Resilience – Stronger with Rakesh Shukla™

Articles Tagged with: Resilience

Feb

Resilience is how fast you can Recover

… not how long you can endure

Have you felt low in energy and motivation and wished you could be tougher? You’re not alone if you do. We all believe that the longer we tough it out, the tougher we are, and therefore the more successful we will be. That is how most of us understand resilience.

My mistaken approach to resilience

My journey to ‘resilience’ started as a necessity of enduring pain from a very young age. It started off with me, a scared seven-year-old who had rheumatic heart disease, having to take an intramuscular penicillin injection every 20 days — 10 ml in the consistency and viscosity of curd. The pain from the injection blinded me. I had to learn to face the day of the injection with courage and to endure blinding pain every time I walked in the next couple of days.

Eventually, I got so good at it that when I broke my back and doctors told me I could never walk without surgery — I learned to not just walk but to run and lift. I once lived with a broken ankle for months. More recently I got electrocuted on an 11,000-volt line — the pain was unbearable for days. A few months later, I cut the artery of my left forearm in an accident. The blood spurted all over my face, eyes, and clothes, so I wiped the blood from my eyes, injected myself repeatedly with drugs to prevent both blood loss and shock, and then drove an hour to hospital with my one good arm.

At work, when I started TWB, I remember working for 16 hours a day for two years without a day off. Today, it’s been seven years since I took a vacation or watched a movie in a theater. I thought I was resilient and tough, but I was wrong.

I have always prided myself on being able to take a lot of punishment, but the last few years have taught me that I had learnt all the wrong things about resilience and developed a bad work ethic. I mistook what it meant to have resilience for how much punishment I could take when it actually is about how quickly I could recover to 100% performance capacity time and again.

The Resilience Model

Much of what we perceive about being tough is inspired by the military. It was certainly true for me. I came from a military background, and as a boy, I read about battles and courage because I knew I was scared. The image of a soldier fighting without stopping when they are shot, or a boxer fighting one more round when they are badly beaten was what toughness meant for me.

Even if the military is not where your idea of resilience comes from, another wrong idea of resilience is bred into you from an early age. You are valued for how early you wake up to study or how many hours you stay up working on a project.

These ideas of resilience become part of our work ethic when we join the workforce. Nobody is punching us in the face but we put in long hours that leave us exhausted. Soon we start thinking of overwork and exhaustion as the same as having a work ethic. Long hours of work become a measure of how we should be seen as professionals. The satisfaction derived from driving late from work and waiting for the weekend so you can hit a pub is now an epidemic. Working and being exhausted from it is now the example of having grit — when actually it is trying really hard, recovering, then trying again.

What is so Exhausting About your day?

After being exhausted for years, I learnt that resilient people operate in either of two zones — the performance or the recovery zone. The performance zone is about making a concerted effort to drive a result. You can operate in this zone for a few hours at most before fatigues sets in.

This is why we need to get to the recovery zone, where we recharge to get back to 100% capacity before we push again. This comes from a fundamental concept in biology called homeostasis. It describes the ability of the brain to continuously restore and sustain wellbeing.

Essentially high performance has a cycle — work hard, rest, work hard and rest. You can see this in sportspersons for they train, rest, train and rest. The more time we spend in the performance zone, the more time we need in the recovery zone. The value of the recovery period rises in proportion to the amount of effort, which is fatigue.

The massive effort itself does not cause exhaustion; it is when we do not have enough time in the recovery zone that we feel we’re overworked and stress starts building. When our body and brain are overworked we have a negative balance and use a vast amount of mental and physical resources just to return to zero before we can get going again.

This is an actual physical condition called ‘upregulation’. Filling the negative balance repeatedly that is ‘upregulation’ causes exhaustion. This is why even one late night can leave you exhausted.

There is another powerful phenomenon that is taking place at the same time, which is ‘the fear of doing nothing’. This is an actual unsaid fear that has been trained into us from our wrong idea of resilience. The fear of doing nothing initially starts as a fear of not contributing to our goals or relinquishing our responsibilities. It is a powerful emotion because this fear is mixed with guilt. When your child is unwell or you require a large sum of money, taking a break feels like a crime. So how do you cope with feeling guilty about resting?

Rest and Recovery are not the same

We fill this ‘recovery’ period with what we think are activities that are relaxing or less intense — such as looking at the phone or checking messages or e-mails. When we first do that, our fear subsides and so does the tiredness. Our body and brain think, ‘Hey I can do this’ because there is no guilt of taking time off.

Without thinking about it, you assume that shifting attention from work e-mails to a Facebook/WhatsApp conversation with a friend will aid in recovery. But the fact is that you are still active and engaged, thinking about, “What did she mean by that,’ or ‘What did I say for him to assume this?’

Even when you come across a video with political views or when you lay quietly thinking about how to change your life, your brain has not received a break from its arousal state. I know people who come back from vacations — exhausted!

Changes I made to my life

Many people ask me how I function — how much time do you need to work off an INR 20+ crore deficit when you are alone? I lived an extreme life but these are some actions that allowed me to function and work against tremendous odds:

I have learnt to actually divide my work equally and be ruthless with my time. When I am thinking of work or actually working, I’m in the performance zone. The time I spend with my dogs or working out is my recovery zone.
My hours of working have dropped dramatically (to around four from 10-12 at TWB_) but my productivity, energy, and creativity have skyrocketed.
If there is any activity that does not fall into either of these — meeting a friend or working on something that puts me in a deficit (read about procrastination here) then I think hard whether it is worth investing my time in it all. Invariably the answer is no.
For years I could hardly sleep but now I am fast asleep by 10 pm, and up by daybreak — though I sleep so light. The change in breathing of just one of 20+ dogs around me will wake me up.

I can’t say I have a work-life balance because I do not seek it. I run a 24-hour day whether I work for money, or am with my dogs or working out. I only stop to sleep. It has been seven-plus years since I have taken a vacation both because I could not leave the city and I did not have the money to spend on a ticket or a night out. For years I thought, “Next year I will take that vacation,” but now I have decided against it. I don’t need a vacation; when I am not working I am on vacation!

Not resting strangely allows us to feel connected with our goals. You eventually fall asleep exhausted with thoughts and plans of how much work you’ll do tomorrow. Its a poor relationship but a strong habit. The very lack of a recovery period is dramatically holding back our ability to be resilient and successful.

You don’t have to have a life like mine, of course, but there are important techniques in the ‘Stronger with Rakesh Shukla™’ programmes through which you can learn how to build the resilience you need to have a rich, proud and fulfilling life.

Stronger with RAKESH SHUKLA™ is a framework for developing unparalleled mental and physical toughness. It is based on Rakesh’s life, and has helped drive two ‘comebacks’.

Rakesh Shukla slept on railway platforms on his way to creating a world-leading technology company — TWB_, which is the choice of over 40 Fortune 500 tech customers worldwide including Microsoft, Boeing, Airbus, Intel, and others. However, at 43, he lost everything within a year. Alone and friendless, he spent the next five years repaying over INR 20 crore of debt and taxes, while building back his company and reputation, and creating and funding VOSD — world’s largest dog sanctuary and rescue.

Rakesh Shukla has suffered heart disease since he was seven years old, had had two heart attacks by the time he was 30, suffers from brain diseases, has broken his back and his kidneys are failing. Towards the end of this five-year period, Rakesh weighed 88 kg and very unfit. Today, at 48 years, he can lift well over 100 kg above his head, run a 10-minute mile, do 2,000 push-ups, and 250 pull-ups. He has never been to a gym, been on a diet, had a trainer, or taken any supplements.

Dec

Failing ‘Intelligently’ can make you Succeed

Learn from previous mistakes, and review feedback to achieve goals

I know about failing spectacularly, and I know even more about succeeding after you’ve failed spectacularly. In my comeback over five years of rebuilding my life, I found that while I had the courage and the will to succeed, just having resilience in doing the same things over and over again would not turn my tide.

Making an attempt and failing at it is valuable. Getting up after it, more so. But making the same attempt again is stupidity. Nobody can help a person who gives up against all odds. But the difference between those who keep trying and do not succeed, and those who do, might be this.

We’ve been taught since childhood that failure is the stepping stone to success. But we also know that only some patterns of failure lead to success. When I first started rebuilding my company, and my life, it was incredibly frustrating. I could not build the same company simply because it ran on millions of dollars of annual budgets with hundreds of people. When I reached out to customers and — if they did indeed want to engage — there was little I could do to serve them.

My company TWB had a large Fortune 500 customer list; it was a large company that grew on internal cash flow. So clearly it was a viable revenue model and operational practice. Yet, failure in the business leadership team precipitated by my absence over a year had caused the company to get wiped out. The first mistake was that in this one year, we had tried to stick to the same revenue model that had made us successful — even when it failed quarter after quarter.

When I was literally the only person left in the company I was still selling the same story. It was incredibly frustrating because I was ignoring my past experiences and each failed attempt was like I was making it for the first time. What I was not doing was sift through past failures and either retain or replace components.

It took me another year to build that feedback loop. But something even more unnerving started happening — as I changed the story from this big corporate catering to Fortune 500 clients, I was failing even faster! What I did not realize is that progress accelerates with experience. It took me another two years to have made all the mistakes, taken all the feedback and made hundreds of failed attempts before we started seeing a consistent model of generating income and revenue.

Learning from failures

Over this period I learnt how while I was making successive attempts and failing overall, I was succeeding. The overall five-year journey can be broken into three phases:

Phase 1 – ‘If I keep trying I will succeed’: At this stage, I was investing little time in learning from the immediate past failed attempt. I was trying to stick to the blueprint of what had happened over ten years of creating the company. The lessons I had to learn were coming from this last failed attempt, not what happened five ago or even a month ago — but I wasn’t listening.
Phase 2 – ‘Acceptance of failure’: I began to accept that by making more attempts I was not actually making any progress. So success was not a question of how many attempts I should make. It was a hard realisation to give up the idea of the self-made CEO of the multimillion-dollar company. That company didn’t exist and I did not have the portfolio of skills to service those customers.
Phase 3 – ‘Intelligent failure attempts’: Giving up the idea of this large corporation left me with the one tool that I did bring to this situation — myself. I brought a large portfolio of business skills and I brought tremendous fight into whatever I did. So TWB_ and VOSD started building smaller brands and pitches — artefacts as I call them. And I’d make a large number of attempts to move each pitch. When something did not work I took the feedback from the last failed attempt, made the adjustment and attempted again.

When I was making TWB for the first time I was failing slowly because I was cautious of doing things with the resources I had and not letting them go to waste. On the other hand, when I had no resources and they were more precious I was failing faster and more frequently, but each attempt was smaller as well.

The earlier proposal win rate was > 70% because of the quality of the service and the niche that we serviced. I estimate that over the last year we’ve had more intelligent failures than in a decade before that! Essentially I was making a library of reusable failed attempts that I could refer to for what worked or didn’t. I call these attempts as ‘intelligent failures.’

Work smart, not hard

I also learnt that ‘intelligent failure’ required that I work smarter, not harder. When I was initially building TWB, I remember that I used to work for 16 hours a day, seven days a week for two years. But the feedback loop of ‘intelligent failure’ required that I process the information and with that, my time away from a computer or a customer increased.

Today I have a four-hour workday and that is on the way to create a company 10x larger than before! The rest of my time looks empty but that is when I’m actually processing the previous failure and planning a new failed attempt.

The power and value of feedback

In life, success is not guaranteed but I have learned the merit of working smarter not harder. I know that keeping a tight feedback loop allows me to fail faster and refine my library of components that work. It can be seen simply in the fact that I have a four-hour workday or less, and with 10 people, we have the income level of what TWB had with 100 employees.

I do not even live in the city, I live on a farm with my 900+ rescued dogs with a patchy data connection — it can take up to two hours just to upload this blog. But uploading it is also a lesson in intelligent failure, for it has made me observe during which parts of the day I will have an internet connection to work better!

Trying does not make you successful. Trying, failing, learning and doing it fast enough does.