Why do some people give up under pressure and others bounce back from major hardships? Do you perceive an event in life as an obstacle, or as a chance to learn?
According to the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago, 92 percent of Americans report suffering at least one significant negative life event in their lifetime.
Dealing with job loss, illness, divorce, family trauma or injury can be challenging. Nearly everyone suffers negative life events, but people respond to them differently.
Resilience is one of the most important skills you can ever learn to become a better human. When people think about “resilience,” they typically imagine bouncing back from hardships — but it’s more than that. Resilience is also the ability to adapt to complex change.
Surviving the most difficult situations build you up for the next one. To improve your ability to persevere in tough situations, it pays to think like an optimist. Duckworth’s research suggests that encountering adversity and believing pessimistically that you have no power over them, will encourage you to give up without a fight.
“Optimists see failure as a chance to learn. They consider the changeable aspects of a disappointment that can be addressed and adjusted to make failure less likely next time. Pessimists, by contrast, will tend to blame the failure on a fundamental cause that can’t be changed, such as the belief that they don’t have what it takes,” says Dr Christian Jarrett.
George Bonanno, a clinical psychologist at Columbia University’s Teachers College has been studying resilience for over twenty-five years.
“Bonanno’s theory of resilience starts with an observation: all of us possess the same fundamental stress-response system, which has evolved over millions of years and which we share with other animals,” writes Maria Konnikova of The New Yorker.
She adds, “The vast majority of people are pretty good at using that system to deal with stress. When it comes to resilience, the question is: Why do some people use the system so much more frequently or effectively than others?”
Your capacity for dealing with obstacles is different from mine. People handle challenges and obstacles based on their perception.
If you can improve your narratives and the stories you tell yourself about hardships — and see them as opportunities for growth, how you handle any stressful situation will change rapidly. You will be able to use your resilience system better than you have done in the past.
In 1989 a developmental psychologist Emmy Werner published the results her thirty-two-year longitudinal project after following a group of six hundred and ninety-eight children, in Kauai, Hawaii, from before birth through their third decade of life.
Werner found that several elements predicted resilience. Some elements had to do with luck. She also discovered that a large set of elements was psychological, and had to do with how the children responded to the environment.
Resilient children tended to “meet the world on their own terms,” she wrote. They were autonomous and independent, would seek out new experiences, and had a “positive social orientation.” “Though not especially gifted, these children used whatever skills they had effectively,” Werner wrote.
A clear understanding of your skills, emotions and frustrations changes how you respond to everything
Knowing what you need, what you don’t need, and when it’s time to reach out for help can help you focus on the things they can control.
People with strong self-knowledge don’t fear to push back and renegotiating salaries, goals, and timelines when they don’t make sense.
“..leaders with strong self-knowledge — who have a clear understanding of their skills and shortcomings, their frustrations, and their core principles — are more likely to sustain those needed reserves of resilience to thrive through adversity and change,” wrote Ron Carucci of Harvard Business Review.
Highly resilient people augment their shortfalls with the skills of others in a team. They prepare themselves as best they can readily acknowledge their shortfalls, take responsibility when it matters.
“My research has found that self-awareness is an important aspect of resilience — in fact, it is fundamental,” says Gail Kinman, an occupational health psychologist at the University of Bedfordshire and the British Psychological Society.
Resilient children had what psychologists call an “internal locus of control,” Werner found in her study. Strong self-knowledge can stop harsh reactions before hurting others.
People with shallow self-knowledge tend to take out their stress on whoever happens to be in the way. They can’t control their emotions in the face of challenges. They easily get overwhelmed. Most people with shallow self-knowledge have a breaking point.
The good news is, resilience can be learned. Werner discovered that resilience could change over time. You can learn to reframe trauma, bad news, and life-changing events into positive terms when the initial response is negative. You can train yourself to better regulate your emotions.
To improve your sense of control over situations, stop spending too much in your head. “Ruminating on traumatic events can have a negative impact on emotional and physical health. Learning to move through negative thoughts and memories rather than getting stuck in they is crucial to psychological and physical well-being,” says Dr Denise Cummins, a research psychologist, and a Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science.
Resilient people do not just bounce back from hard experiences; they find healthy ways to integrate them into their lives.
In his book, Survivor Personality: Why Some People Are Stronger, Smarter, and More Skillful at Handling Life’s Difficulties…and How You Can Be, Too, Al Siebert writes, “The best survivors spend almost no time, especially in emergencies, getting upset about what has been lost, or feeling distressed about things going badly…. For this reason, they don’t usually take themselves too seriously and are therefore hard to threaten.”
Whilst you can become more resilient, the opposite is true if you don’t deal with life’s challenges better.
“We can become less resilient, or less likely to be resilient,” says Bonanno. “We can create or exaggerate stressors very easily in our own minds. That’s the danger of the human condition.”
When you face a difficult situation in life, remember what Dr Chris Feudtner once said, “90% of life is about remaining calm.”
—
Previously published on medium
*******************************
***
If you believe in the work we are doing here at The Good Men Project and want to join our calls on a regular basis, please join us as a Premium Member, today.
All Premium Members get to view The Good Men Project with NO ADS.
Need more info? A complete list of benefits is here.
Talk to you soon.
*************************
Photo credit: shutterstock