Strengthening The Resilience Muscle

Episode Transcript

Kelly:   [00:00:00]Welcome back to Let’s Talk About Skills, Baby, the podcast where we discover what skills can help you live your best life. I am your host Kelly Ryan Bailey, and each week I chat with inspiring visionaries about the skills that make them successful. You’ll get a firsthand account of how they develop those skills, as well as their innovative approaches to improving skills based hiring and learning around the world. Now let’s talk about skills, baby.

Our guest today is Amelie Yan-Gouiffes. Thank you so much for joining us today. I’d like introduce you quickly. Amelie has spent more than 23 years managing crisis in Latin America, the Caribbean, Asia, Africa, Europe, and the Pacific working with the European Union, the UN System, The Red Cross [00:01:00] and non-governmental organizations.

She works with affected communities to address their needs in an empowering way, advises governments on disaster recovery and risk reduction, builds the capacity of national and international humanitarian and development actors, and empowers the corporate sector for growing through change, disruption and uncertainty.

Her 2020 personal journey includes the experience of cancer and chemotherapy, gifting her with a valuable additional perspective on resilience building and thriving in the time of crisis.

She has coached and delivered motivational talks to thousands of government officials, members of parliament, entrepreneurs, charity leaders, professional speakers, priests, and students in Spain, Iran, France, Thailand, Malaysia, Sri Lanka, South Africa, and in many other countries.

She is a certified professional coach by the International Coach Federation. Her book, which I highly recommend, is called “Speak and Live Your Legacy” [00:02:00] available in English and Spanish and published by Bubok publishing, for a practical pathway to build resilience and shine, our personal and corporate inner diamond. It has been featured on Spanish national radio on Teresa Veahos program and listed among a 20 books selection of must read books. What an amazing accomplishment.

She also speaks fluently in English, French, and Spanish and her dream, which I have to say I absolutely love, a world where we can all be belong and become. Thank you so much for joining us today. This is just fabulous. And I know that I have read through these amazing highlights which I just want to take a moment and thank you for what you’ve put out into the world to help people.

And what I’d love to do is also just hear a little bit more about your journey. What led you here today?

Amelie: Thank you so much Kelly for the invitation,   for enabling me to be here talking to you and to your [00:03:00] audience, to your people. I’m always very excited of what technology enables us to do today. My journey stops is fundamentally global, it’s tough. So when I’m 18 years old, I leave France and I take a night train to Spain. I would not speak Spanish at that time.

And I’m with a suitcase, it’s 30 years back because close to my 49 this year. So this is the time the suitcases do not have wheels.  And I take this training I go to Spain initially to learn Spanish one year. And actually it was my first expatriation  the last time I went to live in France, because of course I came back to France for holidays, but I never actually came back for living in France.

I studied in Spain some more years and then I engaged into humanitarian aid. I started with Bosnia I mean, I lived in modern 13 countries and intervened and had the mission or covered natural disasters or conflict areas in close to 40 countries.

Kelly: Wow. If [00:04:00] I may, what made you interested in that type of work?

Amelie: 1994. remember very well the year, because it’s one year before the first international conference on the rights of women, the Beijing conference. And at that time, a big thing because it was when this conference came out that women’s rights are human rights and then nowadays it can seem of course.

At that time there’s been years of preparation, really intense and intensive discussions among countries. There’s been amendments to these statements from many countries. So it was not a little thing. So at that time, I’m volunteering with enlist international and actually with a group  of other people.

Eh, we set up the first women’s rights team in the Spanish Secretary of Amnesty International. And when I volunteer with amnesty international, I read and I discover and I organized campaign for all these [00:05:00] human rights activists or these rights activists all over the world who are being tortured and are being jailed.

Who are not given a space to express and in whom still fighting and struggling and who do not have access maybe to some rights that we take for granted, not like the right to vote and the right as a woman to dress and to speak as you wish.  And I’m fascinated by these people.

I said, my God, I want to know these people. I want because they, wow. It gives me goosebumps. You want to know the views. You want to listen to them. You want to see what is the style that they have within that makes them go through all what they go through and to believe, and to be so activists.

At that time the only way to get to the field where they’re doing humanitarian aid. So I applied to a project manager management job in a humanitarian aid organization. And then I fall in [00:06:00] love with humanitarian aid. Because it’s about understanding the cultural environment and social dynamics, political contexts. And so I find it’s fascinating. I started in 89. Team 97. I was very blessed because this has been an amazing time in the world of relief and the emergency response.

And because we have grown a lot, there’s been a lot of development of the professionalism of this thinking of the way we support people in crisis. Why I do that and why I work on crisis management, whether it’s through missions to the field or through coaching or through talks. I can sort of read people’s suffering, it touches me so deep in the heart when people suffer. Because there’s no level. Your crisis may be small to the eyes of others, but for you, it’s overwhelming.

For example, the COVID crisis, if you look at countries that are used to crisis, I mean, [00:07:00] continents like Africa, they managing much better than us. The Western world, because we’re not used to that. So our resilience and I like to call it the muscle of resilience, is it not that strong because we’ve not practiced.

So here for example, I coach a lot of corporate teams in industries from the tourism industries. I’ve coached a number of them in the people as in so much suffering. So when someone from  another context could say, Hey, why are you suffering? You have the state paying for your salary or part of it.

You have all these resources. And I don’t have that. I’m not complaining, but it’s just a matter. The suffering cannot be compared. And that’s what I work. This is my passion to be of  support with what I know to people in suffering.

Kelly: I love how you called it a muscle, the funny thing about what I call skills, which are things like empathy, you being able to feel the pain that someone else is going through [00:08:00] the resilience muscle.

These are things that you don’t just learn once. Just like exercise, it’s something that you work on constantly. And you develop, and in all honesty, just like exercise and just like muscles in your body, there are some days where it’s just not that strong for whatever reason. And it’s just the gradual buildup of these life skills, these life muscles.

I’m really loving that term.  That makes such a huge difference. I often wonder this because most people get into this kind of work because there’s like a moment in time for them that makes them see something. That flips a switch and they know this is what I’m going to do. Did you have this one moment that you can recall that made you realize that’s where I’m headed?

Amelie: Yes. I had this moment. The first one is the one I mentioned when I was 18 years old and I decide that I go and learn [00:09:00] Spanish. I think, I didn’t know where I was heading. I mean, that’s not that though. Yes, I’m going to Spain, I’m going to study Spanish. I’m going for one year. The plan was one year. 

And it’s following like this inner core, the thing that is burning. So strong inside that in your guts, in your heart, in your soul that you have to go. But you’re not really clear where you’re going and what is taking you. So, yes, I had to plan because I had a plan, so I wanted to learn Spanish one year.

I wanted to open my mind, my eyes to the world and come back to my law studies in France, then be a lawyer, et cetera, et cetera. So actually this not why I had it. I had to do it in a different direction.

Kelly: Of course. I love that, but it’s so true that most people have this plan that’s a

Amelie: Yes, that’s true. So you go with the plan, but you follow your intuition, your instinct, or however you call it or the divine call. And you know that’s the way, that [00:10:00] there’s no, maybe because, I’m the queen of, doing this column’s not plus and minus. And this decision because when you’re young, you also have this plan, you just go, okay.

So I just went with a plan because it’s important after the intuition, you transform it into a plan, so it can materialize and you go somewhere. Now you need to know where you’re going. I love this quote from Yogi Berra, he was a coach of the baseball and he used to say, “if you don’t know where you’re going, you might end up somewhere else.”

 I love this quote because at the beginning you say, well, of course. But then it ends, you think, so many times in life or in what we do, we don’t know where we going. And then after we surprise at what day we wake up and we don’t feel we are in the right place, because actually we didn’t decide where we wanted to be.

So that’s the first time and it was harder. It was hard because you arrive at, I mean, I was 18 years old. I was looking like 16 years old. I arrived to a country where I don’t speak the [00:11:00] language. I know no one. But then you keep up on you and you stay there. And then the next time I did it.

 In terms of my life, a big thing has been like seven years back, when I quit my job in the European Union to just go to another planet where didn’t know the language. I opened my company.

I was living in Thailand at the time. And when I say your new world with a different language, is that because I didn’t know about entrepreneurship, I didn’t know about companies, I didn’t know about Chambers of Commerce. I knew only, like one entrepreneur. I’m more used to being with communities, with governments, with international organizations.

This was another world. So now in humanitarian aid, we work a lot with the private sector. That’s very recent. So I arrived to this planet and new language, new everything. So I jumped. Again plan, but the plan was I just knew I had to go and explore.

  Kelly: Let’s talk about this inner voice for a moment because I think so many of us [00:12:00] throughout our lives whether or not we’ve felt that inner voice, listening to it is a different thing. What are the things that you think you learned through that process and being able to do it a second time, that would help else hear that inner voice?

Amelie: Sometimes it’s not very clear. I was with my job and I knew there was something that I wanted to do, but I had no idea what it was. I knew that I wanted to change the world. So that’s a big thing after 20 something years of being in my humanitarian world.

And then one day I received an email saying, learn how to ask empowering questions.

I said, my God, that’s what I want, because I’m passionate about empowering people. I mean, that’s my obsession. So I said, oh, that’s what I want. Because even in the office and everything colleagues would come to me even if I was a coach, to share something, to ask for how to manage that and everything.

So even when I worked with communities and I said, instead of telling them what to [00:13:00] do or guiding them or advising, even if It’s very wise. I want them to connect with their inner wisdom, with their knowledge, because really empowering when you’re able to do that. So I said, oh, let me do it. I went on the free call. And, and it was a huge coaching certification, 13 months, or no 11 months. Wow.

I said, that’s amazing. And at some stage I cannot continue with this. I mean, I had a high level job in really demanding in terms of presence and commitment and everything. I had two kids alone one of them a baby. And I was coaching at three o’clock in the morning with the United States, Saturday, Sundays, I said, I cannot continue. So what now? And I say, oh my God, I love when I coach people.

Kelly: I love that.  One other part that I thought of as we were having this discussion is the work that you’re doing on the corporate side as well, because a portion of this podcast focuses on innovations that are happening in the workplace.

I would tend to say skills based hiring and learning in my mind, this is all part of future of [00:14:00] work, future of education. When you do the corporate work that you do my guess is that you’re working with the people within that organization. When we’re making decisions, we in the past liked to separate out our and professional life and think that, oh, we can perform in a professional way no matter what know. COVID has shown us to get all of us who didn’t know before that it actually is just intertwined.

  Amelie: Absolutely. And I would like to highlight what you just said. COVID, I’ve heard in all the coaching in resilience that have done with the corporate sector all this last year, because of COVID the main thing I’m hearing in Spain, in France, wherever the people are from. I have these team leaders who say Amelie, before I was coming to work and I was not even asking my people how they’re doing, because we wanted to focus on the work and the work objectives.

And [00:15:00] they say now I wake up in the morning and the first thing I think is of my people. And I don’t know how to tell them, how much they important to me. I don’t know how even to listen, to ask them about how they feel and to listen to what they have to say, because I’ve never done that, but I would like so much them to how much they important to me.

And it’s the first time I’m thinking of them like that. But when it’s the first time, then after COVID, it’s not going to be the same. As a leader we will have grown, and then the people who work under the leadership will have had kept seeing you in another eyes. And also they learned to see you as a human being, then not the boss.

To see you, I mean, not only the boss and to see the other colleagues, and shift perspectives. And here it’s very important because when I work with the corporate world so we’re talking about the same, I mean, residents management, crisis management, and then what are the tools that we have to [00:16:00] reconnect with who we are as an individual, as a team, as a company. We use tools to enhance the residents and to reconnect, especially with our resourcefulness, with who we are, because it seems in the Western World, because we’re not used do to have a huge crisis, like the COVID affected all areas of our life and that destroyed so many things.

In so little time, we’ve lost confidence in ourselves. We lost confidence in who we are, before COVID, we had a life.  We did so many things. It’s like, it’s all erased. No. So what I like to work with is on this elevator pitch, it’s 60 seconds to present yourself, your project, your business, but what is exciting about the pitch?

Not only that you have a pitch and then if you use super good in 60 seconds, you have a structured and powerful way to present yourself. It’s because with this 60 seconds, you really connect with who you are, what you do and how you do. And when you pitch in a way that [00:17:00] sounds like you, that has your personality in, that helps you to reconnect of all who you are. And COVID next to that is nothing. It’s temporary. Even if it’s seen as it’s never ending, it’s temporary.

Okay. so when you reconnect with all what you are, you regain this confidence, you pass a message to your stakeholders, to your clients. That’s reassuring. Then they know here we are on the same boat, but we’re going, we’re moving forward.

Okay. The COVID is just change the path. That does not changed who we are. On the contrary, it’s helping us to grow, to discover other parts of who we are.

I like to use these tools, very practical tools, but at the end, what do they do? It’s just strengthened this inner inner self and this inner self.

We have that in the team, strengthening the team as a team, strengthening the company as a company. A company as it’s like, I like to say this in a diamond. [00:18:00] Now we have it within a team as it’s in a diamond, a company that is in a diamond. So that’s what is the in the diamond about, this is this resilience. This is this talents that we have to give to the world for a more sanely world.

Kelly: I love that. There’s so much goodness in what you just described. To lean back on our listeners for a moment, I just want to say that when we talk about sort of that high performer person and the ability that growing these types of skills for ourselves, imagine if your entire company was made up of high performers. What difference would that make?

And that is exactly where this piece of your work is really going to make such a huge difference because to me, and same for the reason of why I started this podcast. The idea was that if we all find what our unique gift is to the world, that gift that not only makes us happy in our personal life, but we know sets us on fire [00:19:00] professionally.

If we can do that, what difference will that make for the people, for their tribe, for their circle, their family, for their communities, for the company that they’re working with, whether or not they’re an entrepreneur or an employee for government organism, everything, it just starts to keep going and going and going.

And my guess is when you were making these huge decisions in your life to go in this direction, you knew you wanted to make change. And when you came to this realization, you probably had the same thought, which was oh my goodness. There’s so much change affecting one person’s life that can be made.

Amelie: Yes that’s true. I want as we finishing, I just want to say to you that are listening.  You may be in the middle of a crisis and you say, my God, I’m feeling crap. In the cycle, I’m down there. So I [00:20:00] remember a spiritual teacher once said, the more down you are actually the higher you can bounce. And you can say, where I am right now. I just feel like so bad that it bouncing and resonates and everything.

And I want to tell you all what we’ve mentioned and all these skills that’s when you want to have them. Because I’ve been there not far ago and I will be again. I mean, life is a cycle. So at the bottom of the will and we there, but you know the good thing? Because the most painful is when we go down like that, what is painful here? Many times is all resistance.

So we like that. And then we enjoying ourselves. I don’t say just that, but it’s part of the journey.  When you go down, use the skills that you have. The resonance, the perseverance, your pitch, your [00:21:00] confidence, your message, your gift, your unique gifts, the talents that you have.

And we have mentioned here, so all that, it helps you that the cycle, the flow is monetarily. Then you, at this moment, when you’re the bottom of the well, the good thing is that you kind of grow more down. So that’s a time, you know what?

  Kelly: There’s only one place you can go.

Amelie: Yeah. So here you stop. Because when I’ve been in these places I said, okay, great. Because at least I don’t fall more because that’s the fall is painful. So now I’m here. I sit in, I stop. And I listen and I breathe and I take some time off for this mine, like we mentioned before. And then I asked my questions. Well, what now? Where do I want to go. Because when you’re there, that’s the opportunity to ask the big question, that you don’t have a life. All is broken, so you can recreate your life.

Every crisis has a gift. [00:22:00] So like, I have a friend of mine who says it’s actually the wrapping paper, this is badly wrapped. And the badly wrapped is the drama or the crisis we’re going through. So we’ll remove this horrible rap and find the gift. And then when I started with the cancer process, well, when I was diagnosed, then I asked myself..

Do I like my life? Because of course, when you have something like that you think about daily life. I’m not scared, it’s not something that’s a big fear of. It’s not a fear at all. Actually. I would like to say. I asked the question for me about life. I say, do you like your life Amelie? And Then maybe things I didn’t like, and I say, why are you in that place? Then change them.

When you have a big things like that, that’s still opportunity because one year ago, or even one month ago, I was asking myself this question, despite I was doing things. So I was living [00:23:00] in some way or what I didn’t like, but you’re starting to work so much things and you don’t stop like we want to say before. So let us stop before there’s  something big and just ask ourselves a big question. 

Kelly: I feel like there has been so much that I’ve learned in our session today. And I think that anyone listening here will feel the same way. So many good pieces that we’ve touched on. And Amelie, I think that honestly, I know we’re going to hear more from you as you continue your journey and you grow. I feel like I should get your autograph right now.

Amelie: Thank you so much.

Kelly: One day we’ll look back on this time and I’ll be like, oh, remember when I got to talk to her.

Amelie: That’s it? Thank you. And, and don’t hesitate. We are all on the journey. Even when you feel down in these moments too, you are high because you need to be [00:24:00] down to be high. And in here you learning something so huge. So just trust the journey  and don’t hesitate to contact with me. Connect with me on Instagram, on Facebook, wherever on LinkedIn.

Kelly: Yeah. What social media account? Cause I know you’re on all the socials, but which one are you most active on?

Amelie: I really liked LinkedIn. I have to say, I am starting to enjoy the Instagram.

Kelly: And Amelie’s website is ameliespeaks.com. So make sure you check out there. I think you guys should really take a peak, she’s got on her website her Eat Pitch Mastery Course, which I love. I’m going to link all of this when it goes live.

And then of course her book is available on Amazon, which is also linked through her website, but I’ll link that book directly, it’s such a fantastic read. And like I said, I know that there’s more to come. I was even reading through some of your articles and blog posts on your website [00:25:00] yesterday and it’s so heartwarming the work that you’re doing. Thank you for coming here today and sharing with us. Thank you for doing all that you do to make such a huge difference in the world. We so appreciate you.

Amelie: Thank you so much, Kelly. And thank you to all of you listening.

Kelly:  You’ve been listening to Let’s Talk About Skills, Baby a Growth Network Podcasts production. If you enjoyed this episode, make sure to subscribe to the podcast and share it with your community. Ratings, reviews and suggestions are great sources of feedback and always appreciated. Please reach out and connect with me on social at Kelly Ryan Bailey.

I’d love to meet you and continue the conversation. We’ll be back next week with a new episode. So until then keep growing your skills and have a great day.