Thought for the Week – Resilience

There is a lot of talk about resilience these days. Resilience is the ability to deal with adversity – how we respond to things when they go wrong. We react in different ways.

Martin Seligman has identified three ways we reduce resilience.

I personalise the event – blame myself  – it is all my fault. The issue of personalisation.

I believe that the event pervades every aspects of my life. The issue of pervasiveness.

I  believe the negative effects will last forever – we  project our suffering into the future indefinitely and overestimate how long the negative events will affect us. The issue of permanence

This loop play in our minds – it is my fault that this is awful, my whole life is awful and it is always going to be awful.

There are numerous studies which show that we can improve our resilience – the amount is not fixed.

 One way to can do this is to realise that negative events are often not personal not entirely my fault, nor are they pervasive, affecting every aspect of my life and are not permanent – they don’t last forever. Avoiding these reactions to hard situations builds our resilience and we cope better and this helps to avoid depression.

By learning about these 3P’s,  teachers can become more effective in the classroom and insurance salespeople stop taking rejections personally and sold twice as much and stayed in the job twice as long as their colleagues.