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Learning

Today at a glance:

• What is resilience

• Why building it matters

• What happens when you don’t build it

• How do we build it

Show me someone who hasn't gone through some rough patches or faced a few curveballs in life.

Whether it's dealing with the loss of a loved one, getting that rejection letter from your dream job, battling physical injuries, or just facing some downright tough times - we've all got our stories.

J K Rowling beautifully nailed it by saying “It’s impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you have not lived at all”

What is resilience?

Let’s break it down:

• To adapt implies to make something suitable for new use or purpose.

• Adversity is a sustained difficulty or problem faced by an individual

Very important to note that merely accepting your situation does not make you resilient. (More to come on this later)

Why should anyone bother building resilience?

The answer lies in the question - precisely because it’s not a trait. It’s a process that can be built.

If you are heading to a party, wouldn’t you take time to get dressed well?

Similarly, when we know that we cannot escape life’s adversities, why would you not develop something that will help you navigate it a little smoother?

What happens when you do not build resilience?

You fall victim to this interesting phenomenon “Learned Helplessness”.

This term was coined from a brilliant 1975 experiment conducted by Martin Seligman and Donald Hiroto.

TLDR (Too Long Didn’t Read) version of the experiment is that they exposed people to loud music and divided them in to groups.

The group who were given agency to lower it, did lower it.

The group who realized they are helpless, did not try hard to improve their situation even when they were given opportunities in next phases.

They essentially made peace with their helplessness.

Here’s the mind-boggling fact about this study.

They ran this experiment with dogs, mice, and cockroaches and gave them shock treatment.

It all resulted in the same learned helplessness

How does this concern you and me? It translates into some of us never being able to overcome heart breaks or setbacks such as being fired from our company.

We just accept the status quo. (Remember the note from above - not accepting; this is why)

You do not build resilience when you merely accept your situation, you build it when you have something more meaningful coming out of the experience.

How do we build resilience?

Three strategies to build resilience that are simple, but not easy.

1. Removing negative labels

George Bonanno clinical psychologist from Columbia University has coined a new term - PTE - Potentially Traumatic Event.

When you remove negative labels - you condition your mind to look at every experience as an opportunity to learn from and grow.

Very important to call out that, this does not mean you do not recognize the pain you have gone through, it simply implies that do not label it as something so awful that it has power over you.

2. Mindset realignment

Psychologists call it “internal locus of control.”

I like to also think of it as “get out of the victim mentality” stop giving yourself too many excuses.

3. ABC Model by Albert Ellis

This model developed by Albert Ellis is used in Cognitive Behavorial Therapy

It states that our Emotional and Behavioral Consequences (C: Consequences) are not determined by Adversities (A: Adversities) but by the Beliefs (B: Beliefs) one holds about Adversity.

Read that again. The way you react is not because of the adversity itself but because of the beliefs you hold.

For example: If you get fired from your job (A: Adversity) and you learn to separate out the belief of (B: Belief) I am a failure in my career from C (C: Consequences) wallowing in self-pity will build you mental toughness and resilience.

Because you have managed to not correlate being fired with failure but rather a setback, your belief has shaped how you look at the adversity.

Resilience primes you to recoil and make this adversity useful to help people who experience similar situation.

Prompt

♟️ My turn:

My relationship with my body has not been the best.

I have videos of recording myself crying over how I hated my body. I considered myself fat and unappealing.

Thankfully it is WAY better now - owing to working out at least 30 mins everyday.

My life would have been different had I:

Removed negative labels and not kept calling myself fat and ugly.

PS: I do not condone - obese people saying it is okay to be Obese in the name of body positivity. Neither am I saying they should berate themselves like I did.

My point is I wish I told myself “okay I am not in my best shape and I got to workout eat healthy to get where I want to get”

Realigned my mindset by not comparing myself to people on social media and had my own metrics to measure my fitness - such as how often am I working out.

I reacted to the adversity of hating my body by going on unrealistic diet fads and workout programs to expect immediate results because of the belief I held of being “Fat and ugly”. Applying ABC model to understand what belief I held and changed my belief to “I can become fit by consistently working out and eating healthy”

That’s all for today.

♟️ Your turn

Shout out to my dear friend Simran Moraes for helping me riff some ideas for this Newsletter and feedback on previous Newsletters.

Stay Cute and intentional,

Clerisa

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