Russell Harvey

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Transcription - Teaching Resiliency to Your Child

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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

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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