3 Ways to Build Resilience: Unpacking What Typhoon Odette Gave Us

"There will never be enough excuses or outside factors that can stop a driven person from succeeding—except themselves." This was one of the highlights that stood out for me when the team gathered last Friday night to listen to Adrian Ding, an inspirational speaker who leads the training group Maximum Impact Philippines. It was our first hybrid event for 2022 and it took place 64 days after typhoon Odette (Rai) struck Cebu. I’m grateful to Adrian for helping the team transform an extremely stressful event into an additional source of resilience, a reminder to step forward "from our comfort zone into our courage zone." Our office in Cebu IT Park was quiet and had fewer than 50 people when we held the event. Most of the participants had chosen to join via Zoom. Only eight weeks before that, though, the space sheltered team members and their families who had felt at risk when the typhoon blew off their roofs or flooded their kitchens and living rooms. Some spent the Christmas holidays sharing the office with other families, while the power and water supply to their homes had yet to be restored and supplies like gasoline or roofing materials were hard to come by. Yet most had gone back to work within two or three days after the storm. Adrian, in his talk, defined resilience as "the ability to bounce back amid challenges and adversities."

He didn’t try to appear perfect or like someone who had everything together. He talked with the team about how he, too, felt crushed when some of the events he had been booked as a keynote speaker last December 2021 got canceled after Odette.

He talked about how he worried about whether his family would have enough diesel fuel and how much it was all costing them. When the power finally came back on, he did a little dance of joy—which is something so many of our team members did as well.

We all get a taste of adversity. No exceptions. One of the resilience techniques we can learn is to reframe adversity into something useful. We can see it as a way to strengthen our character. Or to learn a new skill. Adrian suggested asking ourselves, "What’s the good stuff behind this change?"

Because there can be good stuff in most of the challenges we meet. After Odette, some team members reported getting a better quality of sleep because they had much less screen time. Also, the absence of street lights meant that their rooms were darker than before. Some team members with young children made time to play (flying kites, for example, or going for a swim) so the kids wouldn’t feel bored by the absence of their screen time. Others dusted off their board games, which meant they had actual family time together, instead of each retreating behind their phones and tablets.

A second technique that helps build resilience is mindfulness. For Adrian, that means "being aware of your circumstances and carving out the time to unplug." I could not agree more. When I book in time to exercise and time to read, even if it’s just 30 minutes for each activity, my days usually go better. We all remember how moments of adversity made us feel. The events themselves were different: a flood in Brisbane, winter storms in parts of Canada and the US East Coast, wildfires in parts of Australia and the US, and the different surges we've seen in this Covid-19 pandemic. Yet the anxiety and worry that these events trigger are familiar to many. One way that mindfulness helps is by reminding us to stay fully in the present, where our choices and actions can make a difference, instead of reliving the past or worrying about the future. There’s a breathing exercise I enjoy sharing with new team members:

Inhale for 5 seconds. Hold that breath for 5 seconds. Exhale for 5 seconds. Do this cycle 5 times.

By the time the exercise ends, you will feel lighter and more at ease. You have gently coaxed your body to relax. Learning to focus on each breath happens to be a good way to learn to stay fully present.

A third resilience technique that Adrian shared is to practice gratitude. This means choosing to pay attention to what’s going right, instead of obsessing about what’s wrong. Or what’s missing.

It can be a real challenge to stay grateful when what’s missing is the entire roof over your family’s heads. Yet there’s always something, isn’t there? One of our team members, for example, chose not to spend her time worrying about how their family’s coffee shop would make up for all the holiday meals they would have otherwise served their customers.

Instead, she offered to lend us their water filtration system so that everyone in the office would have enough water, without spending hours waiting in line for it. (In the first two weeks after the typhoon, people spent hours in line waiting to buy drinking water or fuel or to get money from a cash point. There were lines everywhere.) She was grateful that her entire family was safe. This was her gratitude in practice.

It takes less than five minutes to jot down at least three things that we feel grateful for each day. And we will often find it’s easy to recall more than three things.

The ability to reframe adversity, to stay mindful, and to practice gratitude all remind us that resilience is both the choice to welcome change itself—and to change how we think about what has happened. It’s an ability we can strengthen with practice and one we can share with the people we lead and care about. Thank you, Adrian, for again sharing your time, attention, and insights with the team.

Fiona Kesby is a Ceo, public speaker, and mother of 2 teenagers. She has built a track record in recruitment and sales and is a firm believer in the power and fulfillment of learning for life.