Option B: Facing Adversity, Building Resilience, and Finding Joy

by Sheryl Sandberg

Blaming our actions rather than our character allows us to feel guilt instead of shame.

Shame has the opposite effect: it makes people feel small and worthless, leading them to attack in anger or shrink away in self-pity. Among

Writing to others—and to herself—turned out to be key to Catherine’s ability to rebound. For as long as she can remember, Catherine has kept a journal. “Journaling isn’t exactly meditating,” she told us. “But it helped me quiet myself and reflect. I was able to put words to my feelings and unpack them.

Labeling negative emotions makes them easier to deal with.20 The more specific the label, the better. “I’m feeling lonely” helps us process more than the vague “I’m feeling awful.

There are some caveats. Immediately after a tragedy or crisis, journaling can backfire:22 the event is too raw for some to process.

Self-confidence is critical to happiness and success.25 When we lack it, we dwell on our flaws. We fail to embrace new challenges and learn new skills. We hesitate to take even a small risk that can lead to a big opportunity. We decide not to apply for a new job, and the promotion we miss becomes the moment our career stalled. We don’t muster the courage to ask for a first date, and the future love of our life becomes the one who got away.

This loss of confidence is another symptom of pervasiveness: we are struggling in one area and suddenly we stop believing in our capabilities in other areas. Primary loss triggers secondary losses. For me, my confidence crumbled overnight. It reminded me of watching a house in my neighborhood that had taken years to build get torn down in a matter of minutes. Boom. Flattened.

Philosopher Søren Kierkegaard said that life can only be understood backward but it must be lived forward.29 Journaling helped me make sense of the past and rebuild my self-confidence to navigate the present and future.

Making gratitude lists has helped me in the past, but this list served a different purpose. Adam and his colleague Jane Dutton found that counting our blessings doesn’t boost our confidence or our effort,33 but counting our contributions can. Adam and Jane believe that this is because gratitude is passive: it makes us feel thankful for what we receive. Contributions are active: they build our confidence by reminding us that we can make a difference. I now encourage my friends and colleagues to write about what they have done well. The people who try it all come back with the same response: they wish they’d started doing this sooner.

Jenessa’s husband helped her look at her situation with more self-compassion, reminding her, “When you didn’t have cancer, you couldn’t write a paper in a day.” Her coworkers helped as well. As Jenessa told us, “On the whole people treat me like I am capable—someone who can still make valuable contributions.

Losing a job is a blow to self-esteem and self-worth and can rip away identities. By robbing people of a sense of control,39 losing income can actually lower their ability to tolerate physical pain. And the stress can spill over into personal relationships,40 resulting in increased conflict and tensions at home.

Self-confidence at work is important and often discussed, but self-confidence at home is just as crucial and often over-looked.

My understanding and expectation of what a family looks like has shifted closer to reality. Since the early 1970s, the number of single mothers in the United States has nearly doubled.43 Worldwide, 15 percent of children are in single parent households and women head approximately 85 percent of these households.

To try to make ends meet, many have more than one job—not including the job of being a mother. And

Working moms, especially those who are single, are put at a disadvantage from the start. The United States is the only developed country in the world that does not provide paid maternity leave. In Australia, maternity leave is paid at the federal minimum wage; in India,50 less than one percent of working women are eligible for maternity benefits.

Adam’s research has shown that this is shortsighted: offering support through personal hardships helps employees become more committed to their companies.

Without Dave as a rudder, I found myself relying heavily on feedback from friends and family. Like when colleagues pointed to something positive at work, it helped when friends let me know they thought I’d handled something well at home.

We are all headed for where Dave is. Without a doubt. Looking at the row upon row of headstones, it is so clear that we all end up in the ground. So each day has to count. I don’t know how many I have left and I want to start living again

alone. We all need other people—and I do more than ever. But at the end of the day the only person who can move my life ahead, make me happy, and build a new life for my kids is me

“When we are no longer able to change a situation,”3 psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl observed, “we are challenged to change ourselves.

The two psychologists were treating grieving parents and expected to see signs of devastation and post-traumatic stress, which they did. But they also found something surprising. The parents were all suffering and would have done anything to bring their children back. At the same time, many also described some positive outcomes in their lives following loss.

Psychologists went on to study hundreds of people who had endured all kinds of trauma:5 victims of sexual assault and abuse,6 refugees and prisoners of war,7 and survivors of accidents, natural disasters,8 severe injuries, and illnesses.9 Many of these people experienced ongoing anxiety and depression. Still, along with these negative emotions there were some positive changes.

Joe learned that post-traumatic growth could take five different forms: finding personal strength, gaining appreciation, forming deeper relationships, discovering more meaning in life, and seeing new possibilities. But Joe wanted to do more than study Tedeschi and Calhoun’s findings;

Nietzsche famously described personal strength as “what does not kill me makes me stronger.

“I am more vulnerable than I thought,13 but much stronger than I ever imagined.

I used to celebrate my birthday every five years, feeling like only the birthdays with the zeros and fives were special occasions. Now I celebrate every one because I no longer take for granted that the next birthday will come. Long gone are the jokes I used to make about not wanting to grow old (and working for a boss who is fifteen years my junior, I used to make those jokes a lot).

After losing a spouse, it’s common for people to argue more with friends and feel insulted by them.

I turned to football to save my family. When they measured my stature, they failed to measure my heart.

The jobs where people find the most meaning are often ones that serve others.24

Dancing to an upbeat song from childhood had taken me to a place where I wasn’t filled with loneliness and longing. I wasn’t just feeling okay. I actually felt happy. And that happiness was followed immediately by a flood of guilt. How could I be happy when Dave was gone?

In my Facebook post thirty days into widowhood, I wrote that I’d never have another moment of pure joy. When friends who had lost spouses assured me that this wasn’t true and someday I would feel happy again, I doubted them.

“We take it back” became our mantra. Rather than give up the things that reminded us of Dave, we embraced them and made them an ongoing part of our lives. We took back rooting for the teams that Dave loved: the Minnesota Vikings and the Golden State Warriors. We took back poker, which Dave had played with our kids since they were young. They laughed at the story about how one day Dave came home from work to find them playing poker at ages five and seven and said it was one of the proudest moments of his life.

Dave and I had played together. Dave and Rob had played together. Now Rob and I play each other.

When we look for joy, we often focus on the big moments. Graduating from school. Having a child. Getting a job. Being reunited with family. But happiness is the frequency of positive experiences,6 not the intensity.

“A day of joy is fifteen minutes. A day of pain is fifteen years,” he said. “No one pretends this is easy, but the job of life is to make those fifteen minutes into fifteen years and those fifteen years into fifteen minutes.

A friend of mine who lost his wife of forty-eight years right after his seventieth birthday told me that to fight despair he needed to shake up his routine. Doing the same things he’d done with his wife left him yearning for his old life, so he made a concerted effort to seek out new activities. He advised me to do the same. Along with taking things back, I looked for ways to move forward.

If Option B for me means coping with the loss of a spouse, Option B for refugees means coping with loss upon loss upon loss: loss of loved ones, home, country, and all that is familiar. When I read Wafaa’s story, I was struck by her incredible resilience and got in touch to learn more. She opened up about her struggles. “When my son was murdered, I thought I would die,” she told us through a translator. “Being a mother saved me. I need to smile for my other children.

friends. We can start by helping children develop four core beliefs: (1) they have some control over their lives; (2) they can learn from failure; (3) they matter as human beings; and (4) they have real strengths to rely on and share.

When a kid struggles at math, instead of saying, “Maybe math isn’t one of your strengths,”25 Dweck recommends, “The feeling of math being hard is the feeling of your brain growing.

With the right support, beliefs can fuel action and become self-fulfilling. Believe you can learn from failure and you become less defensive and more open.34 Believe you matter and you spend more time helping others,35 which helps you matter even more. Believe you have strengths and you start seeing opportunities to use them. Believe you are a wizard who can cross the space-time continuum and you may have gone too far.

Photos are important because happiness is remembered, not just experienced.46 And losing Dave taught me how precious video is: when I see photos of him, I long to see him move and hear him speak. Now I take videos as much as possible.

Every survivor’s story shared a common theme: a key to their resilience was hope.

To join a community after tragedy, we often have to accept our new—and often unwelcome—identity. Writer Allen Rucker told us that after he became paralyzed, “I initially didn’t want to hang around people who were in wheelchairs. I didn’t want to belong to that club. I saw myself as a freak; I didn’t want to join the freak fraternity.” His mind didn’t change overnight. “It took four or five years. It almost felt like every cell in my brain had to transfer, one at a time, very slowly learning to accept this thing.” As he made this personal adjustment, he grew closer to those who understood his situation. The bonus, he told us, was “these are some of the funniest people I have ever met because their humor is just as dark as possible.

Psychologists call this “stereotype threat”:14 the fear of being reduced to a negative stereotype. That fear becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy when anxiety disrupts our thinking and causes us to conform to the stereotype.

Some hardships result from centuries-old discrimination—the steady accumulation of injustice that threatens to crush even the most resilient among us. Others hit unexpectedly. When sudden violence strikes, it can shake our faith in humanity to its core.

As Reverend Joseph Darby, the presiding elder for a neighboring district, told us, “Their extension of grace is rooted in a long-standing coping mechanism passed down from people who had no option in many cases but to forgive and move on while still leaving the door open for justice to be done. It takes you past raw vengeance. Forgiveness clears your head to pursue justice.

“We all have our own personal Andes,” Nando Parrado wrote long after the expedition with Roberto Canessa that led to their rescue. Canessa added, “One of the things that was destroyed when we crashed into the mountain was our connection to society. But our ties to one another grew stronger every day.

The more times a government or company had failed, the more likely they were to put a rocket into orbit successfully on the next try. Also, their chances of success increased after a rocket exploded compared to a smaller failure. Not only do we learn more from failure than success, we learn more from bigger failures because we scrutinize them more closely.

To be resilient after failures, we have to learn from them. Most of the time, we know this; we just don’t do it. We’re too insecure to admit mistakes to ourselves or too proud to admit them to others.

Of the hundreds of answers, most had one thing in common: the majority of regrets were about failures to act, not actions that failed.