Roadmap to Resilience: Learn to bend but not break
How can we find strength during tough times? Why do some people bend but not break? There’s a Roadmap to Resilience – and orthopedic surgeon & resilience coach Vonda Wright, MD, is here to reveal it.
Transcript
[SOFT PIANO]
Hi. I'm Dr. Vonda Wright, and welcome to our very first Roadmap to Resilience class.
I'm an orthopedic surgeon and an expert on active aging. But recently, I became really fascinated
with the topics of hardiness and resilience. Why don't we break when we bend? How can we become stronger when we face life's greatest
challenges? When I started studying this, I decided to go all in and become a hardiness coach.
This has been such a tough year. Our health has been challenged. We've been challenged politically, socially,
and each of us has had to dive deep and really find out who we are and what's important to us.
As I began studying hardiness and resilience, I realized that unless we build these tasks that can help keep us standing when the winds blow and things go
wrong, it's just like living paycheck to paycheck. We have nothing to fall back on.
So we need to do everything we possibly can to take a little bit of control when we can,
to remain committed to the things that are important to us, and to see challenge as opportunities.
The really good thing is that if we build our hardiness like muscles, we will be able to bend and not break.
So it's time to get fit. You are going to thoroughly enjoy
all the wisdom and perspective that these experts bring to this class.
We're starting right at the source of hardiness literature with the authors of the "Hardiness" book, Dr. Paul
Bartone and Dr. Steven Stein. Dr. Bartone, could you give me a brief definition of hardiness?
Hardiness is a mindset or a mental framework that helps you to be more resilient and healthy in dealing with stress.
It's a set of attitudes that act like filters for how we look at stressful events and how we cope with them.
And hardiness, we say, is made up of three primary facets or elements,
what we call the "three Cs"-- commitment, which is a strong sense of purpose and meaning in life; control, the belief that your actions,
your decisions have a major influence on how things are going to turn out; and finally, challenge, which is about flexibility.
Today the best hardiness measure available is the Hardiness Resilience Gauge,
which is a self-report test. It takes about 10 minutes to complete. We show you your hardiness levels on the three Cs.
It shows you your overall hardiness score, and it provides some tips and strategies for how you can develop your hardiness
and grow in that, in your resilience. And you know, I've taken the HRG, and I actually really found it easy, number one,
but really enjoyed taking it. Because who doesn't want to learn more about where they are and then immediately get tips on how to be better?
So I really enjoyed it myself. But, Dr. Stein, how does increasing
of a characteristic like hardiness affect people's health or their work?
So people with a hardy mindset tend to be healthier, more resilient. So we've reviewed and describe dozens
of studies showing the interaction between a hardy mindset and better coping strategies. Hardy people take more direct control over their health,
and they do things that are proactive. They're more preventative in terms of how they approach their health. They also deal better with illnesses and other health
challenges. In the workplace, we found that people higher in hardiness tend to find more suitable jobs.
For example, people high in control manage to find jobs where they're more autonomous. This helps them perform better, and they get more satisfaction
from their work. People high in challenge deal better with the changes they go through in today's workplace. And people high in commitment find
work that is more purposeful and meaningful to them. So all of these things lead to higher work satisfaction,
more productivity, and more innovation. And do you find, in general, before people read your book
or take this gauge that they're self-aware enough to understand where they are in hardiness?
Do they say, oh, I'm so hardy, or-- what is people's self-awareness of these factors?
A lot of people tend to overestimate how hardy they are, that they can get through anything and do a variety of things.
But sometimes, the reality is they find things a little more difficult to cope with than they plan for.
We are really interested in understanding how emotion fits within the hardiness model. Because some would say, you know,
if you're emotional about something, then you're just not hardy enough. Or some would say, I'm just going to gravel on and on.
And therefore, I'm resilient. Could you speak to the emotion versus just
pushing, pushing-on aspects of this? Sure. And it's a really important point. Because the first thing is to be aware of your emotions.
When we work in the area of emotional intelligence, awareness is really important. Just pushing through often doesn't work.
Sometimes it does, but often it doesn't. We get overwhelmed. We find that we overestimated our ability to get through these things.
So acknowledging your emotions and how you feel about a situation can be a very important first step
to helping you manage it. Because once you know your strengths and weaknesses, you can better deal with those and build up the strengths
where you need them. That's a fantastic perspective. The better you know yourself, the better you can adjust in the areas you need.
JUD BREWER: Some of you might have heard the term "mindfulness." I like the simple definition that Jon Kabat-Zin put forward
in his book "Full Catastrophe Living" where he talks about paying attention in the present moment on purpose, nonjudgmentally.
You can really think of this as helping us see when we're caught up in that wanting more or wanting
less and being able to bring a curious awareness to what's happening.
So what are the three things people might do to be more resilient? [CHEERY MUSIC]
Well, first thing I would say is, know your mind. Understand your mind. So map out all of these habit loops
that get in the way of this resilience naturally being there. Resilience can be learned just like any other good habit.
And the first step there is to start with whatever the-- let's say resistance or worrying is our bad habit that kind of
makes us more rigid. So that first step is noticing the trigger. So we might be thinking or having some anxiety,
and then that old behavior might be worrying. And then the result is that that worry feels us-- makes us feel like we're in control or something
like that. So the first step there is to map out that habit loop. The second step is to see how much worry is actually
helping things. And in particular, is that worrying help us-- helping us be more resilient? Is worry actually helping me?
No. It generally doesn't help with resilience. And then that third step is where we bring in that bigger, better offer of helping us step out
of the old habit loop of worry and into the habit loop of being resilient. The second piece is to check in with our own direct experience
and just be on the lookout for times when we feel closed down, or contracted, or rigid. So when we can see that, we can then ask ourselves, well,
how does this feel? Is this actually helping? And we can start to tap into our own brain's learning systems where our brains are going to see
when things are not rewarding. Our brains are going to become disenchanted and not want to do those. So we can start to see, oh, this isn't helping me.
We become less excited to do that. And then it helps us bring in what I call the "bigger, better offer," which
is simply being resilient. So resilience itself feels good. Being flexible itself feels good.
So if we're resisting a colleague at work, we can notice, oh, that doesn't feel very good. What does it feel like when we ask them, well,
what are you trying to get at, or what is it that you'd like to do? And we start working with somebody. We can start to see that that actually feels better.
The more we learn to see that being able to roll with situations themselves feels better,
the more we can train our brains to move in that direction and even make that our own habit. The third piece is practice curiosity early and often.
So as we get closed down, we can get curious. Oh, what does that feel like? Or as we resist somebody's idea, we can get curious.
Oh, what's their idea really about, instead of throwing it away immediately or resisting it immediately.
When somebody is giving us feedback, we can go, oh, is that true? Is this helpful? As compared to saying no, no, that's not me,
or I don't want to hear that. And so every time we can bring in those moments of curiosity, that will help us unwind from those moments
where we are being rigid or nonresilient. When we're mindful, we can be curious
of what's happening right now. So you can think of mindfulness as this large category of ways to pay attention in the present moment
and not resist what's actually happening. So you can think of even built right into the definition of mindfulness
is this idea of resilience, of curiosity. So noticing of that flow of experience
can also help us see things more clearly, like, oh, this is the way-- things are constantly changing. Can I actually roll with the change
rather than resist the change? Resiliency is part of what we're seeing growing so much
and having so much more attention during the pandemic because so much of our life was switched. And the tips for that are, one, is, where am I holding strong?
And where can I let go and release myself of external things as well as internal?
In my life, I've had many opportunities, more chances
to strengthen my resiliency. But a few times, I'm like, I think I've had enough. I think I'm ready to stop having some growth opportunities here.
But I am-- in the end, I'm grateful that all of it happened even though I really wish some of the details
were very different. About 10 years ago, I lost somebody who was really important to me, a boyfriend
that I had dated for five years. It was a shocking realization. It was not even on a radar of what was going to happen.
And in fact, we were actually in the middle of reconfiguring what our relationship was. We had unfinished conversations and unfinished business
between us. And when he died and when I got the news that he passed away, not only was I dealing with this grief of losing
this beautiful human and the tragedy I felt for the loss of him in my life and his family's life--
he was in a band, and that was like another family to him too-- and what that was going to mean, all the ripple effects.
I grieved and grieved all the things that happened when his whiteboard was erased
and that that meant so many of ours was erased also or changed tragically. At first, my role was to take care of everybody else.
And so I had immediate resiliency. It was, OK, let's focus. I detached a lot from my grief, and I
went straight into taking care of others and taking on logistics of the funeral. But several months later, I started
realizing that things were harder than normal. I didn't bounce back like I used to,
and I didn't know how to make decisions with confidence.
I was somebody who was often-- I love challenging myself. I stopped taking a lot less risk in my life.
And that carried forth for quite some time. And I had someone point it out to me,
like, I think you're not really facing what's happened and what this means. And they were right.
So I really went into the place of, I was so mad at the world. I was so mad that this could happen.
It was unfair and unjust, and I didn't like the world being like that. It just-- all of it felt so wrong.
And I found that that was the spot that I needed to do the most work. And when I did that, when I started adjusting,
that's really actually when I started talking about, like, I was-- I remember crying one time and saying, somebody came in and erased my whiteboard.
And it was the first time I had that thought and imagery for it. And I made a decision.
I wasn't going to stand in front of my whiteboard protecting it and keeping everybody out. That wasn't the way I wanted to live.
And I needed to not feel angry at the world all the time. So I started looking at the good for this, the good that
could come of it, the parts of me that needed to loosen up, and change, and risk take again, and go into challenges.
I started looking at myself as somebody who could be resilient. Adapting in my world view and adapting in my ability
to still love again was the best place of resiliency
that I could have had and the lesson that I chose to take from Chris's death.
Now, with everything you've learned, we challenge you to do the following-- take time to think about what is important and interesting
to you, your personal goals and values. Work on increasing your skills and competence
in an area that's important to you. Pay attention to what's going on in the world around you, read, observe.
See you next time for our Q&A where we answer all of your questions. And next month for our next class,
mental health behavior
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