CHAPTER 9
BUILDING ON YOUR RESILIENCE EVERY DAY
As we approach the end of the book, we hope that by now you are feeling more confident about your ability to overcome whatever you are going through. Like all skills, however, building resilience and real strength is not something you do overnight, nor is it something that you learn once and that’s it for life. Instead, think of real strength as a psychological muscle: you have to work at it to make it strong in the first place, then you have to keep working at it to keep it strong. ‘Use it, or lose it’ goes for resilience like it goes for learning languages, maintaining a good memory and all other cognitive skills. This final chapter, then, is full of real skills and techniques that you can take away and try right now; techniques that you can turn to when you feel you’ve hit a tricky patch. All you have to do is to digest and understand what each step of each process entails, and then you can turn to them whenever you need them, ensuring that your real strength muscle remains in the best shape it can.
ENCOURAGE MORE HELPFUL WAYS OF THINKING
Just as we can’t stop bad things happening to us, we also can’t stop how these things make us feel – anxious, stressed or even depressed.
Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) is a type of psychotherapy which has been used to treat depression and stress for years. In very basic terms, it helps the client to control and reduce their symptoms (of stress, anxiety, depression) by giving them coping strategies and helping them to change the way they think about their situation, which, in turn, changes their emotions and behaviour.
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) is also a form of psychotherapy but is a step on from the ‘new CBT’ if you like. While CBT is more about controlling your symptoms of distress when you come up against a setback or trauma in your life, ACT is more concerned with the relationship you have with your symptoms. Using mindfulness and also ‘acceptance’ techniques, ACT invites people not to avoid or eliminate unpleasant feelings, but to sit with them and get curious about them, in order to move towards what therapists and psychologists call a more ‘value-based life’. In other words, ACT encourages us towards more helpful ways of thinking which means we don’t just feel more able to tackle the challenges we have, but to live the life we are meant to live while we do that.
“If we can learn to experience stress and respond to it in a more helpful way then we can feel less distressed and stronger.”
Dr Michael Sinclair, Consultant Psychologist
We already know from Part 1 that when we experience some adversity, our normal response is to try to control or eradicate it in some way. However, we also know that when we do this, we exacerbate those feelings and the situation becomes all-consuming. We become obsessed and pre-occupied with our problem, leaving less time and energy for the things that are important to us.
The question ACT asks is: is this workable for you? Is this making you feel good and enabling to live the life you want? Because if it is, that’s great, but if it’s not then you need to look at your relationship to the thoughts and feelings you’re having. The first thing to do might be to stop fighting altogether, so that you can really explore what you’re feeling.
“If we stay still, we give ourselves opportunities to see alternative routes out. You don’t have to struggle. Do nothing.”
Dr Michael Sinclair, Consultant Psychologist
So how can I encourage more helpful ways of thinking?
ACT is a technique that can do just that. It is something that is practised by professional psychotherapists, but if you understand each of the four stages, there is no reason why you can’t take the concepts from each and practise it yourself.
- Wake up!
This step is all about being present in the here and now. One way of cultivating this ability is to cultivate mindfulness (see Chapter 6: Strength Robbers, about how you might start to do this right now). It’s about learning to notice our thoughts and feelings, but also the traps we fall into: our unhelpful patterns of thought. It’s about experiencing these thoughts and feelings as they happen in the present moment. The other part of the Wake up! stage is what practitioners of ACT call ‘self as context’. This basically means developing a perspective on our experience that’s bigger than our actual experience, so that we are able to separate ourselves from our thoughts and observe ourselves as separate from them. If we can learn to do this, then we don’t have to be defined by our thoughts and we begin to see ourselves as simply the context in which our thoughts happen, rather than being them. (See the box from Consultant Counselling Psychologist Dr Michael Sinclair later on in this section.)
- Loosen up
This stage is all about responding to your thoughts and feelings in a more effective way – a way that fosters resilience. Psychologists call the way we respond to our thoughts or feelings ‘cognitive diffusion techniques’, so Loosen up is all about developing good ones! Again, as we explored in earlier chapters, these would be first and foremost noticing and becoming aware of our thoughts (instead of just reacting to them). It also means not buying into negative thoughts such as: I’m useless/I can’t do anything. ‘These,’ explains Dr Sinclair, are ‘autopilot responses of distraction. They’re like turning the TV up louder.’
If we buy into thoughts like this, it affects us behaviourally, and we might feel down and anxious; we might ‘fuse’ with this feeling, which is the word psychologists use to describe getting unhelpfully caught up with a feeling, often creating an unhelpful narrative around it.
The Loosen up stage also means not trying to suppress our feelings. To illustrate how unhelpful trying to deny our feelings is, try this: DON’T think about chocolate, what it tastes, looks, feels like … See? All you do is think about chocolate and how it tastes and what it looks like! Basically, the harder you try to throw something away, the harder it bounces back. Trying to suppress thoughts isn’t helpful, instead cultivate the awareness to say ‘this isn’t working. I need to loosen up’.
The other piece in Loosen up is acceptance. It means developing your willingness to experience feelings without putting up defences. The more we do this, the more quickly we can move towards the things we want to do/should be doing and the quicker we can feel stronger and better in general.
- Step up
This stage is about clarifying our values. What do you want to stand for in this adversity? Who do you want to be and what qualities do you want to display and prove? We already looked at values and how to find yours in Chapter 4, but let’s look deeper. Dr Michael Sinclair defines a value as a ‘desired, ongoing, global quality of action’. Basically, values are not goals – they are the qualities we want to bring to the way in which we pursue and hopefully achieve our goals. Our values inform how we’re going to do it, and why … For example, a goal might be: I want to get through this adversity; but the value might be: by being kinder to myself, by being a calmer mother while I do it. When we take the time and trouble to find out what really matters to us, then live our lives accordingly, we feel much stronger and self-confident. We have ‘stepped up’.
- Committed action
This is the bit where you JUST DO IT! You put into practice the promises you made to yourself about living out your values and you start to actually make changes. One great way of doing this is goal setting. Goals give us hope, direction and focus. Setting them is about creating a vision, and having a vision is a big part of building real strength. It’s about having the mindset: let’s keep working towards the things I want to happen, despite the fact I’m going through adversity.
One tried and tested way of setting goals is what psychologists call ‘SMART’-based goal setting. The acronym SMART has several slightly different variations, which can be used to provide a more comprehensive definition of goal setting, but here is the one used in ACT.
- S: Specific. Try and make your goals as defined as possible. So, rather than ‘I want to lose weight’, say ‘I want to lose ten pounds’.
- M: Measurable. This is about being able to monitor your progress; so can you measure the weight you are now, and make a note of how much you lose every week? Or, to give a different example, can you measure how many jobs you’ve applied for this week, against how many jobs you intended to apply for (your goal) and work out how you will split up the remainder?
- A: Achievable. Know if the goal is obtainable and how far away completion is.
- R: Recorded/Realistic. Can you achieve this goal with the resources, knowledge and time you have?
- T: Time-based. What time frame do you want to achieve the goal within and is this enough time to complete it?
If we look back at the four different stages of ACT, then, we could breakdown and summarize the whole process like this:
- Contact the present moment.
- Hold onto those thoughts and feelings lightly and with self-compassion.
- Observe those thoughts and feelings as they pass through you.
- Clarify what actions you can take – and engage in those steps.
GROW SOME GRIT
In Chapter 3 we were introduced to author Angela Duckworth and the concept of ‘grit’. We learned how, as part of her research, Duckworth interviewed and studied army cadets going through a grueling training programme. (For the record, she also studied children doing a spelling bee and trainee primary school teachers as they were thrown into the lion’s den of an inner city state school.) We heard how she discovered that the one quality those who stayed the course, no matter how hard it was, had in common, was what she coined as ‘grit’: the ultimate blend of ‘passion and perseverance’.
We can now see, then, the close correlation between grittiness and real strength: if we have passion and perseverance, we are much more likely to be able to stick at things when tackling a problem or challenge and to come out the other side, not crushed, but thriving.
“Grit fails when we can’t get back up after a setback, but when we do, it prevails.”
Angela Duckworth, author of Grit
The obvious question now is: if being gritty is such an essential part of thriving after adversity, can I develop it? Say you’re not ordinarily the kind of person who sticks things out once the going gets tough, can you learn to be?
The answer to that is a resounding yes. Seeing as passion and perseverance are the two vital components of grit, it would follow that if we can learn how to develop each one, we can develop grit.
We already looked at how to find your passion and the goal hierarchy in Chapter 4, so let’s look now at perseverance.
Perseverance and how to develop yours
In a nutshell, perseverance is the act of persisting to do something in spite of challenges, obstacles and disappointments. It is an essential quality, a type of real strength if you like, which is essential not just for grit but for realizing your goals in general.
Unfortunately, many people rob themselves of success because they do not have the perseverance to see their goals through. However, developing perseverance is not difficult to do if you’re prepared to put in some effort. The following is a kind of checklist you can look to for helping you develop perseverance and become grittier!
- First, establish what it is you truly desire. What goal do you really want to achieve?
- You have to have an unshakeable faith and belief that you CAN overcome your adversity or achieve your goal, no matter what obstacles you come up against.
- If you don’t, then the likelihood is that you’ll quit, which only reinforces your theory that you wouldn’t have ever succeeded anyway.
- If you’re not careful, this mindset can develop into a habit, meaning you fall into the trap of sabotaging potential success.
- To help you with confidence, it’s a great idea to have a clear step-by-step plan of how you’re going to achieve your goal. Your plan is your roadmap – without one, you’ve far more chance of getting lost!
- Before you start your pursuit of a goal, make a commitment to yourself that you will work toward it for a specific period of time and won’t give up before that time is up.
- When the deadline arrives, you can then decide whether to continue with the strategy you’re currently following or make some changes to it.
- Be flexible. Have belief and willingness to revise your game-plan, because revising things is fine, but giving up will only reinforce your idea that you’re unable to see things through and undermine your confidence.
- Identify potential obstacles you could face along the way. This will not only prepare you for when you do come across them, but it will also help you devise plan B/alternative strategies.
- Seek out support from family, friends or mentors to help keep you motivated.
- Remember: it’s all about the baby steps. Establishing habits every day towards your main goal will mean that your efforts will accumulate.
BEYOND ‘REAL STRENGTH’ TO ‘SUPER RESILIENCE’
In Chapter 5, you were introduced to psychologist Elizabeth Kubler-Ross’ ‘grief model’ and the five cognitive stages of grief and loss; be this loss of a loved one, of self, or loss of your hopes and dreams.
Just to remind you of those five stages:
- Denial.
- Anger.
- Bargaining.
- Depression.
- Acceptance.
This last stage – acceptance – is what we talk about when we talk about resilience or ‘bouncing back’. If we think about the phrase itself – ‘bouncing back’ – we can see how it describes getting back to our lives after adversity: how we carry on, willing to live with, ‘accepting’ whatever loss or pain we’ve endured.
Motivational speaker and author Dr Gregg Steinberg, however, believes there is a final stage that we are capable of – a higher stage. This stage he calls transcendence:
“Transcendence is not just accepting the tragedy – not just bouncing back to the same spot – but bouncing back higher. It is being super-resilient.”
Dr Gregg Steinberg, motivational speaker and author of Fall Up!
Eager to learn the ‘secret of using adversity as a superpower for personal growth’, Steinberg interviewed thousands of people around the world who declared that their tragic events had propelled their life to a higher level of existence, meaning they discovered not just their true path in life, but also joy they could never have imagined.
The result is his book: Fall Up! Why Adversity Unlocks your Superpowers. It is a book that shares these stories, but also Steinberg’s discovery that in their journey from tragedy to transcendence, every single person he interviewed went through the same steps in the same order. Just as Kubler-Ross called the five stages of grief she discovered the ‘grief cycle model’, Steinberg called these stages ‘The Science of Transcendability’.
‘These people used adversity as a super-power for personal growth’, says Steinberg.
Here, he tells us how it’s done.
Each of these stages gives you a map for bouncing back higher and becoming the person you’re meant to be. Also, you don’t need to have experienced serious tragedy to want to, or know how to, transcend. Maybe you are just stuck in a rut or unhappy with your life, but feel you’re on the threshold of that wake-up call to have the life you always wanted to have, and be the person you wanted to be.
We hope this chapter has been useful and, above all, inspiring. Take some time to read and absorb the information, then make it work for you. Perhaps you’re still finding your way through the mire of whatever trauma you’ve been through – or are currently going through – and aren’t yet ready to think about bouncing back, never mind, bouncing back higher! And that’s fine. Whether it’s trying to simply work on your perseverance or listening to your newfound calling and setting up a charity – going at your pace is not just an important part, but a vital part, of building real strength. Good luck!