thousand thoughts and half of those arenegative, half of those from yesterday's and
half of those are negative. Negative. That's crazy, okay, So yeah,
it's changing our view of failure becausewe will have to fail eventually otherwise
that that's how we learn. Howhow would also I also find that people,

(09:33):
including myself, we have a fearof failure like that actually prevents us
from even attempting the thing, sothat we don't need we don't fail,
but we don't win anyway because we'rescared of failing, So we don't try
and we don't move forward. Howcan we how can we be how do
you think people can be resilient withtheir fear of failure? Because I feel

(09:54):
like people have so many gifts,talents and things that they're just not putting
out there because they're too afraid thatit won't go well, that it won't
succeed, So they don't even try. And that's like a fear of it,
and that's failing in and of itselfbecause they don't accomplish what they want
to do either way. No,So it's about sort of where you want
to start on the resilience wheel,about approaching this thing of fear of failure.

(10:20):
So, you know, confidence isone of the aspects of the wheel.
You could spend some time actually thinkingabout, Okay, how do we
in general I build my confidence?But actually, if your starting point is
like what if I get, youknow, looking at confidence wrong, that's
going to get in a way,that's going to interfere. So you might
want to redefine your purpose. Youmight want to really spend a lot of

(10:41):
time doing some things that are playingto your strength. So it's making a
choice about where you might start onthe wheel to task all this fear of
failure, because they're all interconnected.When you get one aspect of the wheel
into a better place, it hasa positive impact on the other aspects.
So sometimes how I support clients todo something with the confidence, it's not

(11:01):
really ever go anywhere near it is, you know. Or if like somebody
says I've got a fear of failure, it's like, well, let's look
at loads of other stuff first andthen see what that does to your fear
of failure. Sometimes it then sortof cracks that nut or the better analogy,
But other times you have to thenthen it's a bit more of the

(11:24):
analysis around. Okay, so where'dit come from? Where did it start?
What was the first thing? Canyou remember back through time of like
what was it that meant that youcertainly created this belief that you know you're
now good at things. Sometimes youhave to go back to the root cause
m yeah, fascinating. I findthat fear of failure often prevents me,

(11:46):
So I'm constantly trying to push againstthat and do things that I'm afraid to
do, or do things that Ikind of don't want to, like not
don't want to do, but Iknow that I'm going to pick me outside
of my comfort zone. So I'mnot so afraid of them. Yeah,
so it's about you could sort ofsorry, I mean to talk over fand

(12:09):
it's about so the strength based approachis and then this may or may not
work for you. But another optionthat you can go with is, you
know, make a list, doa mind map, talk to loads of
people, you know, do aspider diagram of literally everything that went right,
anything you did succeed with, youknow, and really create a college,

(12:30):
create something, add music to it, science, sound, smells,
whatever, you know, really buildsomething to let yourself know that actually you
do achieve things. So what areall the things when it's like you've achieved
it, you've been successful, andthat might give you a sense of sort
of grounding. Actually, do youknow what? There are lots of things

(12:52):
that I've achieved and I am gettinga feeling I feel like I want to
have a go at something else,and I don't have quite so much of
like a self talk around it ofthis could go wrong. Actually I've got
a self talk around in it ofactually I know where this could go right?
Hm hm, really good. Yeah, self talk. I find it

(13:13):
interesting that's come up quite a fewtimes with recently with people I've spoken to
our own self talk into these situations. All right, Well, last question,
if if it's all right, whatwhat what? What would you say?
Russell has been your your biggest failure, and but how has that failure
shaped you to become who you aretoday? So I was really thinking about

(13:37):
this because this too, I'm luckybecause I'm in that place of what I
understand failure that exists. I don'tview any of those things as failures.
However, answer your question, whatwhat have you What have you sprung forward
with learning from? Yes, thebiggest thing is probably learning forward from learning

(13:58):
with Yet it's probably so I've beenmade redundant six times in my lifetime.
Wow, And it was the seventhtime that from that that the Resilience Coach
was born. So you know,my learning is so it's like, you
know, I've made redundant, gotsacked, lost a job. Those are
phrases that I could say, butit's like and I'd forgotten all about it.

(14:22):
Essentially, I was telling the storyabout how the Resilience Coach came from
when it was the face of factthat yeah, the seventh time I was
made redundant, That's when the timingwas all right to create the resilience coach.
But what I learned was I wasn'tready. I wasn't ready for the
other times. I could have createdthe resilience coach after the first, second,
fourth, or fifth time, butI wasn't ready, you know,

(14:45):
So timing was right. So yeah, So my biggest learning is like it
is about the timing essentially around allof those experiences. And I've had to
pick myself up from six redundancies,you know, one go out and job
search again and do that thing,have come home six times and go right,

(15:07):
then we need to change our circumstancesbecause one of our wages is gone.
Really good. Thank you so muchfor sharing that. I think that's
really insightful that. Yeah, thethings that you sprot sprung forward with is
learning your definition of resilience six seventhredundancies. I think people would think,

(15:28):
oh, that's really difficult, butactually out of that was born the resilience
coaching. And often when we're goingthrough the difficulty, when we're going through
the adverse circumstance, we can't seehow it's or the failure, we can't
see how it's working out. Buton the other side of it, you
look back and you realize, Wow, all those things work together for the

(15:50):
good. There's a there's a scripturein the Book of Romans that says all
things work together for the good andit's and I think it's the similar thing
from what I'm hearing you say withit with failure that in the moment it
doesn't feel like it, but welearned from it, we move forward and
we get better. That's it tobring forward learning, Fernando. That's it.

(16:11):
Well, thank you so much Russellfor your time today, and thank
you so much everyone for listening todayon lon Is Leadership Podcast. Remember to
go on www. Resilience Coach dotco dot uk to find out more about
resilience and from Russell. But thankyou so much Russell for your time today.
Absolute pleasure. Crenando loved talking toyou. Thank you for having me
on GYD. Bye.
Advertise With Us

Popular Podcasts

Stuff You Should Know
Medal of Honor: Stories of Courage

Medal of Honor: Stories of Courage

Rewarded for bravery that goes above and beyond the call of duty, the Medal of Honor is the United States’ top military decoration. The stories we tell are about the heroes who have distinguished themselves by acts of heroism and courage that have saved lives. From Judith Resnik, the second woman in space, to Daniel Daly, one of only 19 people to have received the Medal of Honor twice, these are stories about those who have done the improbable and unexpected, who have sacrificed something in the name of something much bigger than themselves. Every Wednesday on Medal of Honor, uncover what their experiences tell us about the nature of sacrifice, why people put their lives in danger for others, and what happens after you’ve become a hero. Special thanks to series creator Dan McGinn, to the Congressional Medal of Honor Society and Adam Plumpton. Medal of Honor begins on May 28. Subscribe to Pushkin+ to hear ad-free episodes one week early. Find Pushkin+ on the Medal of Honor show page in Apple or at Pushkin.fm. Subscribe on Apple: apple.co/pushkin Subscribe on Pushkin: pushkin.fm/plus

Dateline NBC

Dateline NBC

Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com

Music, radio and podcasts, all free. Listen online or download the iHeart App.

Connect

© 2025 iHeartMedia, Inc.