Posted on

Learning your resilience ABCs

“Coming from a family of perfectionists, I get very upset if I make a mistake at work and tend to dwell on it & berate myself long after everyone else has forgotten it! Would you have any advice about how to keep things in perspective please?”

I received this question from a reader recently, and recognized this as a very common problem for quite a few of us. In particular we tend to get stuck in a loop of blaming ourselves and forget to look for other reasons why something might have happened.

There is an excellent model described in the book “The Resilience Factor” (Reivich & Shatté, 2003): the ABCDE model. The model helps us figure out what is triggering our repetitive & negative thoughts, shows us how to interrupt those unhelpful thought patterns, and how to plan a more useful and positive way forward.

Sound useful? Then grab a pen & paper and answer the following questions as you go through them.

A – Adversity: what kinds of situations trigger the ruminating? What is going through your head in those moments? What worst case scenario are you imagining? What pictures do you see in your mind’s eye? Possibly something extreme like “I made this mistake and now I am going to get fired, lose my job, my house and end up sleeping under a bridge” …

B – Beliefs: What thoughts and words are going through your mind? How do you feel? Angry? Embarrassed? Guilty? Sad/Depressed? Anxious? Reivich & Shatté (2002) found that each one of these is linked to a specific trigger:

  • Anger – Violation of your rights
  • Guilt – Violation of another’s rights
  • Embarrassment – Negative comparison to others
  • Sadness, depression – real-world loss, loss of self-worth
  • Anxiety – Fear of future threat

I find identifying the emotion linked to the belief extremely useful – because then you have a better idea of where to start and what you can do to change the situation.

C – Consequences: What do you do as a result? Do the negative thoughts distract you from other things you should be doing? Do they make you want to hide away? Do they make you avoid those situations in future?

Is your reaction in proportion to the event? If it is not in proportion, what is the underlying theme (these are called “iceberg” beliefs)? Sometimes they can be quite complex … like “I have to be perfect to be likeable/loveable” …

D –  Dispute: This is where the really hard work starts, as you’ll need to replace those automatic negative thoughts will more useful ones! You’ll need to channel your “inner lawyer” who can help you dispute those unrealistic beliefs. Here are some starting questions – take look at your notes from parts A&B and see how you can address those thoughts, for example…

  • “a more accurate way of seeing this is …”
  • “that’s not true because…”
  • “a more likely outcome is… and I can do… to deal with it”

 

E – Energize: What would be a good & positive next step that you can take when a similar situation arises in future?

Two suggestions from my side:

1) Self-compassion!! Don’t be so hard on yourself – what would you say to a good friend in the same situation? Say the same to yourself.

2) Mindfulness – By paying attention to our bodies’ reactions, we can actually reduce our self-destructive thoughts by taking our attention off them and framing the issue more widely.

What other ideas might you have for changing your limiting beliefs in a future situation?

In a nutshell, understanding where those unhelpful thoughts are coming from, and challenging ourselves to put them into perspective helps us identify better ways for dealing with them in the future. In the words of Chris Hardwick… “You don’t have to believe everything you think”!

SaveSave

SaveSave

SaveSave

Posted on

Cultivating Positive Emotions: Six Easy Practices to Try

Over the past few years, many researchers have found new and scientifically proven ways to increase positive emotions and wellbeing. From Martin Seligman to Barb Fredrickson, Jon Kabat-Zinn to Amy Cuddy: all have discovered and shared a variety of practices increase the level of wellbeing and positivity in your life. The six techniques described below all require a certain amount of practice, but have all been shown to have a positive impact on our emotions. Depending on your preferences, you might find some techniques suit you more than others. See which one resonates most with you, and give it a try!

  1. “Three blessings exercise”. This classic gratitude exercise recommended by Seligman (2011) in his book “Flourish”. The idea is a simple journaling exercise. Every day, at the end of the day, write about 3 things – large or small – that went well, and why they went well. We can all benefit from reflecting on what went well each day, and this technique has even been shown to improve symptoms of depression over a timeframe of a few months.
  1. Mindfulness: Experiencing and savouring the moment is a powerful way of connecting with our inner selves in a positive way. While its origins can be found in ancient Buddhism, it has found its way into modern life thanks to various advocates such as Job Kabat-Zinn. For example, Berkeley University’s “Greater Good”  website has an excellent overview over its advantages and techniques such as mindful breathing and the body-scan.
  1. Loving-Kindness Meditation: In Love 2.0, Barbara Fredrickson describes how increasing micro-moments of love in your life – including compassion towards yourself – can increase your health, vitality and wellbeing. You can find simple guided meditations on Fredrickson’s website.
  1. Resilience: How we interpret the world around us has an influence on our subjective wellbeing. Developing skills to deal with adversity helps us become more resilient and positive. Reivich and Shatté (2002) describe a sequence of steps you can take to examine negative events, including identifying the type of emotion experienced, any thinking traps preventing us from seeing the bigger picture, putting our negative thoughts into perspective and taking positive action.
  1. Create positive experiences. It has been shown that experiences, and especially sharing positive experiences with others have a much more lasting impact on our emotions. In a similar vein, helping others can generate positive emotions as well – whether it is helping out a colleague, friend or neighbor at short notice, or volunteering regularly.
  1. Posture & presence. When you are in immediate need of positive emotions, paying attention to your body language and adjusting it accordingly can be beneficial. Amy Cuddy’s new book “Presence” (2016) and her 2012 Ted talk, “Your body language shapes who you are” explains how our posture affects our emotions, and she shares “power poses” to quickly change your frame of mind and build confidence.

What other practices are you familiar with? I would love to add to the list – let me know in the comments section below!

Have a great day!

References:

Cuddy, Amy (2016): Presence. London: Orion Books

Fredrickson, B.L. (2013): Love 2.0. New York: Hudson Street Press

Reivich, K. and Shatté, A. (2002) The Resilience Factor: 7 essential skills for overcoming life’s inevitable obstacles. New York: Three Rivers Press

Seligmann, M. (2011): Flourish. New York: Free Press.

Posted on

Overcoming the destructive power of “BUT…”

I was recently working with a client, let’s just call him Mark, who had sought me out in order to adjust to a new work situation that was impacting his work-life balance. During our sessions, we would define the coaching goal and start working on potential solutions. Mark was really dedicated to the process, spent a lot of time reflecting on his needs and generating ideas for solutions.

However something interesting happened every single time any idea or suggestion came up, regardless of how big or small the idea was. Mark immediately followed up with “but…” and then proceeded to list all the reasons why the idea would not work. In fact, this happened so often, that he picked up on it himself and it became a bit of a running joke.

Mark appeared committed to change, however just by using this little word, he was preventing himself from moving forward and actually implementing the changes we were working on. He undermined practically every idea, big or small by focussing on the “but”. Mark was essentially drawing his own attention away from the good idea to *possibly* negative outcomes. So of course he was then less convinced about following the course of action that a moment before had seemed obvious and simple.

Now Mark is far from the only client to do this, he just happens to be a recent example. Many of us have “glass-half-empty” views of the world and a tendency to dwell on the feared negative results instead of putting our energy into the positives. We are naturally risk-averse, so if our thinking style emphasizes the risks, then we can suffer from paralysis.

So what can you do to get over “but” and make changes to your life, even if you don’t really enjoy the process of change?

Set meaningful goals

Be sure that you identify a meaningful goal. Working with Mark, for example, the coaching topic evolved from “increase work-life balance”, to “get better organized” to the underlying topic “connecting with my children”. This was a profound topic for Mark and generated very different solutions than the more vague work-life balance and organizational questions. The goal and its potential positive outcomes were much more meaningful, so it was worth making the extra effort to overcome some of the fear factor and try new things out. And – wellbeing research in the field of positive psychology has identified meaning & purpose as an essential element to be able to flourish as a person, an added bonus!

Enjoy the experiment

Often the belief that the change will be an all-or-nothing experience has us quaking in our boots. It is much harder to motivate ourselves to make permanent changes than reversible ones. So a simple solution to overcome this fear is to view making a change to your usual routine and habits as an experiment and a learning experience. If the experiment works, great, then do more of it. If it doesn’t, chalk it up to learning experience and try something else. When Thomas Edison was working on his famous invention, he did not actually have one magical “lightbulb” moment, he invented many lightbulbs that did not work until he found the solution that enabled him to develop one that did. “I have not failed 10,000 times. I have not failed once. I have succeeded in proving that those 10,000 ways will not work. When I have eliminated the ways that will not work, I will find the way that will work.”

Remember the tortoise and the hare?

Go slow to go fast. I love the idea of “babysteps” and this is one scenario where they really can work. Taking small, slow, safe steps will help you overcome the fear of change. Choose an action that is simple to complete, celebrate your success and take another small step. And then another.

Reframe with positive words

Focusing on the negatives makes the negatives come true. You get what you focus on, so if you focus on what might go wrong, you will spend less time thinking about what will go right, and how to achieve it. Also, positive emotions generate creativity and an open mind. Remind yourself of the purpose of the changes, and replace blockers like “but” with positive words like “try”, “learn” and “experiment”. Move from “never” to “one day”. Give it a try – you might be surprised how this changes your frame of mind and motivates you to get started.

Use your strengths

Figure out what you are good at, and what resources you have available to you and draw on them to help you through a change situation. Use your skills to generate new ideas, build a support network, get organized, or whatever else you need to do. Thinking of times where they have already come in handy in the past can help reduce the fear factor. And if you don’t know what your strengths are yet, these excellent questionnaires can help: the VIA Survey (free) or Tom Rath’s classic StrengthsFinder 2.0 (as a book or via Gallup Strengths Center).

Don’t give three little letters the power to stop your journey in its tracks. Thank “but” for trying to keep you out of harm’s way, however remind yourself that you are in control here, you call the shots, and above all that you have a meaningful goal that it is worth taking action for.

So what is the one small step you will take today to set you on your path towards your goals?

 

 

Posted on

3 signs you need to work on your resilience … and what to do about it.

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