Stuart Taylor: the definition of resilience

After an excellent array of speakers from day 1, Stuart Taylor had a lot to live up to, and he certainly delivered.

Stuart leads The Resilience Institute in Australia, and is an experienced management consultant with a focus on resilience, cognition, work/life integration and stress.

Stuart has become a particular expert at resilience after he was diagnosed with brain cancer in 2002 with a prognosis of two-and-a-half years. He recently celebrated his 5 year milestone, and his strength and buoyancy is certainly admirable.

His speech for the DPV conference was titled ‘Living and working with body, heart, mind and spirit’. Covering almost every facet of life, Stuart asked the audience for a definition of resilience.

After a range of various answers Stuart said Nelson Mandela was his own person perfect model of resilience. He said he believed resilience was a learned capacity to overcome obstacles of the past, bounce back from major setbacks, street through daily challenges and reach out to our full potential.

There is a need to recognise the fact that fear holds us back from performing to our full potential. He showed the audience his model of the ‘performance supply chain’, including, physiology, emotions, thoughts, behaviour and performance.

For example, if you have good physiology everything else will work in the supply chain.

Then he bombarded the professionals in the crowd with some unbelievable statistics.

“Up to 80 per cent of illness is a direct effect of the way we live and work,” he said.

“Sixty per cent are overweight or obese. 50 per cent of us have sleep issues.”

“Clearly we are not living or working well…” he said.

So, he challenged his audience, ‘how can we effectively build resilience?’ Stuart said we should acknowledge that we will experience stress; it is turning it into positive stress that is the challenge.

And thus he introduced the ‘death spiral’, a chain of events that will eventuate if stress is not dealt with in a positive way.

First is confusion, which leads us to be disengaged, and can cause us to withdraw. This will create a sense of vulnerability, distress and finally depression.

Stuart was there to teach us to move in the opposite direction by way of ‘stress mastery’. Which means being able to identify negative stress.

He then demonstrated to the audience by simply taking deep breaths, someone can reduce their heart rate and improve their physiology. Taking a volunteer (Jenni Sewell, CEO of PINARC pictured) from the audience, Stuart attached her to a heart rate monitor, and in a matter of a few minutes, her rate had reduced dramatically since she stepped on stage.

His next theory was the idea of ‘flow’. Being in flow meant, goals are clear, skills and challenges are high and equal, control is not problem, feedback is immediate, concentration deepens, there is a feeling of being in the present, sense of time is altered and there is loss of ego.

The second step to resilience is physical vitality, and recognising the importance of exercise, nutrition and sleep.

Third is emotional competence, and the ability to empathise. People have “different emotional reactions to different things,” he said.

The fourth step is cognitive discipline, and reaching out to your full potential. He followed this point up with a quick exercise of word jumbles for the audience, and got them to reflect on how they felt when they couldn’t solve the problem.

“Emotions can quickly turn negative which reduces performance,” he said.

The final step was spirit in action, where someone is creative, decisive and executive in ‘flow’. Stuart asked the audience which road they would be taking, and said, “You have more choices than you know.”

After his speech, Stuart emphasised how important it was for disability professionals to show resilience.

“[Resilience] is absolutely critical, but it’s more than just helping them to cope, it needs to be more about how do they perform at the level they want to, to be at their best, so they ultimately can be happy,” he said.

About Stuart Taylor

In 2002, while climbing the ladder to corporate executive, Stuart Taylor was diagnosed with Brain Cancer; prognosis 2.5 years.  Far from accept the prognosis; Stuart embarked on a journey back to physical, emotional, cognitive and spiritual health.  Part of this journey included creating The Resilience Institute in Australia to share his experience and philosophy with Australian organisations.  Stuart has recently celebrated his 5 year milestone and is going from strength to strength.  

Stuart leads The Resilience Institute in Australia.  He is an experienced management consultant with a focus on resilience, cognition, stress and work/life integration.  He has worked in a range of industries.  Stuart’s clients include Victorian Government (including DHS), National Australia Bank, Vodafone and Citigroup.

Stuart is an engaging and entertaining facilitator who has a passion for helping people to awaken to the path to their full potential

The Resilience Institute provides consulting, assessment and training to help individuals and organisations develop five disciplines of resilience.

We are a community of medical, psychological and business professionals based in Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, Auckland, Christchurch and Toronto.

"...more than education, more than experience, more than training, a person's level of resilience will determine who succeeds and who fails." Harvard Business Review May 2002.

Website: The Resilience Institute