The Resilience Factor

by Karen Reivich and Andrew Shatte

Resilience Defined

Resilience: "the ability to preserve and adapt when things go wrong." Resilience "is the key to success at work and satisfaction in life" (1). "Your thinking style is what causes you to respond emotionally to events, so it's your thinking style that determines your level of resilience -- your ability to overcome, steer through, and bounce back when adversity strikes" (3). You can increase your resilience by "learning to understand your thinking styles and developing skills to circumvent them so that you can see the true causes of adversity and its effects on your life" (12).

Resilience consists of seven abilities, which can be measured using the Resilience Quotient (33):

1. Emotion Regulation -- "the ability to stay calm under pressure" -- I'm Below Average.
2. Impulse Control -- Above Average
3. Optimism -- belief that you can change your life for the better -- Average
4. Causal Analysis -- ability to identify the causes of your problems -- Above Average
5. Empathy -- ability to "read other people's cues to their psychological and emotional states" -- Above Average
6. Self-Efficacy -- "the sense that we are effective in the world" -- Average
7. Reaching Out -- "a mindset that enables you to seek out new experiences and to view your life as a work in progress. Resilience creates and maintains the positive attitude of the explorer. It confers the confidence to take on new responsibilities at work, to risk embarrassment by approaching a person you'd like to know" (60) -- Below Average

Seven Skills of Resilience

Skill #1: Learning Your ABC's. 

This is essentially CBT. A is Activating event or Adversity. B is Belief. C is Consequence.

To get at B, describe scenario and then ask what they would be thinking. Ticker-tape beliefs = "the thoughts that run through your mind -- sometimes outside your awareness -- that determine how you feel and what you decide to do in the midst of an adversity, challenge, or new experience" (70). 

The Beeper Activity is designed "to develop your awareness of your ticker-tape beliefs. Program your watch or computer to beep at random intervals...Whenever you hear the beep, shift your attention to your beliefs and record whatever is going through your head at that moment. Initially you may be surprised at the monotony of your ticker-tape...But as you develop your ability to listen to yourself, you will find that there is much more going on than you noticed at first...Plan on doing the beeper activity two or three times a week, until you are able to hear your ticker-tape without much effort. As you get better at this, stop doing the beeper activity and instead train yourself to listen for your ticker-tape whenever you're confronted by an adversity" (71). 

Different types of ticker-tape beliefs. Most people have a dominant style of ticker-tape beliefs. (1) Beliefs about the past, e.g., Why did this happen? Why questions can be "described along three dimensions" -- me versus not me, always versus not always, everything versus not everything. E.g., when "adversity strikes, do you tend to blame yourself or others? See you see the cause of the problem as permanent or fleeting? Do you believe the cause will undermine everything else in your life, or is it specific to the one adversity?" (72). (2) Beliefs about the future, e.g., "If we can't work it out, the project is never going to get off the ground and then our careers will be shot" (73). (3) Simple narrations of what is happening. (4) Evaluations, e.g., "I'm so tired of fighting with Julie about these things. I can't do this anymore. I can't stand it when we argue like this" (73).

B-C Connections:

• When you believe that someone harmed you and that they could have done otherwise >> Anger.
• When "you believe that you have lost something real -- like a relationship, job, or loved one -- or intangible -- like self-worth" >> Sadness. 
• When you fail to self-regulate (e.g., "procrastinating, binge eating and drinking, failing to exercise, and overspending) or fail to fulfill a commitment (e.g., "sexual infidelities, not spending enough time with family, and ignoring the needs of friends") >> Guilt. 
• When you "imagine the future as threatening and overwhelming" >> Fear, Anxiety. 
• When you compare yourself negatively to others >> Embarrassment. 

Knowing your B-C connections serves two purposes: (1) it helps you to disentangle your emotions, (2) it helps you to identify the beliefs that are causing you to get stuck (84). When we experience major stress, we're likely to feel a "hodgepodge" of emotions. Keep a log of your emotions. "Whenever you feel a strong emotion or experience a sudden shift in emotion, jot down what you are feeling and how intense the emotion is. At the end of the week, group the emotions you experienced into 'families' of anger, sadness, guilt, anxiety, and embarrassment." If your emotions "tend to clump into one family," "you may be biased in your thinking style and overly focused on one of the five varieties of beliefs, such as violation of rights or negative comparison to others" (88).

Whenever you face an adversity, you should "parse your experience into A,B, and C. Until you separate your beliefs about the event from the fact of the event, and then separate these facts from your reactions to the event, you cannot do the work of changing your counterproductive beliefs" (88). Here are the three steps to follow when you face an adversity.

Step #1: Describe the adversity objectively, focusing on the who, what, when, and where of the situation.

Step #2: Thoroughly describe your C. "What did you feel and how did you react as the event unfolded?" Identify the intensity of your emotions.

Step #3: "What was I thinking that brought on these feelings and actions? The goal, remember, is to identify the beliefs as you actually thought them, not to convert them to what you may view as a more acceptable version. The content of your ticker-tape, the very words that it is constructed from, is important because those words capture the meaning with which you imbue the event. Thus, if your actual tape is 'She's a ball break' and you translate it to 'She is tough,' you lose important information regarding how you understand her motivations and the dynamics of your relationship" (89).

"If the beliefs you have generated do not fall into [the categories listed under B-C Connections], then you haven't clearly identified your beliefs." The B-C Connections always hold (91).

Skill #2: Avoiding Thinking Traps

Eight thinking traps:

1. Jumping to Conclusions -- "making assumptions without the relevant data" (97).
2. Tunnel Vision -- seeing "only the negative [or positive] aspects of a situation" (100).
3. Magnifying and Minimizing -- "Unlike people w/ tunnel vision, magnifiers and minimizers have registered and can remember most of the events that have occurred, but they tend to overvalue some and undervalue others" (103). Some magnify the bad and minimize the good or vice versa. 
4. Personalizing -- "the reflex tendency to attribute problems to one's own doing" (105). 
5. Externalizing -- the opposite of personalizing, failing "to locate those elements of an adversity that are genuinely of [one's] doing and within [one's] control" (108). 
6. Overgeneralizing -- failing to see any nuance, e.g., taking total blame for something that you were only partially to blame for. 
7. Mind Reading -- when we "believe we know what those around us are thinking" and "act accordingly" (111). 
8. Emotional Reasoning -- drawing conclusions about the world based on one's emotional state (114).

You can avoid thinking traps by breaking situations down into A, B, and C. 

Step #3: Detecting Icebergs

Sometimes our ticker-tape beliefs "don't explain the intensity of [our] reaction to a given situation. When that happens, it's a sign that [we] are being affecting by an underlying belief -- a deeply held [and often unconscious] belief about how the world out to operate and how [we] feel [we] ought to operate within that world" (123).

Different types of iceberg beliefs. Achievement beliefs: "Being successful is what matters most," "Failure is a sign of weakness," "I must never give up" (125). Acceptance beliefs: "What matters most in life is being loved," "It's my job to please people and make them happy," "I want people to always think the best of me" (126). Control beliefs: "Only weak people can't solve their own problems," "Asking for help shows that you're not in charge," "If you're not in control then you're a weakling" (127).

How to detect iceberg beliefs. First, break the adversity down into its ABC components. Second, check the B-C connection and see if (a) "your Cs are out of proportion to your Bs," (b) "the quality of your C is mismatched with the category of your Bs" (e.g., "you feel sad even though your ticker tape suggests anger"), or (c) "you are struggling to make a seemingly simple decision." If any of this situations apply, then move to step three and ask yourself the following questions:

• What does that mean to me?
• What is the most upsetting part of that for me?
• What is the worst part of that for me?
• What does that say about me?
• What's so bad about that? (139)

You should then follow the downward arrow -- e.g., why does that matter? what's so bad about that? (140). 

Step #4: Challenging Beliefs

When a something goes wrong, we generally ask ourselves "why" questions and understand why it went wrong. We don't generally ask ourselves "why questions" after a success. This makes sense form an evolutionary perspective, as in order to solve problems it's necessary to understand their causes (146-147). 

The steps to challenging a beliefs:

1. ABC the problem. 
2. Pie chart the causes. E.g., I didn't get the promotion because I haven't been able to convince my boss that I'm competent, I didn't get the promotion because I'm not good with people, I didn't get the promotion because I have trouble being assertive around authority figures (150). Then decide whether each cause is changeable, somewhat changeable, or highly changeable. 
3. Identify your explanatory style, or the dominant style of your ticker-tape beliefs. Review: (a) Me versus Not Me -- Is the problem "totally due to me" or "totally due to other people or circumstances?" (b) Always versus Not Always -- Will the problem "always be present" or "never again be present?" (c) Everything versus Not Everything -- does the problem influence "everything in my life" or influence "just this one situation"? (154). 
4. Being flexible. This of alternative causes, causes different than the explanatory style identified in Step #3. For instance, if you viewed the problem as being "totally due to me," think of some causes that might be due to others. 
5. Being accurate. You have to fight your confirmation bias and look hard for evidence "both for and against each belief" (164). 
6. New pie chart. "Construct a new pie chart for your adversity. Include only those beliefs, either initial or alternative, that are supported by evidence" (165). 
7. New solutions. 

Step #5: Putting It in Perspective

While challenging beliefs applies to our beliefs about the causes of adversity, putting it in perspective applies to our beliefs about the implications of the adversity (169). Doing this can "ease your anxiety and fear of embarrassment" (in other words, combat catastrophic thinking), and it can help you to "identify genuine threats to their relationships, their careers, and their health" (in other words, expose unrealistic optimism) (170). 

Steps: (1) Write down the ticker-tape chain, (2) Estimate the probabilities of your worst-case fears, (3) Generate best-case alternatives, (4) Identify most likely implications, (5) Problem solve the most likely (172-180).

Steps #6 and #7: Calming and Focusing and Real-time Resilience

"Challenging Beliefs and Putting It in Perspective are applicable in most situations, but they aren't the most effective skills when your emotions are so strong that you can't even think straight, when you don't have the luxury of fifteen minutes to process a situation, or when you need a simple but effective way to have a moment of calm amid the chaos" (186).

Step #6: Calming and Focusing "is a powerful tool that helps you to quiet your emotions when they are out of control, to focus your thoughts when they are intrusive, and to reduce the amount of stress you experience" (186). Calming techniques: (a) Controlled breathing, (b) Progressive muscle relaxation, (c) Positive imagery ("closing your eyes and imagining a calming, relaxing scene--a place where you feel completely at ease, comfortable, and happy") (192-197). 

Focusing techniques. When your overcome by intrusive thoughts, play a mental game. "The purpose of mental games is to shift your attention away from the non-resilient beliefs so that you can continue with the task before you." These games need to be challenging but not too difficult, and they should be fun and quick. Example: The Alphabet Game, go through the alphabet and name something for each pair of initials (e.g., AB = Annette Benning). Example: Rhyming. Pick a word and see how many other words you can rhyme with it (204-205). 

Step #7: Real-time Resilience "takes the essential ingredients of Challenging Beliefs and Putting It in Perspective and uses them to fight back against counterproductive beliefs as they occur" (186).