An Interview With Fotis Georgiadis
Building and maintaining your support network — this is about being deliberate about who you surround yourself with. Try to be around people that energize you and can provide support from different angles. E.g. someone to have fun with, someone to exercise with, someone to listen to your problems, someone to offer guidance at work. Don’t rely on the same person for all of this otherwise it can put too much strain on your relationship.
In this interview series, we are exploring the subject of resilience among successful business leaders. Resilience is one characteristic that many successful leaders share in common, and in many cases it is the most important trait necessary to survive and thrive in today’s complex market.
I had the pleasure of interviewing Rachel Austen
Rachel is a Chartered Occupational Psychologist and resilience specialist. She spent 10 years living in Asia and works with individuals and organisations help them tackle the challenge of burnout and take a preventative approach to managing resilience. Her interest this area began when she experienced serious burnout — it crept up on her suddenly so she created an assessment tool called AURA to help individuals and organisations measure resilience and recognize warning signs early, before they cause bigger problems. She now runs her own company, Austen Advisory. Outside work, Rachel is a yoga enthusiast — something she now draws on as a source of personal resilience.
Thank you so much for joining us! Our readers would love to get to know you a bit better. Can you tell us a bit about your backstory?
I’ve always been interested in mental health and actually did my research project for my psychology degree in assessing depression and anxiety using visual images for people who can’t read. However, I chose to become an occupational (work) psychologist and spent many years working as a business consultant doing people assessment and leadership development work. I’m fascinated by understanding people’s personalities, motives and behaviours so I love this sort of work. I also have a passion for travel and work took me out to Singapore in 2010. This was an amazing opportunity to understand different cultures as I was sent on projects all over the place. I moved to Hong Kong in 2012, then have only recently relocated to the UK.
I became interested in burnout through going through it myself. It crept up on me suddenly and I didn’t see the warning signs coming, because I had no idea what to look for. I was physically and emotionally drained, with serious adrenal fatigue. I unable to work for about 6 months and didn’t really feel myself again for about 2 years. This experience prompted me to set up my own business, using my expertise in psychometric assessments to design a proper, scientific tool called AURA to measure the impact of stress on individuals & organisation to shine a light on warning signs so they can address them early before they cause more damaging problems. It provides an overall resilience index to set a baseline for improvement and points people towards relevant, practical tools aligned to their personal symptom profile.
Can you share with us the most interesting story from your career? Can you tell us what lessons or ‘take aways’ you learned from that?
I have been fortunate enough to work with many different clients on some really interesting projects but one that stands out was when I worked with a prison to design a selection tool for prison officers which assessed their personality fit. It was critical that prison officers had the right mindset and attitudes so I spent time in the prison interviewing prisoners and officers to understand what ‘good looked like’. It was a fascinating insight into their psyche of a prison officer and what a tough role they have. What really stood out to me was how they all shared a common purpose to make a positive difference to these prisoners’ lives and get them back into society. It was this that fuelled their resilience through the challenges they had to navigate on a daily basis.
What do you think makes your company stand out? Can you share a story?
Our company is all about applying psychology in the workplace — I think what makes us stand out is that everything we do is scientific yet practical. All our work is evidence-based but we also understand the reality of the working environment which some academic research can be a little disconnected to. Our focus is on translating scientific insights into action to help people achieve their goals.
None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story?
There are so many people who have helped and encouraged me and I’m so grateful to but if I had to pick one, it would be a friend of mine Sarah who was my saviour when I was going through my burnout in 2015. I was living alone in Hong Kong at the time and collapsed in the night with a high fever. Luckily, I managed to reach the phone and she took me to hospital. Chinese hospitals are hard to navigate at the best of times when you don’t speak the language so I needed her there to help. Furthermore, she was such a support through my recovery and always checking in on me, even when I kept saying I didnt need any help. For me, that’s such an important lesson about resilience — social support is so important and we need to ensure we ask for help and be vulnerable to let others in. It’s also important to actively maintain our social support networks so we have people to draw on when we need it.
Ok thank you for all that. Now let’s shift to the main focus of this interview. We would like to explore and flesh out the trait of resilience. How would you define resilience? What do you believe are the characteristics or traits of resilient people?
Resilience is our capacity to recover quickly from setbacks and adapt positively through challenging times. It is the antidote to burnout.
It is not a personality trait but a skill we can learn and develop. You can think of it like a muscle — we can build it with consistent practice and a deliberate training plan. One of my favourite definitions of resilience is by the late positive psychologist Chris Peterson who describes resilience as the capacity to ‘struggle well’ — in other words, its about how we respond to the inevitable challenges that will come our way and being able to navigate them effectively, maintaining our wellbeing as best we can. Resilient people are constantly moving forward; they don’t dwell on the past or beat themselves up, but look for the next positive action step, however small that may be. When we are stressed and faced with a lot of demands, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed and powerless — it’s about taking a pause and identifying one small thing you can do that will make you feel a little better or start to remedy the situation.
Resilient people are constantly curious, looking to learn and grow through difficult times. They stay open-minded to possibilities and alternative solutions, rather than being quick to make judgements or jump to conclusions.
When you think of resilience, which person comes to mind? Can you explain why you chose that person?
I have a friend who has had a long series of really tough life challenges, including death of several people close to her and in general dealing with more than her fair share of life’s difficulties. I’ve always admired how she has dealt with these — not by avoidance and pretending everything is ok but by leaning in to challenges and difficult emotions, knowing that this too shall pass. We build our resilience through adversities so she now has the mental and emotional skills to navigate each difficulty with a little more ease.
Has there ever been a time that someone told you something was impossible, but you did it anyway? Can you share the story with us?
Many times actually! I believe that if you want something enough and put the effort in, you can make things happen that you never thought were possible. One example is when I did an ultramarathon for the first time — the distance was 100km over Hong Kong’s tallest mountains. I was asked to step in only 3 weeks before the race, having never run more than 10km in my life! Obviously, I thought it was totally impossible to achieve this so declined initially but I was persuaded after going out for a trial run with my friends and realised I able to go further than I thought. The race was such an amazing experience and I learnt so much about resilience. We are much more resilient than we think! Our brains are wired for negativity and to keep us safe so they can be overprotective at times, which can stop us doing things. Through the race, I stayed focused on getting to the next checkpoint — I never thought about how far it was to the end. We celebrated getting to each checkpoint, sometimes each km mark which really boosts positive emotions and confidence to help you keep going. But, the strongest source of resilience was the team i was in — we all helped lift each other up and get through the really tough parts of the race. The sense of belonging that brings is really powerful.
Did you have a time in your life where you had one of your greatest setbacks, but you bounced back from it stronger than ever? Can you share that story with us?
It probably is when I burned out in 2015. I was so physically and emotionally exhausted, I was unable to do anything for many months. However, whilst my recovery was long, it led me to set up my company as I was really passionate about helping others prevent burnout and share my experiences. I gain great meaning and satisfaction from my work now and I’m also much more aware of managing stress and living in a healthier way. I am quick to recognise signs of strain and have the tools to address them quickly so i don’t go down the path to burnout again.
I feel I wouldn’t be where I am without having gone through that difficult experience.
Did you have any experiences growing up that have contributed to building your resiliency? Can you share a story?
I lost 2 people close to me to suicide in a short space of time. I felt totally crushed by both experiences and at the time thought I would never get over it. However, the emotions do pass and it gets easier. I think I learned a lot from that about maintaining perspective. When I get stressed about a deadline, negative comment or if something didn’t quite go to plan, I have learnt to let it go and move on. I adopt the attitude that it is not serving me to ruminate or beat myself up over it and challenge my thinking. I often find i’m being way too hard on myself or being irrational in the way i’m thinking about it. I find this very helpful in staying grounded and balanced.
Resilience is like a muscle that can be strengthened. In your opinion, what are 5 steps that someone can take to become more resilient? Please share a story or an example for each.
- Build your self-awareness — learn to recognise the warning signs of stress in yourself. Stress shows up differently in everyone through shifts in thinking patterns, impacts on mental focus, emotions, behaviours and physical symptoms. If you want to gain a detailed understanding of your personal stress profile, you can complete the tool I designed at www.aura.works
- Create a personal action plan — its all very well knowing you’re struggling but you need to take action. Start small and identify one tiny action step that will have a positive impact. This is personal — it depends where you’re at on the Burnout-Resilience Continuum. If you’re really struggling and near to crisis point, then it’s about recovery as the priority. For others, it may be more about shifting from ‘surviving’ to ‘thriving’
- Form habits — there’s a gap between knowing and doing so embedding healthy habits is critical for long term behaviour change. Contrary to popular belief, habit formation is not just about repetition, its about designing the desired behaviours into your life and constantly experimenting until you find you do them without thinking.
- Reflection — this is a step people miss but it important to build in time to reflect as we move through life otherwise we find ourselves going into autopilot and repeating the same behavioural patterns. Simply asking yourself in the morning ‘What would make today great?’ is an easy way of focusing your mind for the day. Then at the end of the day, taking a couple of minutes to journal 1 good thing that happened today and 1 thing that could have gone better. This way you are constantly learning and growing.
- Building and maintaining your support network — this is about being deliberate about who you surround yourself with. Try to be around people that energize you and can provide support from different angles. E.g. someone to have fun with, someone to exercise with, someone to listen to your problems, someone to offer guidance at work. Don’t rely on the same person for all of this otherwise it can put too much strain on your relationship.
You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. 🙂
I think everyone could be more kind to each other. Under stress, our naturally reaction is to focus inward and only think about ourselves but if everyone could take a tiny action to be kind to someone each day, that would have a huge ripple effect and the world would be a better place.
How can our readers follow you on social media?
Follow me on instagram; https://www.instagram.com/aura.works/
For your readers in the UK, we are running a special ‘resilience retreat’ to help people recover from the pandemic stress and take inspired action forward. We still have a few spots left so if anyone is interested, there are full details here
This was very inspiring. Thank you so much for joining us!
Rising Through Resilience: Rachel Austen On the Five Things You Can Do To Become More Resilient was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
