IMI recently welcomed Dr Sinead Kane, international speaker, blind athlete, Guinness World Record holder, and lawyer amongst other accolades. Sinead has faced adversity throughout her life, due to being visually impaired. However, Sinead has chosen to be a victor rather than a victim of her disability, and has used her life and career to bring disruption to the status quo in a number of areas.

During her hugely inspirational talk, Sinead went into depth about resilience, and how we can achieve the mindset to thrive in tough times.

So, how can we work towards this mindset? According to Sinead, the answer lies within yourself. It’s all about showing leadership, and developing specific techniques that work for you. For example, when faced with adversity, Sinead enjoys taking a walk in nature, but that won’t work for everyone. You need to understand yourself before you try to develop these techniques.

The first key to achieving the mindset for success is to develop techniques that help you keep calm. Resilience is almost directly related to stress, but you can turn stress into strength through your attitude, and your daily habits.

Sinead’s next piece of advice it to find techniques that make you feel confident. With confidence, you can overcome adversity and anxiety. Sinead suggests that you perform a short exercise – draw a grid like you’d do to play X’s & O’s. You should have nine squares in front of you. Fill eight of them with things that make you feel confident, and one that makes you feel anxious. See how confidence can overcome anxiety?

So, how does all of this tie into effective leadership? Rapid, disruptive change is today’s normal. To cope, leaders need to be agile, adaptive, and resilient. Resilience brings with it a lot of fear, and even as you grow, you’ll still experience fear. The only way to rid yourself of it is to go out and do something! Everyone experiences fear in unfamiliar territory.

Leaders need to overcome five key fears to be successful:

• Making the wrong decision
• Being criticised for your approach
• Speaking as an authority
• Taking responsibility
• Failing entirely

Resilient leaders all share certain characteristics, and you can make an effort to work towards these in order to boost your own resilience.

These kinds of leaders stay optimistic, even when they don’t feel hopeful inside; they respond to setbacks and move on, adopting an attitude that allows them to control what they can, while letting everything else go. A resilient leader cultivates an open culture by seeking the views of make time to invest in personal renewal; cultivates networks; welcomes feedback; and perhaps most importantly of all, always stays authentic.

By channeling these traits, Sinead believes that you can become a visionary when it comes to resilience.

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