Welcome to our last week. The topics we're going to cover in the next three lessons, I like it so much, I started a company built around this idea. The first one we're going to talk about is psychological resilience and then we're going to move to talking about endurance and adversity quotient. Then we'll wrap up with this idea of mental toughness. These things, how do we navigate the storms of life are so important in my mind. Again, this is why I started my company [inaudible] Metal to really zero-in on how do we get better at this. Today again, we're going to start with psychological resilience. There's a lot I like about psychological resilience. I think that in general, psychological resilience and then another one called grit, get a lot more play than probably some other things and I'll explain what I mean by that. I think there's a lot of value in this. But I'm going to show you a model of mental toughness later that encompasses both psychological resilience and grit. To me in my mind, the mental toughness model is a step up. Psychological resilience is this idea. Again, there's a lot of definitions out there. Not a lot of people agree on what exactly is psychological resilience, but I would say, psychological resilience is probably more well-defined than, let's be honest, mental toughness. But what we're going to see is a dynamic process encompassing positive adaptation within the context of significant adversity. But what does that mean? Especially the part about significant adversity. What is significant adversity to you? What is it to me? I think you get it. It's going to be different to everybody. I always like to laugh. I'm a little bit afraid of heights. I see the famous rock climber Alex Honnold and what a great movie. But when he did the documentary about climbing El Capitan with no ropes, that is adversity way beyond anything that I could ever do. I would probably get 15 feet off the ground and be paralyzed. But to him, that's not high adversity. I just want you to understand what is significant adversity. What does it mean to you? By the way, we can change that level. What used to be hard for me now has become easier. Again, you heard this in my TED talk, what was once hard, now it's become easier. We can all do this. I don't think I'm ever going to climb El Capitan, but there's plenty of things that I've stayed down in my life to get better at. By the way, I have. It doesn't show up as the significant adversity that we're used to. Keep that in mind. It's always fun to look at the words and whatever we're talking about. Today, we're talking about resilience. Where does this come from? It comes from the Latin word, resilire. I don't know if I'm saying that the right way, but you've seen on the slide here, and that's the idea to leap back. Oxford English Dictionary would say, it's ability to withstand or recover quickly from difficult conditions. A lot of times, the way people describe resilience is just basically the idea of leaping back. Resilience is, I have an adversity that has knocked me out of something called homeostasis and now I'm going to bounce back into my comfort zone. You say, what isn't that the only way that we can? No. One thing that we can have adversity that disrupts us, that we don't bounce back. Many times this is going to show up as post-traumatic stress disorder as opposed to post-traumatic growth. I would say post-traumatic growth is a next step up above resilience. Resilience is bouncing back to where we were. Post-traumatic growth is going to go above that and say, you know what, I've come out of this even better. This is [inaudible] situation. It has actually made me better and stronger. That's post-traumatic growth. We're not going talk much more about that. But if you like that concept, go out there and do some research on post-traumatic growth. Let's stick with resilience. Again, it's the idea of bouncing back when you've been disrupted by adversity. What are some traits that are common to resilience? Well, we see some of our old friends the idea of sense of control. Again, it's this interpretation of what do I control, how much of my life do I feel like is in my control. We see again, we've talked about internal locus of control. Do I feel like I'm steering my ship? Do I feel like much of the control of my life is within me? That's going to be that internal locus of control. Strong problem-solving skills when we're resilient. These are the people again, that have that can't do attitude. They're good at solving problems. They're not intimidated by them. They have no problem going out tackling difficult challenges. They have strong social connections. Don't underestimate this, please. Again, we are social creatures and our social connections make us more resilient. Don't try to go it alone. All right? A survivor mentality versus what? Maybe a victim mentality. I'll come back to the idea of a survivor mentality, emotion regulation. Of course, when we're going through tough times, we're facing adversity. Regulating our emotions is going to be important. Self-compassion and grace. Cut yourself some slack. You're not going to be perfect. You're going to fall down, you're going to skin your knee. That's okay. Let's come back to the idea of survivor mentality. One of the things I mentioned that social connections are very important. Please, as I say the next thing, they'll take away anything I said from social connection, but the people that I know and being included that they're resilient. Again, we'll talk about a mentally tough later, but the resilient mentally tough are the ones that say, no help is coming, rescue is not coming. We don't sit around waiting for somebody to bail us out or rescue us. We have this mindset of, I'm going to find a way to survive this. Again, that's at the heart of a resilient attitude to get through those tough times. As I mentioned earlier, there's a lot of definitions out there, but almost all of them will start to center on this idea of that. There's going to be two main core concepts that are part of resilience. One of them is a presence of diversity without adversity, we don't have resilience. So they go hand in hand and then it's that the next component is that positive adaptation. We need to have the adversity and then we need to, again bounce back from that to say, okay that's resilience. It's a dynamic process that changes over time. Same thing with mental toughness that we'll talk about later. You need to use it or lose it? It changes over time. We can get stronger, we can become weaker. As we go through life, depending on what we're doing in our life, we can be at different levels. It's a dynamic. Maybe think about a sliding scale of resilience where you add in your life. There are certainly many times when I've been more mentally tough and more resilient than other times. Again, it's a lot of use it or lose it. We'll talk about that moving forward as well. Then there's a lot of factors that influence resilience. We don't have enough time to go into those now, but just realize this is a multivariable problem. If you're following along with me, you know, I like to talk about this idea of control. We see it show up with resilience. Aversive events are perceived as less stressful when they are perceived as controllable. This is going to be a little bit interesting to a lot of psychology behind this. Let's say I'm going to do a psychology experiment with you, and I'm going to give you an electric shock. Now, if I give you a random electric shock, so I hook you up to, I don't know, the shock machine. I say, you know what? I'm not going to tell you when it's common. It's just you just got to sit there and take it. It can be random. It could come at any given time and how many jolts you get. I'm not going to tell you. That's one situation. Let's call that situation A. Situation B is same idea. I get you in the chair. I'm going to shock you, but I'm going to say, hey run, in three seconds, I'm going to shock you. Then again, the next time you shock me, you tell me when it's coming so that I know what it's coming, I can anticipate this, right? Which one do you think is more distressful to us? Well, it should be obvious. The one where we don't know it's coming is more distrustful. Why is that? Why we have a sense of control? Do I have control over when you're going to shock me? No, but when you tell me in three seconds I'm going to shock you, I feel like I have some control. Again, just be careful to understand that when we have a sense of control, it doesn't always have to be control, but you our feeling that we're in control can lower distress levels. Much like stress. Adversity is stress, by the way. But when we talk about stress and we talk about adversity, too much of it or a chronic stress or chronic adversity is not good for us. I always like to say we're built for transient moderate stress. We think of it like a sine wave; stress, rest, stress, rest. That's the same thing with adversity. Adversity is not a bad thing, but we have all the time, we're getting overloaded or overwhelmed by adversity, this can manifest itself in a lot of health conditions up to and including cancer. I've had podcast guests that feel like they got cancer because of a lot of adversity and lot of stress in their lives. Remember, too much adversity can be a bad thing and also learn to turn it off somehow. Adversity and stress fall into that category. Then lastly, beyond just the health concerns, that lack of control can be something that manifests itself in psychiatric disorders such as depression and schizophrenia. Now we get to the good stuff; how do we improve this? How do we get better at this? The first one I want to to talk about is cognitive reappraisal. What story are you telling yourself? When bad things happen and when adversity visits you, what's on your mind? How do you interpret that? Do you say, well, this is bad. Most people will. Most people are going to look at adversity as a bad thing. I should put that in quotes, "bad". What's good? What's bad? It's a Zen concepts; it's not good, it's not bad, it just is. If we can start to look at that, we become objective. Instead of being a subject and being emotionally attached to this, we become objective. We say, it's not good or bad, it just is. It sounds a little low hokey but it's incredibly powerful to start to do that. Reappraise those things that. Maybe, you're given a qualitative judgment to as good or bad and say, you know what? I'm just going to take it as it is. Dichotomy of Control; we've talked about this in previous lessons. This comes from the Stoic philosophy. Understand what you control and what you don't. Let go of those things you don't control, focus on the things that you do control. This is going to be incredibly important to develop your resilience. Adapt, improvise, and overcome. If you want to be resilient, you need to be flexible. You need to move where you need to, go around obstacles, go through them. Whatever it is, you got to adapt to that situation the best you can. It really is again, this can-do attitude, I'm going to do whatever it takes to get through these obstacles. Embrace adversity. Again, I've talked about that and much in my TED talk was on embracing adversity. Most people would say, I want to remove all adversity for my life. There's so many good things that come out of adversity. When we can embrace it, and especially the right kind of adversity. The right kind of adversity is usually adversity of our own choosing of at our own time. But here's the deal we know in life that doesn't always happen. Sometimes adversity visits us without an invitation. That's okay too. We can still use our cognitive reappraisal to frame that as, okay, there's some good that's going to come out of it. I'm going to become more resilient because of this adversity. I'm going to practice more savoring. Those things. It's not all bad. Learn to embrace adversity as an ally in, maybe, your pursuit of getting stronger. Then lastly, practice savoring. We know that the more adversity we go through, the more capacity we have for savoring the little things in life. Pay attention to those little things. Do some hard things so that you can develop that capacity for savoring and then really bring some attention and focus to savoring those little things; that cup of coffee on a Saturday morning that you love. Whatever it is, those little things that you love. Maybe petting your cat. How many times do we go through life and we don't pay attention to those or give their fair due. Focus on savoring those little things. It's like now that you're going to get more resilient, but you're also going to find more positive well-being from savoring. Consider that. They go hand in hand. That's where I will leave you today. Again, psychological resilience in this lesson. We got more good stuff coming. See you in next video.
