183: Your Resilience Battery with Guest Whitney Sullivan

Today I welcome a past guest, dear friend, and resilience expert to the podcast to share skills and strategies that we can practice to stay resilient in our lives, work, and engagements.

 

Whitney Sullivan is a speaker, educator, team trainer, and coach with a background in health, wellness, higher education, communications, entrepreneurship and the Enneagram. All these life experiences have allowed her to test and build up her resilience over time and use it to help her current clients and students build what she refers to as their “resilience batteries.”

The Resilience Battery

 

In today’s episode, Whitney shares that resilience is like a battery - the more charge you have going into challenges, setbacks and failures, the more capacity you have to thrive in the face of them.

 

In the interview, Whitney shares that resilience is less about willpower and more about wellness. Tending to your resilience battery will help you stay energized, manage stress, prevent overwhelm and avoid burnout in work, life and leadership.

 

By practicing self awareness and knowing when our own resilience batteries are in the various color zones, we can be proactive about our wellness and enact interventions to keep us healthy and resilient.

 

Green Zone: your most energized self. We still experience stressors in this zone, it’s just that our challenges are balanced evenly with our comforts. We have capacity to face whatever comes our way.

 

Yellow Zone: your most stressed self. This is when challenges start to outpace comforts and things feel like they’re moving faster than we can keep up with. The signs for needed self-care intensify a little bit, so we want to intervene and address them here.

 

Orange Zone: your exhausted self. Your mind and body’s final call before depletion, and we start to get “emergency alerts” from our body. These alerts might appear as outbursts, reacting to triggers, or feeling the desire to quit or engage in numbing behaviors. We may still be in a good mood and have decent morale, but our highs are higher and our lows are lower.

 

Red Zone: your depleted self. Your nervous system is overwhelmed and you experience a hard time making decisions, problem solving, and seeing the big picture. 

 

In the interview, Whitney shares stories, strategies and skills to help you identify and move through the zones in your own life to keep yourself resilient and healthy. For additional support, you can grab her Resilience Battery Tracker or her To-Do List Audit at the links below.

 

Key Takeaways

• “Owning a business is a masterclass of resilience.”
• “[Resilience is] not this innate ability, it’s a nurtured capacity.” 
• “[Resilience is] not a matter of willpower, it’s a matter of wellness.”
• “I like to think of resilience as a battery and the more charge you have going into each day, the more capacity you have to thrive, no matter what challenges come your way.”
• “We have to go on offense with our wellness, not defense.”
• “I want everyone to not underestimate the power of 10-20 minutes.”
• “I’m always evaluating what I need to grit and what I need to quit.”
• “One thing that lead me into burnout was this ‘I never quit’ mentality…and it’s sneaky because that looks like resilience, doesn’t it? …but that actually just exposed me to a lot of harm in my health.”
• “To grit is staying the course and working hard when the easy, but wrong thing, would be to quit. To quit is letting go of what’s not working and moving on when the easy, but wrong thing, would be to grit.”

More about Whitney:

 

Whitney Hinshaw Sullivan is a resilience speaker, Enneagram practitioner, team-builder and coach. Her professional training and coaching business is designed to:

• Help leaders and teams use the Enneagram to positively influence their relationships, responsibilities and results
• Support emerging leaders in the development of skills in communication, stress management and self-mastery
• Deliver keynotes and company webinars on resilience, connection and purpose

 

With a background in leading health/wellness and student leadership programs in higher education, she has been a professional educator since 2012. Whitney's favorite moments in higher education were always when others stopped by her office and asked, "Hey, Whitney. Do you got a minute?" She loved the coaching conversations and mentorship moments that followed so much, that she opened her own business in 2021 in order to do it even more.

 

In 2024, Whitney created The Enneagram Studio: a virtual learning platform designed to deliver professional Enneagram trainings, masterminds, coaching and more. Her goal is to demystify the Enneagram and make it an accessible and mainstream professional development tool in leadership, business and higher education settings.

She currently lives in Bozeman, Montana with her husband Tim, where she is also an avid reader, outdoor adventurer, and communication professor at Montana State University.

 

Connect with Whitney at https://www.whitneysullivan.com/

Resilience Battery Tracker: https://whitneysullivan.myflodesk.com/tracker

To-Do List Audit: https://whitneysullivan.myflodesk.com/audit