Navigating Change: A Roadmap for Resilient Leadership | Deborah Gilboa

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Why Resilience Matters and How Leaders Can Cultivate It at Every Level

Dr. Deborah Gilboa shares her journey from theater to medicine to resilience expert, uncovering how resilience can be learned and developed. She offers actionable insights for leaders on managing change effectively, building resilient teams, and understanding the natural resistance to change within organizations.

What makes some people bounce back from adversity while others remain stuck?

In this compelling episode of Leveraging Thought Leadership, host Peter Winick welcomes resilience expert Deborah Gilboa. An author and consultant, Deborah helps organizations navigate change with confidence and competence. Her book, From Stressed to Resilient: The Guide to Handle More and Feel It Less, serves as a roadmap for individuals and teams seeking to enhance their resilience.

Deborah’s journey to thought leadership is as unconventional as her path to medicine. Initially pursuing a Bachelor of Fine Arts and a career in theater, she pivoted to medical school, where she spent years treating patients. Observing the stark differences in how individuals responded to illness prompted her to delve into the concept of “Patient Resilience.” She aimed to redefine resilience beyond severe cases, exploring its application in everyday lives and discovering whether it can be cultivated.

Transitioning from a practicing doctor to a thought leader began when Deborah was asked to speak about parenting at community events. What started as a way to connect with underserved populations evolved into a mission to educate parents, educators, and coaches about fostering resilience. As the inquiries grew, so did her focus on adult resilience, leading her to investigate effective methods for teaching these essential skills to adults facing their struggles. Deborah’s business model centers on writing and speaking engagements.

Recognizing the need for a platform, she built her online presence and leveraged her speaking skills to gain credibility. Companies often approach her to address change resistance within their teams. Through tailored workshops and a “Change Resistant Exam,” she equips leadership with the tools to facilitate smoother transitions, ultimately fostering a culture of adaptability. Deborah’s insights are vital for any organization looking to thrive in a rapidly changing environment.

Three Key Takeaways:

Resilience is Learnable: Deborah emphasizes that resilience is not merely an innate trait; it can be cultivated and developed over time. Understanding what contributes to resilience can empower individuals and organizations to enhance their ability to navigate challenges.

Effective Communication is Crucial in Change Management: Organizations often struggle with change due to a lack of understanding of the natural resistance employees exhibit. Deborah teaches leaders how to communicate effectively about changes, ensuring that expectations are clear and that employees feel supported throughout the transition.

Speaking Engagements as a Gateway: Deborah’s journey into thought leadership illustrates the power of speaking engagements. They serve as an entry point for organizations to experience her insights firsthand, ultimately leading to longer-term consulting relationships focused on building a resilient workforce.

Doborah shares her journey of learning the need for a strong platform to leverage her skills and show credibility. If you are struggling to build your platform we can help! Contact the Thought Leadership Leverage team about a strategy session to take your first steps.

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Transcript

Peter Winick And welcome, welcome, welcome. This is Peter Winick. I’m the founder and CEO of Thought Leadership Leverage. And you’re joining us on the podcast today, which is Leveraging Thought Leadership. Today, my guest is Dr. G, which is Dr. Deborah Gilboa, and she has an interesting background. She is a physician and business consultant, a resilient expert for The Today Show and for the doctors The show and her showcase is the challenges financial, organizational or due to unforeseen circumstances. There’s a science to becoming more resilient. So she is in me not just a doctor, but there’s domain expertise and resilience which we could all use a little bit more of. I think so. Welcome aboard, Dr. G.

Dr. Deborah Giboa Thanks so much. Good. I’m happy to be here.

Peter Winick Let me ask you one of my favorite questions, my show, and get to do that, whatever. And we talked about this a week or two ago when you and I thought, how did they get here? Because it’s obvious how you became a physician. The not so obvious have the thought leader part of your world. But I’ll talk about that from them.

Dr. Deborah Giboa Karen. I’ll tell you, it’s not so obvious how I became a physician either because I was a drama major in college.

Peter Winick So you’re actually acting like I Doctor?

Dr. Deborah Giboa I do both. I am both a doctor, and I play one on TV.

Peter Winick In fact, and realize the see it all came together away. So there’s going to be that back.

Dr. Deborah Giboa So that back story is I got my undergrad from Carnegie Mellon University, from the Department of Drama, Bachelor of Fine Arts, and I worked in theater and television for six years. And I was got an amazing job at Second City in Chicago, which some of your listeners will know as the premier improv theater company in the country. And it was amazing. But after a couple of years, I thought I would do something different. And it was really one of the best jobs I could get in my field. So I had been a volunteer EMT, so I thought about being a paramedic. I called a couple of friends and they said you would be a terrible paramedic.

Peter Winick Which really painful.

Dr. Deborah Giboa Ones. You like to change the system. If you’re bad at just following protocols, you’re always looking for a better way to do something. Just go be a doctor. And I said, Too old. I was 26. So obviously ancient.

Peter Winick Ancient, ancient, obviously. Right.

Dr. Deborah Giboa And so I called Northwestern’s med school and I said, hey, because this is pre-Internet. I said, I’m thinking about applying what’s required. A mormon said, a bachelor’s. And I said, In what? Imagining that she would say biology or science. And she said, college. I totally have one of those. So I.

Peter Winick When was the last time the med school had seen a BFR? Probably not.

Dr. Deborah Giboa Right. I mean, actually in my class at Pitt Med when I. Which is where I ended up, I, I got into a bunch of schools. Every interview I did, they said to me, hey, we have a show, what would you do on it? And I was like, if you want me in your school, of course I will. So it turned out my theater background was useful in that way. But I and there was one other guy who was a concert pianist, one who was a chef. So at that time in the late 90s, you go on. Well, for people to take a more nontraditional route to medicine. So I get some medicine, right? I finish medical school when I’m 29, almost 30, and I do my residency in family medicine residency. And so I become a family doc and I’m a family doc for about five years, full attending house calls, rounding, rounding at the hospital, seeing patients when I start to notice that some of my patients. They handle. And I see kids and adults, they handle illness or injury and they get through it and they get to the life they want. They start thriving again. And some people don’t. They really get set back, even if they recover physically. It’s a setback that is very hard for them to get through. And I started to wonder, because it didn’t seem to me like it was just the medicine I would prescribe or the therapies I would recommend. I started to wonder, what is it that some people have and some people don’t.

Peter Winick But this is this is clearly a sort of human curiosity, not necessarily a medical. Well, I think that university.

Dr. Deborah Giboa And my obligation as a family doctor, my job is really twofold. It’s to prevent the illness and injury I can and help people get back to the life they want from the illness and injury they get.

Peter Winick And so I know the question that yeah that’s the piece that’s keep me up at night is outcome. Some people bounce back. And how come some people don’t, right. So you’re saying some.

Dr. Deborah Giboa To people. I can’t find a different, similar scenario.

Peter Winick Yeah.

Dr. Deborah Giboa Right. Or their disease process. What is it? And the medical literature calls this patient resilience. Okay. I was like, okay, so maybe that’s a cop out and maybe it isn’t. But if it isn’t, what is that? What is patient resilience? And can I write a prescription for that? How do I get.

Peter Winick Somebody more of that.

Dr. Deborah Giboa Right? Yeah. So I got really interested in this. I was lucky enough to partner with a post-doc and fellows lab at Carnegie Mellon University, which is near where I live. They’re Tepper School of Business because when I started to get interested in this, most of the research on resilience was done in adults with severe mental illness or post-traumatic stress disorder. And that’s a minority of my patients, but it’s certainly not a majority of my patients. So I wanted to know.

Peter Winick That those are extreme outliers. So it sounds like you’re dealing with more of a general, more in the middle of the bell curve kind of stuff.

Dr. Deborah Giboa But some of my folks are so extreme, But I feel like we have some guidelines for helping people in those situations. And what I wanted to know is for people who are working a job or 2 or 3 taking care of their parents, taking care of their kids, involved in their community, people who are really living very mainstream lives from a medical standpoint. What about those folks? What’s resilience in them? I want you to really three things. What is resilience? Is it just something you’re born with? Right. Like it’s some people get more. Yeah, some people don’t. It’s a trait. And if it isn’t a trait and you build it on purpose, not just by going sort of hard things, but on purpose.

Peter Winick So now sort of let’s segway to okay, so now this becomes a thing and it becomes an important thing. Such to the point that your decrease, the amount of time you’re spending, practicing medicine and increasing the time that you are now world renowned thought leader and resilience. Because most people practicing medicine aren’t saying I’m looking for a side hustle or something else. It’s kind of all encompassing from the docs that there are friends of mine that I know. So but you’ve got this other thing that’s driving you.

Dr. Deborah Giboa It’s driving me and it’s sort of way of helping. It’s a way of helping people. Wholesale instead of retail meaning inverts as opposed to one on one.

Peter Winick More scale, right? Yeah, right. Okay. So how did that happen? How does that steer you? But what are the things that you did? So now I got what you had to do to go to medical school. You practice the practice. That’s a fairly traditional route, even though the undergrad is a little bit different. But now as a, you know, mid-thirties or whatever, practicing M.D., you say, Hey, I’m going to go do this. I’m going to.

Dr. Deborah Giboa That happened in a couple of ways. One is I moved to a brand new health center to serve underserved folks, and my bosses said, we don’t have a lot of patients yet. Would you go out and speak to groups to let them know we’re here? And I said, Sure.

Peter Winick Basically on the on the business development cycle.

Dr. Deborah Giboa So I was helping a little bit on the business, the marketing side, you know, in the local area.

Peter Winick Yeah.

Dr. Deborah Giboa This young, energetic doctor out to tell the community we exist. So we called any number of nonprofit organizations, churches and community centers and said, Hey, there’s a doctor who will come and talk. And I would get there and they’d say, And I’d say, What would you like to talk about? I could talk about high blood pressure and how we smoking is bad for you. But I said I was I was very visibly pregnant. And so these people said, hey, could you talk about parenting? Now, we all know that you don’t need any parenting lessons to get pregnant. But it was my third kid. And in the office, I was doing a lot. I work with children and their parents a lot. Said, you’re hooked. So I started for about a year. I was speaking about parenting strategies, how to get your kid to go to bed. You know, a lot of what people ask me in the office about their children is actually parenting and not medicine. You know, very few patients say, and it is my child on the correct controller medication for their asthma. They say, how do I get my kid to take their inhaler? Which is not so much a medical question as a parenting question. You know, not should my child’s A.D.D. be treated differently, but how do we get my kid to go to bed because they need sleep yet. So. I started to recognize that a lot of what I was getting asked about parenting was really how do I help my kid grow up to be more resilient? How can I help them handle difficulty better? And I was like, that.

Peter Winick But they weren’t using those. But I was going to say, they they’re not using those words.

Dr. Deborah Giboa Directly, not use that word. But I think because I was also on this pathway in my own brain at work, I saw in the crossover, I said.

Peter Winick Boy, I’ve ever heard a parent say my kid has a resilience problem. I’ll say, my God, little Billy doesn’t go to sleep or whatever, or.

Dr. Deborah Giboa He melts down at the easiest, this latest thing, or he listen or right. So I was like, basically, there are a lot of different philosophies out there about parenting, but every parent I know would like to raise their kid to be more respectful, responsible and resilient.

Peter Winick Yeah, that would be good.

Dr. Deborah Giboa So I started talking about that. I called those the three hours of parenting. Unlike the three hours in school, that only one of them actually starts with our. And Rhonda, I said, okay. And I wrote a couple of little books, you know, how do activities that’ll make your kid more respectful, more responsible. And then as I was speaking more and with more and more clarity about developing resilience in children, not only to parents, but to educators, athletic coaches. And then people started saying to me, Am I supposed to teach my students, my kids, my remember to be resilient when I’m struggling with. And this is.

Peter Winick Yeah, yeah. 18.

Dr. Deborah Giboa 2019. And so I said to this group at CMU, let’s really dive into what does and doesn’t work to build resilience in adults.

Peter Winick Got it. So that’s the research piece of this. From a business model standpoint, I get. Being a doctor is right. You see patients, you get paid forever to get paid from insurance company, whatever, whatever. I need, you then decide. And what is the business models that you chosen in this space?

Dr. Deborah Giboa So for me, the easiest route. I thought I should write a book. I hate writing. Yeah. And then I researched selling a book because I can write whatever and found that you need a platform. So like 2011, 2012, you should write a parenting book. Do you have a book I could read? Yes, I could write a book on all these questions I asked. I answer the same. Yeah. Yeah. Like I’m a month, right?

Peter Winick Right.

Dr. Deborah Giboa But to celebrate, you need a platform. So. Okay. And get somebody, you know, under God to put together a website for me. I learned about Twitter. But really, the best way to do it would be to speak. I love speaking. No problem. I say find it. France is offering two different institutions.

Peter Winick I sort of stay there a minute because I think this is a critical point in that, yes, you absolutely need a platform. And many people and I’ve talked more people out of this than anyone I know say, and you have to have a book. And I love books. I read a couple of books a week. But it is not a pre-contract to be a thought leader to have a book. And I would say you have to find the modality that is comfortable for you. So for me. I’m pretty much a crappy writer, occasionally mediocre. And more importantly, I just don’t enjoy them. But I do enjoy I. I enjoy. I enjoy having conversations. I’m fairly good on video, you know, short form video, that kind of thing. So. So that’s what I play. And that works for me.

Dr. Deborah Giboa I talked to a lot of people out of writing books, too. I think there are three good reasons to write a book. One. You’re burning inside to do it. You have something you need to see between pages. Two. You want to have something to leave behind to keep people working on the concepts you’re giving them as a consultant or speaker. And a book is, in your mind, the best way to do it. Three. You want to prove credibility because even though it’s stupid in the time of self-publishing and this happened to me, I was known as a parenting and a youth resilience speaker. But I was doing all this research, had all these thoughts and ideas and this knowledge to impart to adults. So I wrote from Stressed to Resilient, so that when I was pitching, I could say author of From Stress to Resilience. And it did get me gigs that I would have not. And it got me media opportunities not to talk about the book. I don’t want to be on TV talking about a book because I’m the only have you on as an author, and then you can only be on every time you write a book. That’s not often enough for me because media what It’s a.

Peter Winick Nice little it’s part of the intro. There’s a graphic on the blurb if you’re on the show.

Dr. Deborah Giboa And so.

Peter Winick Whatever are.

Dr. Deborah Giboa Maybe fall asleep, but people take it as credibility.

Peter Winick Yeah yeah yeah.

Dr. Deborah Giboa So there’s it’s not no reason but if you’re writing it to sell a bunch or you’re writing to make a lot of money, stop writing.

Peter Winick I love it. So you’ve got the platform. But where I was going is that you spent a lot of time in the modalities that you enjoy, that you’re comfortable with, and eventually you wrote the book for the other reasons, but you spent the Y.

Dr. Deborah Giboa Yeah, four of them. I cheated. So, yes.

Peter Winick Okay.

Dr. Deborah Giboa Arguably all seven of them because meaning I wrote things that were three page chapters and it’s meant to go through it as a reference book, not as a read it from start to finish.

Peter Winick Right. But it’s still a book. And I would also argue that you did it somewhat forensically. Right? You were.

Dr. Deborah Giboa Right. Yes. But I go back to my times, right? By cheating, I mean, I tricked myself into writing it.

Peter Winick Right. And do it again. And do it again.

Peter Winick If you’re enjoying this episode of Leveraging Thought Leadership, please make sure to subscribe. If you’d like to help spread the word about our podcast. Please leave a five star review at rate this podcast.com. Forward slash l t l and share it with your friends. We’re available on Apple Podcasts and on all major listening apps as well as at Thought Leadership Leverage dot com. Forward slash podcast.

Peter Winick So now let’s get to so the business model in this resilient expert space who pays you to do what.

Dr. Deborah Giboa Okay so I get paid often to speak at conferences because what I help companies do is navigate change more competently.

Peter Winick And.

Dr. Deborah Giboa And every company needs that. They often really misunderstand the neuroscience that’s behind resistance to change. Can I give you an example of like, something leaders get wrong all the time about this? So leaders announce a change, a well-considered, well-researched, necessary change for their business. We’re moving payroll companies. We are adding a product line. We’re going to expand our model, whatever it is. We’re bringing in a new leadership person. And then what happens? They get resistance. Not universal resistance usually, but some people struggle. And then leaders think either. Don’t they trust me? Don’t they know? I asked all those questions about this organization that I approved myself. You know, they see it as a betrayal of trust in their leadership or they think, what’s wrong with these people? Why are they resistant? Why are they obstinate? Why are they.

Peter Winick All so obvious to me? I don’t see it yet.

Dr. Deborah Giboa I think it’s either a referendum on their own leadership or a referendum on those people’s character. And it’s neither. It’s a reflex. It is a neurochemical reflex in the amygdala to be really suspicious of change and the lost distrust and discomfort that people. Those are the three safety mechanisms of anger.

Peter Winick Yeah. Yeah.

Dr. Deborah Giboa As people express those, it gets in the way of relationships. And so the analogy I give from my office is I say, Hey, you ever gone in for a well check? And if you came in to see me, you’d sit up on the table. We talk, I’d examine you, I take out my reflex hammer and I would tap your knee. And if your brain and your leg is healthy, what would happen.

Peter Winick In your leg pops up?

Dr. Deborah Giboa You get, right? Yeah. If I stood directly in front of you, Peter and I tap your knee, what happens to me?

Peter Winick It happens that you’re going to get right.

Dr. Deborah Giboa I’m going to get kicked. But would you. Would you apologize for. No. You’d think why did she stand right in front of me and make me kick her? As neighbors, we announce change. Stand right in front of our people and get kicked all the time.

Peter Winick But let me ask you. So I love that. So let me ask you this then. It sounds like there are parallels and similarities to what you’re talking about when you extrapolate it at the organizational level. Right. To change management. So I personally believe that the brand change management has gotten beat up because when you ask people, Hey, tell me about the life change initiative, you went through your last organization. People start twitching. Nobody said it was awesome. We got it done on time, on budget. It was the greatest six months of my career. It’s twitching, it’s stress, it’s this. It’s like it’s all this awful that comes up. So is resilience not just a rebranding of change management.

Dr. Deborah Giboa It’s not so. Well, I guess I don’t know for sure, because what I have seen from the outside of change managers is they help you through one project. Right. They come in and they project manage a change. And that’s not what I do. I go and who I usually end up working with the most. I do a little bit with the leadership because they need different vocabulary and different expectations about change so that they can. There’s five inflection points, but where people usually make it up is in the announcement, the navigation and the recovery they consider well, they decide, well, those two go great in announcing it, navigating it, and the redheaded stepchild of change, which is recovering from it, which nobody that had to do that that rehab afterwards to get back to strength, that’s where the opportunities are.

Peter Winick So Right, right.

Dr. Deborah Giboa I do a little bit with the leadership. I do. And that’s usually company wide. So everybody has different vocabulary, but it’s really the middle management that struggles the people who have to implement change but didn’t get to choose it. They’re the ones who need ongoing support in how to get more competent at this.

Peter Winick So what is it? So this is what they’re bringing you in for, Is that are you delivering? The value in the forms of insulting speaking workshop licensing your IP. How are you getting paid for this knowledge for this?

Dr. Deborah Giboa Usually my entry point is speaking. They want to hear what I’m talking about and they want to see that people like me and are engaged. Yeah, whatever were wanted.

Peter Winick So they need to speak before they fall in love with it and they go, my God, we need and they need more help.

Dr. Deborah Giboa They get maybe convinced that this could actually help because what everybody knows about bringing in a speaker is no matter how good they are, three days later, the impact is gone.

Peter Winick Yes, 100%.

Dr. Deborah Giboa So you need speakers at the conference and hopefully it makes people think differently. But it’s really.

Peter Winick Well, there’s no stickiness. There’s no.

Dr. Deborah Giboa It right. It dilutes very quickly. So once they see that and they say, we do want more of this, we do want this to be stickier and more long lasting. Then either do one of two things. If it’s the management that are saying we’re positive, it’s these people. I do what’s called what I call a change resistance exam. And I put everything in medical terms because most people have had an examination for a problem. I go in, I work with the leadership team. It’s about three months. I can give them a prescription afterwards for what they can do without me to keep people to solve the problems. I find that they’re having, instead of just getting a one size fits all, here’s a course I can take it. That doesn’t work. Change is a little too bespoke for that. And what I more often end up doing is in a months or years long relationship with a company and it’s a retainer base. And so in terms of business model, it’s simply a retainer because I give a lot of access. You know, I’m used to doing house calls and I’m used to building phone calls. It doesn’t work. And I don’t know what people need as much as they know what they. So I give will have some structure to it. I’m going to be at these two meetings, do a month. I’m going to give you one strategy to use per week or three months, depending on how deep we are to strengthen your team so that if this change goes better and so that future changes go better, I can’t make you feel like change. I can make them more competent at navigating it and less overwhelmed by change.

Peter Winick So you’re developing that capability because I think that maybe this is the skill segment. Resilience is yeah, it is change management. At this point in time, we’re implementing a new CRM, Whatever the external thing is, let’s get through this and move on. And you’re like, Yes. And at the end and I mean, we do the capabilities.

Dr. Deborah Giboa Right? We’re building a skill set.

Peter Winick Yeah.

Dr. Deborah Giboa And every one of us and grill everyone’s. Well, I need a business leader who says, well, we don’t have a lot of change right now, so this is the right time to work with you. Let’s do it preventively. And as a family doc, I like preventive medicine better than treating things, but very few people have resilience in their budget. You know, how much are we spending on results?

Peter Winick Nuts.

Dr. Deborah Giboa So if they think that’s a bad idea.

Peter Winick Or without with a lot of thought leadership is that there’s two ways to do it. Nobody I’ve never met anyone that said I bought the burglar alarm the day before. I should have been burglar. Right, Right. You get the burglar on the day you can go broken window because now you.

Dr. Deborah Giboa Spend the money on the pinpoint. Yeah. So what I’m finding since the pandemic is that more and more companies accept that they won’t at baseline do change. Well, what I found at first when I was in this is people saying, no, we have great culture, we have great company, I have great people. We’re like family. Nothing’s going to hurt. Yeah, you know, we can manage. We’re flexible and adaptable. We can handle anything. And my answer to that is resilience is absolutely a growth commodity and you can build it on purpose. But just like the stock market, sometimes it crashes unexpectedly. Yeah, and I love it. So having those skills in place make a big difference.

Peter Winick Yeah, Fantastic. Well, it’s been great. Appreciate your time, Dr. G. And this is fantastic. Thanks for sharing.

Dr. Deborah Giboa Absolutely.

Peter Winick To learn more about Thought Leadership Leverage, please visit our website at thoughtleadershipleverage.com to reach me directly. Feel free to email me at Peter at thoughtleadershipleverage.com and please subscribe to leveraging thought leadership on iTunes or your favorite podcast app to get your weekly episode automatically.