Resilience, change and overcoming adversity keynote
“Blind determination: how to stay significant when events conspire to keep you small”
Blind determination
How to stay significant when events are conspiring to keep you small
Giving a solid dose of inspiration to think, act and feel differently, Karen McCarthy will have your people and your organisation advancing in the face of adversity with her three-part iterative methodology:
Reflect: Pinpoint your purpose and get a realistic gauge on the ground you occupy. Only after assessing your aims and taking stock of your stores can you begin to plot a path forward.
Recruit: Change is hard and adversity is even harder. To handle change well, rather than resisting, you have to change more in the right ways. This self-directed change can be uncomfortable but it’s the core of growth and adaption. Going it alone is often hard, lonely and ineffective so resilient people cultivate the humility to learn from others and the courage to reach out for the practical and emotional support they need.
Resource: When your car breaks down, you need to find a new way to get where you’re going. When your world changes, the old ways of operating may not be an option either. Regardless of whether you need new tools and technologies, you’ll need new skills and habits of mind if you’re to live large after encountering loss.
After practicing as a lawyer for 15 years, Karen suffered life-threatening complications when surgeons attempted to remove a tumour from her brain. In the aftermath, she was left legally blind, physically incapacitated, and with her short-term memory shot. The doctors told her family that she probably wouldn’t survive. They said that, if she did, she certainly wouldn’t be capable of taking care of herself, let alone her children.
Determined this would not be her fate, Karen fought hard and smart to get back to a significant life that was aligned with her values. Embracing the challenge of adapting for her disabilities and finding new ways to live, love and work, Karen overcame the odds to achieve her highest level of physical fitness ever; to walk alone to collect her kids from school; to travel interstate on her own; to learn the adaptive skills that she needed to return to her job as a lawyer with the state’s top corruption watchdog.
In losing her sight, Karen gained a vision – an actionable blueprint for building resilience through adaption and growth in the face of adversity. A dynamic communicator at heart, she synthesised this vision into an actionable framework comprising of three key processes: reflect, resource and recruit. This iterative framework can be applied by anyone, anywhere, facing any type of change or adversity that threatens to keep them small.
In her inspiring keynote, Karen parallels her personal road to resilience with a roadmap to help you and your organisation survive, adapt, and thrive despite acute shocks and long-term stressors - and shares her insights into how to keep the momentum going once you have it.
Regardless of adversity, see the significance your people can achieve when they’re inspired to match their blind determination with this holistic process for building rock-solid adaptive resilience.
Book this keynote if you want to give your people:
A jolt of inspiration, motivation, and renewed purpose
A dose of perspective on their challenges
Actionable strategies to make positive change in their personal and professional lives
An understanding of how to make the first small step on their big journey towards an energised, engaged, and excellent future
Key Takeaways
“Resource yourself for resiliency. Re-source yourself for resiliency.”
Change changes you. You have a vision of the person you want to be but as circumstances evolve you need to revisit where you get your energy, drive and focus from.
“Don’t believe everything you think.”
Fear is a powerful motivator but it can also send you down rabbit holes of stress and anxiety that keep you stuck. Not buying into your mind’s hype is essential if you’re going to advance in spite of the adversity you are bound to encounter.
“It doesn’t take long to get strong. It just takes persistence.”
Overwhelm and pessimism are thieves of forward motion but if you can just… keep… going, you will find that you reach your destination, stronger than before.
“Even small steps take you on a big journey.”
If you expect to travel a mile in a single step, you will soon give up, discouraged and depressed. In a changing environment, practising patience and persistence is the key to making progress.
“Just because you can’t do it the same doesn’t mean you can’t do it.”
When your world changes, you need to change too. See the possibilities that open up when you are prepared to adapt your thinking and learn new skills for a new reality.
“There’s no point whinging at the wind or screaming at the storm. Save your energy for what promises a pay-off.”
Accept the things you can’t change, then look for the opportunities that are opening amid the turmoil.
“Rigidity ruins resiliency. Loosen your grip. Tighten your connections.”
After years of social distancing and the memories of iso, it’s easy to understand people being reluctant to leave their cocoons of safety and predictability, but research shows again and again that people need people more than ever.
“Courage is contagious. Catch it. Spread it.”
It is possible to act steadily in the face of change and uncertainty and the courage to do so grows exponentially among a supportive group facing the same challenges. Everyone can take responsibility for cultivating a culture of resilience in your organisation.
