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The Resiliency Advantage by Dr. Al Seibert (2005)
Thriving in Today’s World
The Resiliency Advantage shows healthy people how to become better and better at handling turbulent change, nonstop pressure, and life-disrupting setbacks.
Resilience, resilient, and resiliency refer to the ability to:
- Cope well with high levels of ongoing disruptive change;
- Sustain good health and energy when under constant pressure;
- Bounce back easily from setbacks;
- Overcome adversities;
- Change to a new way of working and living when an old way is no longer possible; and
- Do all this without acting in dysfunctional or harmful ways.
Resilient people are those who consciously decide that somehow, some way, they will do the very best they can to survive, cope, and make things turn out well. Here are five steps for developing resiliency skills:
- Optimize your health and well-being
- Develop good problem-solving skills (Psychology research shows that problem-focused responses to unexpected difficulties lead to resiliency, while strong emotional reactions in which you feel like a victim lead to helplessness)
- Develop strong inner gatekeepers
- Develop high-level resiliency skills
- Discover your talent for serendipity
Bouncing Back from Setbacks
When your life is disrupted by decisions or actions made by others, an essential question to ask yourself is, “Who is responsible for how well my life goes?” How resilient you are depends on your answer. People who believe their fate is under the control of outside forces act in ways that confirm their beliefs. People who know they can do things to make life better act in ways that confirm their beliefs. Both sets of beliefs are self-validating and self-fulfilling.
Napoleon Hill in Think and Grow Rich, “Every adversity carries with it the seed of an equivalent or greater benefit.” When hit by life disrupting change, you will never be the same again. You will emerge either stronger or weaker, either better or bitter.
Resiliency comes from feeling personally responsible for finding a way to overcome adversity.
Level One Resiliency: Optimize Your Health – A Practical Action Plan
What most people call stress is really an internal, physical feeling of anxiety or strain that they don’t like. This is not just semantics. Stress is the external pressure, strain is the internal effect.
Research with many groups has documented improved coping abilities when people under pressure write about their feelings regularly. The better you become at being able to recognize, verbalize, and manage your feelings, the less you will be vulnerable to losing emotional control or developing cardiovascular illnesses.
Hardy executives and managers have these three qualities:
- Emotional commitment to do their best to successfully handle the ongoing events and to help others as well.
- Feeling of being in control of their job assignments and their part of the action.
- Felt energized and challenged to solve the problems.
People who feel in control hold up much better and remain healthier in high-pressure, disruptive change. Increasing your positive experiences is actually more important than decreasing your negative ones. To create a customized plan, develop a plan of action for increasing positive, revitalizing experiences.
We know from research that we need a moderate amount of strain to remain healthy. Selye called it “eu stress” meaning “good stress.”
Level Two Resiliency: Skillfully Problem Solve
People who focus on solving the problems they encounter are much more resilient than people who disengage, feel helpless, or become highly emotional. Positive emotions broaden a person’s cognitive skills.
Positive emotions make you more aware of many things happening. You notice small details and can remember many tasks that have to be done. Taking time to laugh, appreciate pleasant moments, and “smell the roses” daily affects your brain and nervous system, and this in turn increases your resiliency.
To strengthen your ability to find creative solutions to problems, let yourself be curious, playful, open-minded, and awed in the way you were as a child.
Level Three Resiliency: Strengthen Your Three Inner Selfs
Three core inner strengths are essential to being resilient—which begin to develop early in life—function like gatekeepers to higher-level resiliency abilities:
- Self-confidence: Anticipate ability to succeed at certain things in the future. Think of self-confidence as your reputation with yourself. People with strong self-confidence expect to succeed in new activities and overcome unknown adversities.
- Self-esteem: How we feel about ourselves. Strong, healthy self-esteem serves like a protective, thick emotional blanket that buffers you from feeling hurt by harmful criticism.
- Self-concept: Ideas about ourselves – who we think we are shapes our identity. It may be tempting to think of yourself as an important noun, such as “doctor, professor, judge, CEO, or the state tennis champion.” It’s better for your identity, however, if you develop a descriptive self-concept that remains intact despite a change in your job title, role with others, income level, or physical prowess.
Psychology studies show a direct correlation between the structure of a person’s self-esteem, and how they respond to failure. If people have an identity based on learning useful lessons after not succeeding at something important to them, they experience little loss of self-esteem after a failure.
Level Four Resiliency: Unleash Your Curiosity – Enjoy Learning
Humans have many choices, as we need to learn how to live in this world. We can find safe environments, create environments that are safe, or learn how to survive in a new environment.
When you are hit with a major unexpected difficulty, get a pad of paper and write the Master Question: “What are the important questions I should be asking?” Then, search for answers as fast as you can.
You were born with the ability to learn in three different ways:
- Scheduled and controlled, as in a classroom setting.
- Imitating effective people (role models)
- Self-motivated, self-managed learning, which comes from your own experience.
Stacey Scholtz notes, “I read management books and attend seminars. The real experience comes not only from years of experience, but also taking time to really reflect on what I’ve done well and attempting to learn from both.”
How to achieve high-level resiliency is not a mystery. The most resilient people are like children who never grew up. A curious, playful spirit contributes directly to resiliency because playfulness and asking questions let you learn your way out of difficult circumstances.
Level Four Resiliency: The Power of Positive Expectations
The Bible had many accounts of early Christians being given hope or urged to feel hope. A person full of hope feels less despair hopeful people endure longer, which can lead to healing, rescue, or the end of bad circumstances.
Optimists are people who expect good things to happen to them. Pessimists are people who expect bad things to happen to them. Both tend to be self-fulfilling prophecies.
Resilience is defined as “an interactive product of beliefs, attitudes, approaches, behaviors, and perhaps physiology that help people fare better during adversity and recover more quickly following it.” Highly resilient people are imbued with a mixture of hope, optimism, positive attitudes, and an ability to imagine a desired condition in a way that motivates and guides their purposeful coping actions. Such people expect and need good outcomes, and often get them.
Joanne Hill lost 12 family members in just 4 years. Here are seven “rainbow remedies” she used, and she noted that she could find rainbows every time, if she stopped to look for them:
- Stop, look, listen, and learn
- Praise and thanksgiving is a powerful treatment for fear and anxiety
- Accentuate the positive
- Power of choice
- Forgiveness can heal loss and painful relationships
- Helping others help themselves
- Support systems
Level Four Resiliency: Integrating Your Paradoxical Abilities
When you reach advanced levels of mental development and emotional intelligence found in highly resilient people, you can exercise inspiring optimism, practical pessimism, or a blend of both, just like you control the faucets on a sink.
One mental and emotional barrier that locks people into the energy-draining, constricted level of thinking is to label people as either pessimists or optimists. Thinking of people as nouns simplifies perceptions for the observer but limits comprehension.
Most resilient people are both extroverted and introverted, both thoughtful and outgoing, serious and humorous, hard-working and lazy, self-confident and self-critical. On any dimension of personality, they are rarely one way or the other; they are usually both one way and the other.
Level Four Resiliency: Allowing Everything to Work Well – The Synergy Talent
Maslow noted how some managers managed in ways that enhanced psychological health in their employees. Maslow described the effect of these organizations as synergistic. Those organizations enhanced the well-being of families and communities their employees come from.
Your ability to create optimal conditions is strengthened the more that you can exercise compassionate empathy for people who act and talk in ways that drain your energy, if you let it happen. Use questions to look past their behavior to find how to neutralize or assimilate what they do. Instead of passing judgment on difficult people, empathize with them. This changes the energy. With empathy, you can neutralize their de synergistic actions and create better synergy. By remaining calm and relaxed during periods of intense action, your health and well-being become even more optimal.
Level Five Resiliency: Strengthening Your Talent for Serendipity
Serendipity, according to Horace Walpole (in a letter to a friend in 1754), comes from using wisdom to convert an unexpected event, accident, or mishap into good fortune. He said three elements must be present:
- Something unexpected or accidental happens to you.
- Your perceptiveness, good sense, and wisdom (sagacity), lead you to discover the third element
- Unexpected benefit, gift, or blessing in what happened.
The art of resiliency usually starts with looking for the hidden benefits in difficulties by asking these questions:
- What’s good about this?
- How can I turn this into my advantage?
- What unusual opportunity has this created?
Reading book after book on cancer survivors, one thing becomes evident. Almost without fail, those cancer victims who survive terrible odds take charge of their lives spiritually and holistically. Serendipity is when you purposefully use your internal mental and emotional abilities to convert what could be a loss or setback into a positive or beneficial incident.
Level Five Resiliency: Mastering Extreme Resiliency Challenges
By finding positive benefits in adversity, you regain control over your destiny.
The highest-level resiliency skill of all is being able to convert an extreme misfortune into a lucky event that changes your life in ways more wonderful than you ever imagined. You not only bounce back, your life is better than before.
Level Five Resiliency: Our Transformational Breakthrough
You become highly resilient by continuously learning your best way of being yourself in your circumstances.
If you can avoid being crushed beyond recovery, and you do your best to resile, the outcome will be that you can emerge from the experience a different, better, and more effective person.
We are most resilient when we scan new circumstances with curiosity, not knowing in advance what we will do, but confident that we will interact in ways that lead to things working well.
May you learn to use The Resiliency Advantage, as you shoot for the stars!