The Resilience Factor.

 by Karen Reivich and Andrew Shatte

7 Keys to finding your inner strength and overcoming life’s hurdles.

I came across Karen Reivich in a 5-part Positive Psychology certificate course that I took through Coursera a few years ago, and have been meaning to read her book on Resilience since then. I’m glad I did!  The methods used here are explained in a clear and applicable manner, but make no mistake – to apply them takes practice, and a continual review of the steps until they come more naturally. Reading this reminded me of how our inner dialogue dictates how we think and feel, and how it takes diligence and perseverance to change the ingrained inner explanatory styles that we defer to. If we’re prepared to do the work, the results in mood stability and ability to navigate challenges are extremely gratifying.

Key take outs for me:

• Resilience is the ability to persevere and adapt when things go awry; and affects your performance at school and work, your physical health, and the quality of your relationships.

• Essentially it’s about changing the way that you think about adversity. Your thinking style (your lens on the world) determines your level of resilience.

• Self-efficacy (an essential ingredient of resilience) is the belief that you can master your environment and effectively solves problems as they arise.

• Being able to Reach out to broaden your boundaries and enrich your experiences is a skill that requires practice! Limiting our experiences can result in barriers, where we hide from adversity and don’t cultivate the joy of growth and ground covered.

·      Resilient people:

o   Understand that failures are not an end point, and are able to derive meaning from failure.

o   Do not feel shame when they do not succeed.

o   Tackle problems thoughtfully, thoroughly and energetically.

o   Learn how to stop their anxiety and doubts from overwhelming them.

o   Handle threats with integrity and grace.

Resilience is comprised of 7 Abilities:

1.     Emotional Regulation – being able to stay calm under pressure.

2.     Impulse Control – the ability to manage and reactions and behaviours.

3.     Empathy – how well we are able to read other people’s cues and their emotional states.

4.     Optimism – believing that things can change for the better.

5.     Causal Analysis – being able to accurately identify the causes of our problems.

6.     Self-Efficacy – our sense that we are effective in the world.

7.     Reaching out – knowing and expressing yourself, assessing risks, finding meaning, expansiveness.

The 7 Skills to works through for Resilience:

The first three skills are focused on knowing yourself; then number four and five are more change skills; and number six and seven are more practice skills. Having said that – all of this takes practice – one situation/challenge at a time!

1.     Learning your ABC’s: (Listening to your thoughts)

A = Adversity – what has happened that has upset you?

B = Beliefs – your in-the-moment beliefs, as they run through your mind.

C = Consequences – the feelings and behaviours that result.

Start by identifying then adversity, and then the feelings that resulted. Then, look at your beliefs – what were you thinking that brought on those reactions.

If you can better understand the way that you think, you’ll be able to regulate your emotions and respond more appropriately.

2.     Avoiding Thinking Traps: (Identifying mistaken thinking)

There are 8 common thinking traps:

·       Jumping to conclusions.

·       Tunnel vision (seeing only the negative aspects).

·       Magnifying the negatives and minimizing the positives.

·       Personalizing (blaming yourself)

·       Externalizing (blaming others)

·       Overgeneralizing (always and everything rather than sometimes and some things)

·       Mind reading (“knowing” what others are thinking)

·       Emotional Reasoning (drawing false conclusions based on our emotional state)

Just being aware of these in the moment helps to contextualize our thinking and the resulting emotions.

3.     Detecting Icebergs (Identifying deep beliefs that influence our thinking)

These beliefs may lead to emotions and behaviours that are mismatched to the situation. There are three categories of deep beliefs that can influence our thinking:

·      Achievement – i.e. failure is a sign of weakness, win at all costs, success is what matters.

·      Acceptance – i.e. I must please everyone, I want people to only think good things of me.

·      Control – i.e. only weak people can’t solve problems; you are week if you cannot control things.

Once you’ve identified your icebergs you can evaluate what that belief might be costing you, and how you can change it to reduce the cost.

We develop our iceberg beliefs from our families 

4.     Challenging beliefs: (Analysis your beliefs about the causes of the adversity)

There are seven steps to challenge beliefs:

·      First, ABC the adversity, and break the consequences into emotions and behaviours.

·      Pie chart the causes (with the beliefs from your in-the-moment thoughts). Decide whether each cause is not changeable, somewhat changeable, or highly changeable.

·      Identify your explanatory style, and understand it for perspective:

o   Personal (me/not me)

o   Permanent ( always/ not always)

o   Pervasive (everything/not everything)

·      Be flexible – be wary of old, tired solutions and get outside of your explanatory style.

·      Be accurate – and be wary of your confirmation bias. Look at your beliefs and look at evidence for, and evidence against, and then generate an alternative belief.

·      Create a new pie chart, adding the other causes you have identified. The more causes you identify, the more likely you are to find a solution.

·      New solutions – rate the changeability of each slice, and decide what solutions to implement.

5.     Putting it in Perspective: (Stop “what ifs”)

Analyze your beliefs about the implications of the adversity.

·      Worst case outcome.

·      Best case outcome.

·      Most likely outcome.

·      Solutions and steps you can take.

6.     Calming and Focusing: (To regain clarity)

·      Learn to quiet your emotions when they are out of control.

·      Techniques that help: Controlled breathing, positive imagery and progressive muscle relaxation. 

7.     Real-time Resilience: (Changing counter-productive thoughts)

·      Alternatives: A more accurate way of seeing this is…

·      Evidence: That’s not true because…

·      Implications: A more likely outcome is… and I can… to deal with it.

Useful tools for sure, but the challenge is to slow down in the moment, so that you can try to apply them as best you can as each situation arises. Practice makes perfect – good luck!