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May 11 - May 11, 2020
We plant the seeds of resilience in the ways we process negative events. After spending decades studying how people deal with setbacks, psychologist Martin Seligman found that three P’s can stunt recovery:2 (1) personalization—the belief that we are at fault; (2) pervasiveness—the belief that an event will affect all areas of our life; and (3) permanence—the belief that the aftershocks of the event will last forever.
Studies of “affective forecasting”—our predictions of how we’ll feel in the future—reveal that we tend to overestimate how long negative events will affect us.
“Part of every misery,”18 C. S. Lewis wrote, is “misery’s shadow … the fact that you don’t merely suffer but have to keep on thinking about the fact that you suffer.
Acknowledging blessings can be a blessing in and of itself. Psychologists asked a group of people to make a weekly list of five things for which they were grateful.21 Another group wrote about hassles and a third listed ordinary events. Nine weeks later, the gratitude group felt significantly happier and reported fewer health problems.
When someone shows up with a cast, we immediately inquire, “What happened?” If your ankle gets shattered, people ask to hear the story. If your life gets shattered, they don
Deal with the elephant in the room
It wasn’t possible for me to remind Jeff that he was living with MS. He was aware of that every minute of every day. Even people
“I see it. I see you’re suffering. And I care about you.
imagine how they’d feel if they were defined by their biggest mistake.
Empathy was nice but encouragement was better.
Survivor guilt is a thief of joy—yet another secondary loss from death.
Having fun is a form of self-compassion; just as we need to be kind to ourselves when we make mistakes, we also need to be kind to ourselves by enjoying life when we can.
Playing music at the edge of our capabilities is what psychologists call a “just manageable difficulty.”19 This level requires all of our attention, giving us no room to think about anything else.
Believe you can learn from failure and you become less defensive and more open.34
asking for help is in all four categories. Now I see that this is at the heart of building resilience. When children feel comfortable
“grounded hope”—the understanding that if you take action you can make things better.
When college students were reminded of their gender before taking a math test,12 women performed 43 percent worse than men. When the exact same test was called a “problem-solving test” instead of a “math test,” the gender gap in performance vanished.
Why specific terminology matters
When companies fail, it’s usually for reasons that almost everyone knows but almost no one has voiced.
