Resilient Leadership And The FABULOUS Principle

Resilient Leadership And The FABULOUS Principle – Episode Overview

It is often a past loss that propels women to become innovative trailblazers, mentors, and leaders. If they are able to find solutions to deal with their losses then they can problem solve anything. To build a business, leaders have to build their resilience. Guest, Barbara Rubel shares her FABULOUS Principle, an acronym for eight core competencies that influence women entrepreneurs to grow from their experience of loss into resilient leaders.

Introduction

Barbara Rubel talks about her FABULOUS Principle, and her work with women entrepreneurs and leaders to help them build their resilience. What excites me very much about Barbara and her work is that, despite our different professional backgrounds, we are aligned – the objectives and outcomes of what we offer are similar: to facilitate positive change.

Barbara has a BS in psychology and a Master’s degree in thanatology, which is the study of the field of grief counselling and loss. So from that perspective Barbara shows how we can come out stronger and triumph over adversity or loss to become more resilient.

Barbara Rubel is a keynote speaker, bestselling author and coach.

As a Leader, Know Yourself First

In a nutshell, Barbara’s approach to leadership is to focus first on yourself – start with your inner leadership. It’s about knowing yourself, your strengths and paying attention to self-development before attempting to influence others. Self awareness comes first.

Growing From Loss, Self Compassion

From her experience as a grief counselor, Barbara teaches us that trauma and loss can be catalysts for growth. The most difficult situations facilitate opportunities for meaning making and building resilience. Loss and grief can transform the way we look at challenges.

Out of her own story of grief, bereavement and mourning, Barbara changed her life to help her overcome personal loss and tragedy. In seeking to understand and make sense of her own grief, she proactively pursued a course of study that set her off on a career in which she has been flourishing for over 20 years.

The FABULOUS Principle

FABULOUS is an acronym that spells out the empowering capacity we have to become resilient leaders.

The key to Barbara's discovery of the FABULOUS Principle was the identification of eight core competencies that influence women entrepreneurs to grow from their experience of loss.

Listen in to hear how wonderfully Barbara explains each of these eight competencies. She also describes her process of tapping into each of these eight core competencies. Through carefully crafted language and purposefully designed questions, you can identify how you can work with each of the eight competencies to grow in your leadership and build resilience.

FFlexibility

AAttitude

BBoundaries

UUnderstanding Job Satisfaction

L Laughter

OOptimism

UUnited

SSelf-compassion

By seeking to understand how we can build on our past successes, the FABULOUS framework allows leaders to reflect on what worked in the past to deal with adversity and positively apply that wisdom to current stressors.

Self Compassion

It seems to me that to overcome trauma, self-compassion and being kind and gentle to ourselves was the place to start (even though it's the last competency in the FABULOUS principle.) Barbara explains how important it is to be kind to ourselves in difficult times and to win over the voices in our own heads. She mentions a number of positivity practices such as kindness, gratitude, persistence to help reconnect to our self compassion.

The framing and the questions Barbara poses to help us focus on what was helpful and productive in the past resonates with the Appreciative Inquiry world view. It's far more resourceful to focus on how we have overcome past challenges versus dwelling on the circumstances and people that may have contributed to our grief or stuckness or loss.

Empowering Questions for Self Compassion

Describe a time when you showed compassion (i.e. empathetic caring awareness of another person’s difficulties along with the desire to lessen it.)
Summarize a time when rather than negatively appraising your situation, you focused on what you did that was productive and helpful.
Appraise how you generously extended loving kindness to yourself (Barbara cited her own example of savoring a meal).
Thinking back on a past loss, tell a story about your self-soothing activities that helped alleviate your past personal distress.

Palette of Grief™

From her own experience, learning of her father’s suicide while she was in hospital giving birth to triplets, Barbara, a water colorist, experienced the entire turmoil and mess of her life as a swirling blend of colors. Her insights were that grief did not present itself neatly as a series of steps, a process, or sequence of events, but as a palette of swirling emotions, thoughts, beliefs and behaviors co-mingling as water colors bleed into each other in a painting when water is spilled across the surface of the painting and the colors blend and bleed into each other.

Burnout in Professional life

In her work with professional grief workers, Barbara became aware that the grief workers themselves were burnt out; they were experiencing compassion fatigue and vicarious trauma. Barbara began to refocus her efforts to support the professional carers to keep them healthy and happy. So she moved from working with those who were grieving to creating a space for the grief workers, like herself, to deal with stress. She saw the value in shifting the focus from experiencing the de-energizing effects of stress in grief workers to being energized by the stress they were experiencing. She switched to reframe stress so the grief workers could continue doing the work they loved before they were burnt out.

Do The Work That You Love

Barbara’s shift from a bereavement counselor to a speaker, specializing in overcoming stress led her to create tools and strategies that help people and leaders thrive and stay healthy so we can all do the work we love. This is her mission today. It’s about staying resilient in our work.

Listen to Barbara explain each of the other core competencies of FABULOUS in some detail. She provides helpful questions, stories and pearls of wisdom taken from her own story of transition.

In our conversation, we emphasize the importance of language, positive inquiry and sharing personal stories to help us find our inner strengths. True wisdom is gained in sharing our stories. We triumph over struggles when we talk openly and make meaning together.

Questions to Build Resilience

What positive themes do you continue to see woven through your story?
What’s the constructive takeaway and how do you talk to yourself about your story?
How does finding meaning in your narrative provide purpose in your life?
What strengths kept you positive during the struggle?
How can you apply what you learned during those difficulties and challenges to confident self-leadership?

As Barbara talks in detail about each of the eight core competencies of the FABULOUS Principle, you will be energized by her generous sharing and great wisdom. When we get clarity around each one, we will experience that stress can be a great energizer.