Making It – Episode 167
Resilience is Everything: The Key to Making It (Kim Ades)
Kim Ades: Hello, my name is Kim Ades. I’m the president and founder of Frame of Mind Coaching, and you are listening to Making It. My company is an executive coaching company, and my mission is to help every single person that we coach live a life with greater ease, peace, exhilaration, fulfillment, and joy.
I grew up in Montreal. The way school works is you go to grade six and then you go to high school starting in grade seven. In this particular school, there was one girl. Her name is Shelly. She was very tall, very thin, very, to me, strange looking. I was 12 years old at the time. She had long, very thin hair. She had a tooth missing and cigarette in her hand. And I looked at her like, because I had never been exposed to anybody like that. And she caught me looking at her. Five minutes later, she put me up against the wall and wanted to beat me up for looking at her. I’m not a fighter. I’m like, no, I didn’t mean anything by it. Like, I’m sorry. I don’t want to fight.
And she’s like, okay, we’re going to meet outside and I’m going to beat you up. I was terrified. And a lot of people came and surrounded us, but luckily there was a teacher who stepped in and kind of broke up the fight. She let it go and that was it. But I didn’t let it go. It stayed with me for years. That interaction, it stayed with me for years. And I started to dream about it. And the dream was that Shelly and I were on a roller coaster together. And on this roller coaster, in my dream, I was talking to her about her life and her life choices and how she could make it better. Keep in mind I was 12 years old and how, you know, she didn’t need to be that way and she didn’t need to, like, smoke, and she didn’t need to hang out with the bad people, and she didn’t need to be violent, and she didn’t need to fight.
I was the person that everybody came to for help. But the dream was about Shelly. I was terrified. I was, like, very, at the time, very quiet, very shy. You know, I was an observer, and what I was doing was observing her. And unfortunately, I was a little too obvious in my process because it was something new for me. It was somebody that came from a different life and a different upbringing and a different everything. I was interested. I was attracted in a weird way, just to keep watching, and, you know, it kind of backfired on me. I was not resilient as a child. I was a very terrified kid.
So if my parents told me, okay, we’re going out tonight and you’re getting a babysitter, I would have a stomachache, vomiting, diarrhea, the whole nine yards. I was a very scared, very, very anxious kid. And it didn’t feel good to have that level of anxiety. It’s something that I worked super hard to eliminate. Or I’m still anxious sometimes. I’m normal, right? I’m a human being. But I worked very hard to overcome a lot of that anxiety.
My dad was an entrepreneur, and my mom, interestingly enough, she wasn’t super educated, and she didn’t speak English very well. But when they came to Canada, my mom got a job at the bank, and she worked her way up and became a bank manager. She started off as being a secretary, typing with two fingers. And they were both very, very driven. But they did everything by giving everything that they had to whatever it is they did, whether it was their children or their friends or their family members or their work. Like, I remember one story my mother came home and told us. She was, at the time a bank manager. And she took her tellers aside and she told them, you’re not allowed to smoke. It’s bad for you.
And, you know, it wasn’t part of her job. It wasn’t part of her role. It was, in today’s day, completely inappropriate. But in the day, it represented how much she cared for others. And honestly, I think that culturally, when they invited people over, there was so much food, so much warmth, so much caring about other people. If someone was sick, my mother would bring them food, you know, like it was just a different time. But what they did for me is really helped me understand what customer service means, which is really all about going above and beyond the call of duty. It’s really about being there when they don’t expect you to be there.
And so they left a huge mark for me in terms of how to interact with people in a way that is unusual and not like every other business. And so even the way that I run my business is different because we interact with our clients every single day. Even on the weekends, we interact every single day. We’re accessible to them every single day. Because, you know, I perceive my role to be like an Olympic level executive coach. Not just a coach. I’m an Olympic level executive coach. And so I’m with you every day, day in and day out, until we’re done.
I would be called a serial entrepreneur. Lots of people would call me that. This is my third business, the one before this, I owned a software company. We used to build simulation based assessments. The purpose of those assessments was to help companies make better hiring decisions. I was in that field for a long time. One of the things I discovered as we were testing hundreds and thousands of people was that there was really only one key differentiator between top performers and that was their degree of emotional resilience. So when we looked at the data, it didn’t matter how old they were, where they came from, their education, their role, their company. What mattered was their emotional resilience score.
And when we look at what is emotional resilience, it’s the ability to bounce back from adversity with skill, with speed and agility. And it’s not only bouncing back, but leveraging that adversity somehow. And so that was a piece of my background. I ended up selling that business and then I started this business, Frame of Mind Coaching. That piece of information came with me because I thought, if emotional resilience is the key to success, how do we help people build a high level of emotional resilience? And we created Frame of Mind Coaching specifically to do that.
I definitely see people who are naturally more resilient than others. No question. We see that in our lives, all around us, everywhere. Resilience is something that can definitely be. I think of it as a muscle as opposed to a skill. It’s a muscle that can be fortified. It’s just like abs, Go to the gym, get better abs. Coaching is like a gym and that’s where we develop our emotional resilience. But it’s not a one and done thing. It’s something we need to work on consistently.
I think making it really needs to be tied to how you live. What I mean by that is where your emotional state is most of the time. So if you are an executive running a company and you’re super successful, but you’re stressed out of your mind and you’re agitated all the time and you’re barking at people and you never see your spouse or your children, that’s not making it. You might have a very full bank account, but that’s not making it. The key about making it is really looking at your emotional state most of the time. Sometimes it’s valuable to get agitated because that indicates that something needs to change. But what is your emotional state most of the time?
If you’re mostly tired and you’re stressed, irritated by others, you know, waking up in the morning and not really looking forward to your day, if you’re mostly grumpy, then you haven’t made it. I think at one point making it was like growing a business, bringing in lots of money, being very well known all over the world, really impacting as many lives as humanly possible. And so there’s a concept early on, as you’re younger, of a volume, volume of everything. Now I think about it a little bit differently. Certainly we love impacting lives and we do do that, but I also think about my life in, you know, how much longer I have left and what I want to do with those hours.
So for me, making it means having the freedom to choose what I do with my time and really fueling myself with as much energy that I can. The more I live with energy, the more freedom I have, the more vibrancy I have. And for me, that’s making it. It’s the how you live life component as opposed to what you accomplish component. We’ve already accomplished some things now. Could it be more? It can always be more. At this point, for me, making it means, you know, when I wake up in the morning, how do I feel? Am I bouncing out of bed? Am I energetic? Am I excited? Or do I have aches and pains? Am I tired and can I hardly roll out of bed?
Making it for me means living a life with a high degree of energy and excitement and engagement. For me, that’s making it. It’s definitely a circular experience. It’s definitely a feedback loop that I’ve seen seen over and over again, not only in my life, but in the lives of our clients. I mean, I live a very fortunate life. I do what I want to do, when I want to do it. I have a lot of freedom in terms of my time. For me, my priority is taking care of my health. I had thyroid cancer a year ago, so there’s a recovery process. My focus is on taking care of my body, my health, my cholesterol, all the things that you’re supposed to take care of.
I think that people think in ways that hurt themselves, they sabotage themselves. I think that people have a misconception about what making it means. And very often they attach it to external conditions. And when that happens, they’re at the mercy of those external conditions and other people, and so they experience a great deal of suffering. I’m not denouncing achievement, but I’m trying to help people separate their emotional well being from the need for those things to happen.
I was married at 20 years old. I got divorced at 35. The biggest mistake was not necessarily getting married, but at the Time I was very young and my whole identity was connected to somebody else’s well being and happiness. When my husband at the time wasn’t happy, it really upset me. It bothered me when I didn’t get the attention I wanted or needed. You know, not good. And it took me some time to learn to detach myself from other people’s states. It’s a learning curve. There’s a consciousness of how your emotions are linked to other things. So you can’t do anything about it if you don’t have consciousness. The minute you have consciousness, you’re like, oh, I’m doing that thing again. That’s not working for me. That doesn’t feel good.
And when you start to prioritize the way you feel emotionally over other things, you start to take ownership for that. Because as we know, there are many, many things we cannot control. We can’t control the weather, we can’t control other people, we can’t control politics, although sometimes we wish we could, right? So there are so many things we can’t control. What we can control is the way we think, the way we feel and what we do. Unfortunately, many times we don’t take control over what we can control. When we learn the mechanics of how to control the way we feel, we get to decide, do I want to feel bad right now or do I want to switch that around. When I can learn how to do that, it becomes a lot easier to do.
For me, when I was really struggling, I did a lot of journaling, to be completely honest, because if I go back to even my divorce, that was one of the hardest times of my life. I was married very young. My marriage was my whole kind of life. We worked together, we had two kids. That’s how I envisioned my future and everything else. And when things changed, I had to redefine myself. For me, I wanted to go through the divorce with as much grace and dignity as I could muster up. Some days I did a terrible job. But journaling allowed me to unload all of the emotions that I was feeling.
So there’s a concept I use, it’s called dump, dump, and then dump the dump. I just dumped it all out there. When I thought I was done, I kept going and so I dumped some more. And then at some point you kind of go, okay, like, this is not how I want to feel. I would literally write down on my paper or in my journal, it’s time to turn myself around. And it would allow me to redirect myself to what I wanted, where I wanted to go. How I wanted to feel, what kind of relationship I did want, what kind of mother I wanted to be, how I wanted to live with dignity and what that looked like, what that felt like, what that meant, the practical side of it.
And so my journal allowed me to get rid of some of the negativity I was holding onto, redirect myself to where I wanted to go and how I wanted to feel. A very powerful process. When you do it over and over again, you start to focus on where you’re heading instead of where you’ve been.
My name is Kim Ades from Frame of Mind Coaching, and you’ve been listening to Making It. You can find me at frameofmindcoaching.com. You’ll find the link in the show notes.
Danny Iny: Making it is part of the Mirasee FM Podcast Network, which also includes such shows as as To Lead Is Human and the Neuroscience of Coaching. To catch the great episodes that are coming up on Making it, please follow us on Mirasee FM’s YouTube channel or your favorite podcast player. And if you enjoyed the show, please leave us a comment or a starred review. It’s the best way to help us get these ideas to more people. Thank you and we’ll see you next time.