With potential stressors coming at us from all angles, both at home and at work, it’s really important that we learn to deal positively with life’s adversities. We all know people who just seem to bounce back from anything that life throws at them, no matter how bad. This week I’ve been really touched by Sheryl Sandberg’s tributes to her late husband, and really admire the strength she is showing in dealing with a situation that must be truly awful. And then there are those who seem to be dragged down by the smallest event, however insignificant it might appear from the outside.
The good news is, you can choose which camp you want to be in. While there is no magic wand that will guarantee you will overcome negative events with ease every time, there are some things you can do that will help you get in that positive and resilient frame of mind – even when faced with the worst.
But first of all, how do you recognise if you need to become more resilient?
If the answer is yes to one or more of the following questions, you might benefit from applying some of the ideas described in the second part of this article.
Sign 1: When faced with certain situations, do you fall into the same negative thought patterns and behaviours over and over again?
Sign 2: Once you calm down again, do you sometimes find yourself thinking that your reaction to a situation was over the top?
Sign 3: Do you frequently feel one of the following in certain situations: anger, sadness, guilt, anxiety or embarrassment?
So what can you do about it? Above all, you can learn to recognize how you react to and interpret events – and you can learn to challenge your unhelpful thoughts. I find these following three actions from Reivich and Shatté’s (2002) book “The Resilience Factor” that I want to share with you particularly helpful.
Recognize your thought patterns and identify your reactions. The first thing you need to do is recognise what you are thinking, and what reactions these thoughts are triggering. How do you react when things go wrong? Typically we display one of five reactions which you can recognize by listening to the thoughts that are going through your mind in the moment. We may experience anger (“how dare he/she!!!”), at other times we might react with guilt (“I am a bad person”) or embarrassment (“I feel so stupid”), or even with anxiety (“I am afraid”) and sadness (“I feel really down”). It might be a combination of them. Spend some time making a note of your reactions – both your thoughts and your behaviours. Can you detect a pattern?
Identify your underlying beliefs. Reivich and Shatte describe how certain reactions are linked to certain underlying beliefs. We experience anger when we feel our rights have been violated, and guilt we we believe we have violated another person’s rights. We feel sadness or even depression when we experience a loss of self-worth or a real world loss (such as bereavement). Fear of future threats lead to anxiety and fear (think of stage fright, or nervousness before an important meeting). Finally, when we compare ourselves negatively to other, this can lead to feelings of embarrassment.
By recognizing why we feel what we feel, we can more easily check if this reaction makes sense or not, or if it is time to challenge ourselves to replace the unhelpful thoughts with more helpful ones.
A great example I can think of is road rage – some people feel really angry when they believe their right to drive safely or quickly have been violated, thereby missing the point that other people have certain rights and reasons to be on the road too! Recognizing this link might help reduce the anger felt by reframing the situation and finding alternative explanations – maybe the jerk who pulled in front of you was in a hurry to get to a sick relative, or maybe the person who was slow to move at the traffic light was dealing with screaming children in the back oft the car!
Know your thinking traps. Do you mind-read? Mind-readers tend to assume they know what the other person is thinking, and accordingly limit or adjust their behaviours.
For example, a person I worked with recently did not reach out for help for some paperwork they needed because they had already decided that this person would annoyed by their request. Now, this may or may not be the case, but it completely undermined my coachee’s ability to solve their problem, and chances are the administrator would actually have been happy to help!
Mind-reading is just one of the many thinking traps that we can fall into, along with jumping to conclusions, tunnel vision (rejecting evidence that would allow you to interpret the situation differently), magnifying/minimizing problems, personalizing (this is all about me), externalizing (this is nothing to do with me), overgeneralizing (this always happens to me), and emotional reasoning (the more emotionally charged I am, the worse the situation seems).
The idea here is to identify which are your typical thinking traps, challenge yourself to review the problem in a new light, and allow new evidence and ideas for solutions to come into play – which can completely reframe the situation and the challenge you are dealing with.
Developing resilience is all about how you frame the events that happen in your life – and this is something you can work on right now! It is about replacing unhelpful thoughts with helpful thoughts, changing the way you feel about events, and ultimately it is about finding new solutions to problems you previously thought were unsolvable. The three skills of (1) recognizing your thought patterns and identifying your reactions, (2) identifying your underlying beliefs and (3) knowing your thinking traps will help you take control of your thoughts and give you a more flexible outlook on life.
Now over to you – the next time you are feeling stressed or down – challenge yourself and notice how this empowers you to resolve your issues in a new and positive way!
Wishing you all the best,
Sarah
