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Resilience for the Rest of Us
By Daniel Goleman
There are two ways to become more resilient: one by talking to yourself, the other by retraining your brain. If you’ve suffered a major failure, take the sage advice given by psychologist Martin Seligman in the HBR article “Building Resilience” (April 2011). Talk to yourself. Give yourself a cognitive intervention, and counter defeatist thinking with an optimistic attitude. Challenge your downbeat thinking, and replace it with a positive outlook.
Fortunately, major failures come along rarely in life.
But what about bouncing back from the more frequent annoying screwups, minor setbacks, and irritating upsets that are routine in any leader’s life? Resilience is, again, the answer—but with a different flavor. You need to retrain your brain.
The brain has a very different mechanism for bouncing back from the cumulative toll of daily hassles. And with a little effort, you can upgrade its ability to snap back from life’s downers.
Whenever we get so upset that we say or do something we later regret (and who doesn’t now and then?), that’s a sure sign that our amygdala—the brain’s radar for danger and the trigger for the fight-or-flight response—has hijacked the brain’s executive centers in the prefrontal cortex. The neural key to resilience lies in how quickly we recover from that hijacked state.
The circuitry that brings us back to full energy and focus after an amygdala hijack concentrates in the left side of our prefrontal area, says Richard Davidson, a neuroscientist at the University of Wisconsin. He’s also found that when we’re distressed, there’s heightened activity on the right side of the prefrontal area. Each of us has a characteristic level of left/right activity that predicts our daily mood range—if we’re tilted to the right, more upsets; if to the left, we’re quicker to recover from distress of all kinds.
To tackle this in the workplace, Davidson teamed with the CEO of a high-pressure, 24/7, biotech startup and meditation expert Jon Kabat-Zinn of the University of Massachusetts Medical School. Kabat-Zinn offered the employees at the biotech outfit instruction in mindfulness, an attention-training method that teaches the brain to register anything happening in the present moment with full focus—but without reacting.
The instructions are simple:
- Find a quiet, private place where you can be undistracted for a few minutes. For instance, close your office door and mute your phone.
- Sit comfortably, with your back straight but relaxed.
- Focus your awareness on your breath, staying attentive to the sensations of the inhalation and exhalation, and start again on the next breath.
- Do not judge your breathing or try to change it in any way.
- See anything else that comes to mind as a distraction—thoughts, sounds, whatever. Let them go and return your attention to your breath.
After eight weeks and an average of 30 minutes a day practicing mindfulness, the employees had shifted their ratio from tilted toward the stressed-out right side to leaning toward the resilient left side. What’s more, they said they remembered what they loved about their work: They got in touch with what had brought them energy in the first place.
To get the full benefit of mindfulness, a daily practice of 20 to 30 minutes works best. Think of it like a mental exercise routine. It can be very helpful to have guided instructions, but the key is to find a slot for the practice in your daily routine. (There are even instructions for using a long drive as your practice session.)
Mindfulness has steadily been gaining credence among hard-nosed executives. There are centers where mindfulness instruction has been tailored to businesspeople, from tony resorts like Miraval Resort in Arizona to programs in mindful leadership at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. Google University has been offering a course in mindfulness to employees for years.
Might you benefit from tuning up your brain’s resilience circuitry by learning to practice mindfulness? Among high-performing executives, the effects of stress can be subtle. My colleagues Richard Boyatzis and Annie McKee suggest as a rough diagnostic of leadership stress asking yourself, “Do I have a vague sense of unease, restlessness, or the feeling that life is not great (a higher standard than ‘good enough’)?” A bit of mindfulness might put your mind at ease.
DANIEL GOLEMAN is a codirector of the Consortium for Research on Emotional Intelligence in Organizations at Rutgers University, coauthor of Primal Leadership: Leading with Emotional Intelligence (Harvard Business Review Press, 2013), and author of The Brain and Emotional Intelligence: New Insights.
Adapted from content posted on hbr.org on March 4, 2016.