Resilience is a trend and a theme that is very much in the zeitgeist, as we’ve discovered on LS:N Global, our online consumer trends and foresight platform.
Sometimes it’s a word we associate with the ongoing vagaries of the culture wars – ‘I’m RIGHT! No, I’m RIGHT!’ – while for others it is about taking a more agile, flexible and less resistant view of the world around you.
As Ozlem Tuskan, this week’s guest on Back to the F**kture, explains, it’s also about listening, learning and drawing your strength from the kinds of soft skills that many of us understand and appreciate – kindness, collaboration, creativity – without ever cultivating them strategically or properly. ‘It’s about having a higher sense of self-accountability and of taking personal responsibility for your actions.’
Or, as she puts it more pointedly in our chat: ‘Unless we take personal responsibility for the demise of things around us – and see ourselves as part of the challenge, as well as the potential solution, we are also always going to blame others. Essentially, to get things right, we need to start with the individual, with our own belief system, and work from there.’
To help entrepreneurs do this, she has launched her own academy and private business coaching programme that can tackle future challenges on a one-to-one or group learning basis. Her GET.SET.BRAND helps you bring your brand vision to life with a one-day brand strategy which, she says, is distilled down from her 25 years as a brand strategist working with some of the toughest brands globally, as well as having to manage her own path to resilience.
A single parent, as we hear in the podcast, Ozlem had to suspend the hugely successful strategy and innovation agency she founded in Istanbul when social and economic circumstances in Turkey under a very traditionalist and right-wing government became ever more difficult for a female entrepreneur to navigate and manage.
Running her business out of Amsterdam, Ozlem also went through a divorce, after nursing him through life-threatening diseases, which in turn triggered a bout of PTSD, a life-changing event, she tells us, that in many ways kick-started the journey that led her to become the head of The Future Laboratory’s Strategic Foresight consultancy. She later founded The Resilient, which draws on the many skills, insights and personal developmental tools she developed and utilised over the years to manage her own journey, and to determine her own personal and professional goals; as she tells it, the right kind of resilience helps you unlock revenue by creating a stronger, more inclusive business.
And it is precisely this merging of the personal with the professional, the strategic with the spiritual and the psychological with the psychometric that intrigues me about Ozlem’s approach to uplifting your brand, or indeed yourself. As she puts it: ‘I connect the hard skills of creating future-fit brand value with the soft skills of conscious and resilient leadership to accelerate your income and amplify your impact.’
Quite so. But she’s also created a very pragmatic and professional framework behind how she does this – I’m thinking here of the many FTSE and Fortune 500 brands where she brought her forensic skills to bear when she worked at the Lab. But, and this is what warms me most to her approach, she fully understands those emotional skills we need as people and professionals to drive conscious businesses today – ones that require us to be purposeful, agile and flexible, but also to be empathetic, or as Ozlem puts it more succinctly, ‘to listen’. For without this there is no learning, no forward momentum, no journey. And without that, as she says, there is no life worth living!
You can listen to our full podcast here, or find out more about Ozlem, The Resilient and her academy sessions here.
