The Fatherhood Challenge Podcast & Radio Program

Teaching Resiliency to Your Child

Russell Harvey · August 30, 2024

Executive Coach · Leadershipin

Interview with Russell Harvey

Teaching Resiliency to Your Child — Russell Harvey

Podcast: The Fatherhood Challenge Podcast & Radio Program

August 30, 2024 · 34 min

What do you do when your child or teen has a meltdown? How do you help your kids bounce back after suffering a bitter disappointment or worse, trauma and grief? Teaching your kids resilience is so key to their success as an adult, that I’ve asked a resilience coach to join us…

Listen

Teaching Resiliency to Your Child
0:00 / --:--
The Fatherhood Challenge Podcast & Radio Program

GO TO APPLE PODCASTS →

Key topicsLeading Well When the World Won’t Slow DownChange is no longer something leaders navigate occasionally - it is the environment they lead in every day. Russell explores the difference between leaders who are simply surviving relentless change and those who can genuinely say: “There’s a lot going on, and I’m good.” Drawing on nearly two decades specialising in resilience, Russell offers a practical perspective on what resilient leadership actually looks, sounds and feels like when the pressure is real and the uncertainty isn't going away.Before You Add AI to Your Team, Fix the Human OneOrganisations are racing to adopt AI, but Russell believes leaders need to ask a more fundamental question first: what makes our team work brilliantly together? Only then can they understand where AI can genuinely improve performance. With deep expertise in leadership, resilience and navigating persistent change, Russell offers a refreshingly human perspective on AI: the biggest challenge may not be the technology, but how well we lead the people using it.Off the Record — What Leaders Admit in Coaching and Never Say in the BoardroomRussell Harvey has coached leaders to board level for over 6,000 hours, and the same admissions come up in private: they are guessing, they are tired, and they can say neither out loud. Most organisations treat that silence as strength and reward the executive who never wavers, which is how confident-looking teams commit to decisions nobody in the room believes in. Drawing on 18 years with organisations from the NHS to Novartis and Kerry Group, he describes what changes when a leader finally gets one place to think honestly: how they pressure-test a decision before announcing it, and how they pass that same permission down to their own team. Listeners leave able to hear what their leadership group is not saying, and knowing what to do once they hear it.View all topics →

About Russell Harvey

Russell Harvey, podcast guest

The Resilience Coach | Resilient Leadership Expert

100,000+ People positively affected6,000+ Executive coaching hours£12M+ ROI delivered by RWE npower leadership programme20+ years Learning, leadership and organisational development

Russell Harvey is The Resilience Coach - a resilient leadership expert, executive coach, facilitator and keynote speaker who helps leaders and organisations perform at their best when the world refuses to stand still.

With more than 20 years in Learning, Leadership and Organisational Development, 6,000+ hours of executive coaching and over 70 published podcast appearances, Russell is an experienced and engaging voice on resilience, leadership and navigating persistent change. He has worked with leaders across organisations including Novartis, the NHS, AB World Foods, Kerry Group and The Co-operative Group.

Russell’s work goes beyond helping people simply cope with pressure. He believes true resilience isn’t about “bouncing back”, being tougher or pretending everything is fine - it’s about springing forward with learning and becoming better equipped to lead because of the challenges you’ve faced.

His approach connects the human side of leadership directly to what matters to organisations: engaged people, stronger cultures, better decisions and improved performance. His work has delivered measurable results, including a leadership programme that returned £12 million to the business and a Resilient Leader Programme that achieved more than 1,100% ROI.

In August 2025, Russell achieved his long-held purpose of positively affecting 100,000 people.

View profile →

About this episode

What do you do when your child or teen has a meltdown? How do you help your kids bounce back after suffering a bitter disappointment or worse, trauma and grief? Teaching your kids resilience is so key to their success as an adult, that I’ve asked a resilience coach to join us so we can master resilience for both ourselves and our kids.

Russell Harvey's mission is giving others the tools and techniques to create the right conditions to apply “transformation” to their roles as parents and leaders.

To learn more about Russell Harvey, receive coaching find resources or listen to his podcast visit: https://www.theresiliencecoach.co.uk/

Special thanks to InGenius Prep for sponsoring The Fatherhood Challenge. To learn more about InGenius Prep or to claim your free consultation, visit: https://ingeniusprep.com/get-a-free-consultation/?utm_campaign=2024+Podcast+Email+Marketing&utm_content=Fatherhood+Podcast&utm_medium=Fatherhood+Podcast&utm_source=Fatherhood+Podcast&utm_term=Fatherhood+Podcast

Special thanks to Zencastr for sponsoring The Fatherhood Challenge. Use my special link https://zen.ai/CWHIjopqUnnp9xKhbWqscGp-61ATMClwZ1R8J5rm824WHQIJesasjKDm-vGxYtYJ to save 30% off your first month of any Zencastr paid plan.

Transcription - Teaching Resiliency to Your Child

---

What do you do when your child or your teen has a meltdown?

How do you help your kids bounce back after suffering a bitter disappointment or worse, trauma or grief?

Teaching your kids resilience is so key to their success as an adult

that I've asked a resilience coach to join us here if this will help us master resilience for both

ourselves and our kids. So don't go anywhere. Before we begin, I'd like to thank our proud sponsor

of this episode and the Fatherhood Challenge in Genius Prep. In Genius Prep is the world's

premier admissions consulting firm proud to be officially recognized as the country's top college

admissions consultants, helping students prepare for admissions to top schools through individualized

educational programs that increase chances of admission by up to 10 times. In Genius Prep

students work with former admission officers to differentiate themselves from other competitive

students in three areas colleges evaluate students in academics, extra curricular activities

and personal characteristics. Just this past admission cycle,

Genius Prep students have secured 110 offers from Ivy League schools, 268 offers from top 20 schools

and 904 offers from top 50 schools. Genius Prep student success lies within the fact that

Genius Prep is an all-in-one consulting firm offering every service of family needs,

whether it be test prep, tailored candidacy, building mentorship, academic mentorships,

the leadership and innovation lab, soft skills courses, writing courses, and other

customized programs to develop their application persona to the most effective and authentic

extent to share with colleges. Just click on the link in the episode description to book a free

strategy call with one of Genius Prep's college experts or you can visit ingeniousprep.com

that's ingeniousprep.com and let them know you came from the Fatherhood Challenge.

Welcome to the Fatherhood Challenge, a movement to awaken and inspire fathers everywhere to take

great pride in their role and a challenge society to understand how important fathers are to the

stability and culture of their family's environment. Now here's your host, Jonathan Guerrero.

Greetings everyone, thank you so much for joining me. Also joining us is Russell Harvey.

Russell's passion and mission is giving others the tools and techniques to create the right

conditions to apply transformation to their roles as parents and leaders. Russell, thank you so

much for being on the Fatherhood Challenge. Thank you so much for asking me, Jonathan, it's an

absolute pleasure to be here and to have all of their listeners tuning in. Hello to you all.

One of my favorite questions to start out with is a dad joke. So Russell, what is your favorite

dad joke? I'm in Leeds UK and there is in Scotland there's the Edinburgh festival,

comedy festival coming up again. So I actually had a look for last year's top 10 jokes for last year.

So for me a dad joke has to have this real mixture of like grown and laughter to it at the same time.

So the number one joke which I think sort of fits this bill from the last year's Edinburgh

Fringe Festival was as follows. I started dating a zookeeper but it turned out they were a cheetah.

So that should, yeah, do the laugh and the groan of the same problem. Thank you for being

with me. And that's actually from a Lorna Rose train that we need to have tripped that too.

And then I saw another one that caught me eye in the top 10. I thought this is number four or five.

So this one is when women gossip they get called too faced but when men gossip it's called a podcast.

So those ones tickled me and I hope they tickle everybody else as well. So those yes,

those are two for you there are two for one. The Russell, they were true dad jokes.

All right, well let's dive right in. Russell you have an impressive career. What is your story and

journey that led you to become a resilience coach? I'm being cheeky now because it's not a

resilience coach. Jonathan, I am the resilience coach. If you want to farm you anywhere it's not

any old resilience coach. It's the resilience coach. I managed to snaffle that one for a website

domain so I'm sticking to it. So my journey I've always really been interested in human behavior.

I think I've been fascinated since a really early age about how come people do the things that they do?

How can we do behavior this particular way or we don't behave in this particular way?

And the vast majority of my career has been in learning and development and leadership

development but it started 1996 in Hong Kong. So I was travelling around the world for a year

with my lovely girlfriend who later became my wife and I was teaching in Hong Kong.

I was teaching English language lessons so essentially just local Hong Kong Chinese.

And in the room some form of magic was happening. I didn't know what it was but I just thought

you know what I think I want to do this for a living. But I knew I didn't want to be a teacher

teaching a school. I just knew that wasn't me and then I came back to the UK and thought you know

what I think I want to do training because the magic that was happening in the room

it turns out later was people learning people having light bulb moments. People going from

confused face to a heart I understand the face. That did something to me. That did something to my

heart and my gut and my head and it actually just sort of gave me a zap of a wonderful feeling.

And that goes into my purpose. So one of the dimensions of being resilient is having a purpose

and we may talk about this later but by the year 2025 I want to positively affect 100,000 people

and right now I'm up to about 72,312ish essentially. And so when I mean by positively affect is there

anybody that I support to have their realization, their light bulb moments, their learning moments.

And so when I came back from Hong Kong in 1997 essentially had a career in learning and development

and today I call myself a facilitator and a coach. And the fact that the resilience coach came about

is that my last permanent role was a business called the co-op and their co-operatives worldwide

and not long after I joined he got itself into a real pickle as a business.

And I was just there supporting all of the leaders, the top 300 leaders around actually this

business is in trouble. What do we do? How do we resolve this? And I said well this is word resilience

and there's this an acronym called VUCA which people may or may not be familiar with. And I went

all of our approaches, our solutions, our answers are in there. So my specialism is how to lead

yourself and others really well in a volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous world. And that is

the resilience coach. In what ways can dad's model resiliency for their kids? What are the long term

impacts of such modeling? I think the really important thing right now is how I describe and define

resilience. So I would love, you know, yourself, do you know the thing? And everybody's listening now

to get their heads and hearts around how I define resilience, which is as follows. So resilience is

about springing forward with learning, springing forward with learning. So I'm personally not a fan of

the term bounce back because we can't actually go backwards. Sometimes there's a risk that when a

challenging event happens to us, yes, we do need to recover from it. But then we are quite often

said to ourselves, right, our now bounce back. And it's can there's a risk. It's a subconscious

instruction to the brain to go back to how you were and you can't do that. Resilient people are

perpetually learning, springing forward with learning. So to answer your question, how leaders,

parents, dads can actually cultivate resilience in their children and in their team is to cultivate

optimism and the growth mindset. That's what they can do. And then so explain what they are and then

the long term benefits. So optimism is the fact that we're trying to move away from toxic positivity.

So how you get to feelings of hope and feeling positive is to actually think about optimism first.

Now if you look up the dictionary definition of optimism, it's got the word positivity

is gripe it. So they're heavily intertwined. And the starting point of optimism is the fact that

it is grounded in reality. So one of the things that we have to find a way throughout life to

accept with good grace is that life is unfair. It's just really horrible things happen to wonderful,

amazing, gorgeous people. Life is unfair. So cultivating that attitude and that understanding

in your children and in the team that you lead is really helpful. So optimism is grounded in reality.

So you do need to understand that if there's a si

Guest: Russell Harvey

Book Russell Harvey for your show

77+ podcast & stage appearances. Remote or in studio, broadcast-grade audio.

Request an interview →