The Stories behind 'Resilient PARTNERS' Part 2 - Emma's Story

I often get asked why I became a coach and why I am so passionate about resilience. My story is a personal one, and one I am always happy to share. As a young child, I still recall crying in class because I was unable to write an ‘S.’ My 5-year-old self, gripped with anxiety and fear of failure whispering to my friend to do it for me. The teacher walked around our small tables checking the class efforts, while I froze waiting for little Danielle to do it for me. Little did I know that this pattern of perfectionism and fear of failure would follow me into my adult life. You see many would see me as a high achiever with an innate ability to party, manage workloads, exercise (well not as much as I would like) and still be a great friend to all that knew me. While my career has been somewhat ‘squiggly, I have always been in sales, yet not a stereotypical salesperson. For me it was all about talking to people, being curious about what makes them tick and it just so happened that these relationships resulted into sales. I had succeeded my whole life, achieved a 1st class honours degree at university, climbed the career ladder quickly, built great reputations wherever I worked yet behind the scenes I was dealing with, at times, deep crippling anxiety. Looking back, my quest for perfection and a deep fear of failure both drove me yet disabled me. It took me to have my second child to look in the mirror and see just how my limiting beliefs around failure, looking after others before myself meant for my own resilience and wellbeing. After a huge 'bump in the road', and some hard conversation with myself I sought help through coaching and CBT. It was at my last coaching session I realised that this was the role I had been searching for my whole life, helping others while practicing the tools that I had learned, became my calling.

So why resilience? Like many I thought resilience was just about being tough, strong and ‘getting on with it.’ The challenge was, I always ‘got on with it,’ yet I wasn’t resilient and certainly had poor wellbeing. Through exploration, seeking out research and data I found many theories but the simple one made sense to me. By focusing on 5 things, Energy, Future Focus, Inner Drive, Flexible Thinking and Strong Relationships you can build your resilience and wellbeing. But like many of you that are reading this, we might think we are resilient, but are we? I thought I was resilient back in 2009, smashing my sales targets, having a great social life, top of my game yet my panic attacks were crippling. I made it my mission to find a tool that would measure resilience, and when I found the Wraw Index I instantly tested myself and used it with my clients. I became so excited about the results my clients were seeing by using Wraw as the basis of a coaching programme, I began reaching out to the coaches in my network and happened to hear from Allan Mackintosh. Allan and I worked together many years back, Allan was an internal company team performance coach and for a short time our team manager. Allan and I were always on the same page, we shared similar values, both passionate about people and what makes them tick. Together we spotted that while many organisations were talking about personal resilience, very few were focusing on the impact resilient TEAMs have on reaching healthy high performance. Allan had already developed a highly successful PARTNERS team development programme, and we instantly saw how the Wraw Index would work in partnership with it.

‘Resilient PARTNERS’ has been born to empower, enable and sustain personal and team resilience, and to provide a safe environment and framework to ensure teams achieve their desired results. We truly believe that ‘Resilience builds Performance’ across both individuals and teams and we are committed to supporting organisations to achieve this. With so much continual change taking place, with corporate restructuring, changes in team numbers and composition, and redefining of roles, the time is right to ensure that organisations take steps to really build resilience across the organisation and take teamwork and resilience seriously.

If you would like to know more about our 'Resilient PARTNERS' team development programme then simply direct message me through LinkedIn or via email at emma@transformingbusinessminds.com Alternatively call me on ++ 44 (0) 7852 427566