Resilience – Achilles & Aristotle

The dojo

A recurrent theme of 2020 is can anything else really go wrong? And then it does! I exchanged as much with a most excellent and special friend yesterday in the following text message exchange:

Just inside the door from the wreckage in the back garden, our lovely little dog lies paralysed with a spinal stroke.

He can’t stand up unaided, and is making little progress as we enter the third week since he collapsed. Poor lad.

So what’s going well?

Not so much if I’m honest, but a good psychology resource has been helping this month – Dr Karen Reivich’s ‘Resilience Skills’ from the University of Pennsylvania currently available for free on Coursera.

There is so much to like about Dr Reivich’s exceptionally well-evidenced and practical explanations: the dimensions of resilience and how you can cultivate them, the killer ‘thinking traps’ which bring us all down, and how to disrupt them; plus how to manage anxiety and cultivate positive emotions – even in the worst of times.

As an illustration here are Reivich’s five ‘thinking traps’:

Mind-reading – I already know what you’re thinking and what you’re going to say and do to me (no, I really don’t)
Me – it’s all because of me and it’s all my fault (no it isn’t)
Them – it’s all because of them and it’s all their fault (nope, not that either)
Catastrophizing – it’s bad, it’s going to be terrible and then the walls will cave in on me (notwithstanding the image above, not wholly likely)
Helplessness – it’s hopeless and there’s nothing I can do (but there always is…)

Reivich’s point is if you get into a negative spiral with these five, you just circle down and down. Which is a great insight – but what are you supposed to do about it?

She has three simple ‘Real Time Resilience’ countermeasures, which are easy to remember and easy to deploy. Each begins with a simple mental ‘sentence starter’.

“That’s not true because…..” insert counter Evidence of facts which challenge the thinking trap.
“A more helpful way to see this is……” Reframe more realistically or positively by broadening the context.
If x happens, I will y……. make a simple Plan, with a practical step you would take if the bad thing(s) starts to happen.

These can be combined with another practical tool – worst case, best case, likely case, practical plan – which puts outer limits on what might happen (including some cheer-inducing good ones) and prepares the mind and body for action, not yet more rumination.

Sometimes simple is best. Walking and talking in the park with my 13 year old son (sadly without 🐶) he got the thinking traps straight away. The ‘sentence starters’ made sense to him too.

This week’s Penn course covers how to manage anxiety. As per my gazelles the key finding is everyone gets anxiety spikes – what makes the ‘Resilience’ difference is mentally and physiologically how fast you can return to normal function. And that’s a set of skills you can learn.

Locked-in and cooped-up, the biggest Covid-19 challenge is keeping mind and body healthy. 2020 is one helluva dojo, but however many times it knocks you down, the answer is: learn, change your mindset and get up again.

Achilles, Life, Work

Gritty

I’m learning – both conceptually and practically – the difference between ‘resilience’ and ‘grit’ at the moment.

Here’s the lowdown from my latest ‘lockdown’ Coursera course:

Conceptually, grit is distinct from resilience, a term defined differently across authors but generally accepted to be a multidimensional construct describing successful adaptation to overwhelming adversity and stress.
While popular measures of resilience often include perseverance as a component, they tend to include other elements as well, such as equanimity and a balanced perspective on life (e.g., Wagnild & Young, 1993).
Moreover, grit entails consistency of interests and goals over time, whereas the construct of resilience is agnostic on the stability of an individual’s interests.
Claire Robertson-Kraft, Angela Lee Duckworth – University of Pennsylvania

Based on this I’d say, of the two, I’m more ‘resilient’ than ‘gritty’. As per recently: ‘consistency of interests and goals over time’ hasn’t always been my approach to life. I’ve been more opportunistic – a polymath and latterly a specialist-generalist.

Perhaps that’s a function of the jobs I’ve had. I’ve been managing people who ‘know’ more that me since I was 22; and learnt, especially in Government in my mid-thirties, that there are all sorts of perspectives on what good looks like.

And it turns out grit isn’t so much about generic leadership or conscientiousness – it’s about sticking at one thing, a metier, a life project or a single-minded goal.

Grit is different than leadership potential insofar as the arenas in which gritty individuals demonstrate their stamina need not be those that entail organizing and managing other people.
Likewise, grit can be distinguished from conscientiousness, a multidimensional family of personality traits that encompasses perseverance, but also includes tendencies toward responsibility, self-control, orderliness, and traditionalism (Roberts, Chernyshenko, Stark, & Goldberg, 2005).
While correlated with conscientiousness, grit provides incremental predictive validity for achievement outcomes, particularly in settings of high challenge (Duckworth et al., 2007).
Claire Robertson-Kraft, Angela Lee Duckworth – University of Pennsylvania

Perhaps also I’ve just not found the goal that would justify the grit – the pearl that would tickle my oyster.

But talk of grit has helped me a bit this week. I can see I have several very ‘gritty’ people who work with me – who will stick at what we have on our plates come hell or high water.

And reflecting on ‘grit’ myself has helped me to apply resilience, leadership and conscientiousness to the task at hand – not just surviving but getting tough stuff done. And this put me in mind of a quote I received a couple of weeks ago:

“Maybe one day it will be cheering to remember even these things”
Aeneid bk. 1

So I decided to look up the passage from whence this came. Here is Wikipedia’s summary:

In the manner of Homer, the story proper begins in medias res (into the middle of things), with the Trojan fleet in the eastern Mediterranean, heading in the direction of Italy. The fleet, led by Aeneas, is on a voyage to find a second home. It has been foretold that in Italy he will give rise to a race both noble and courageous, a race which will become known to all nations.

Coinage of Aenea, with portrait of Aeneas. c. 510–480 BCE.

Juno is wrathful, her favorite city, Carthage, will be destroyed by Aeneas’s descendants. Juno proceeds to Aeolus, King of the Winds, and asks that he release the winds to stir up a storm in exchange for a bribe; Deiopea, the loveliest of all her sea nymphs as a wife. Aeolus agrees to carry out Juno’s orders: “My task is to fulfill your commands”. The storm then devastates the fleet.

Neptune takes notice: although he himself is no friend of the Trojans, he is infuriated by Juno’s intrusion into his domain, and stills the winds and calms the waters. The fleet takes shelter on the coast of Africa, where Aeneas rouses the spirits of his men, reassuring them that they have been through worse situations before.

The key passage is this:

‘O friends, well, we were not unknown to trouble before. O you who’ve endured worse, the god will grant an end to this too.
Remember your courage and chase away gloomy fears: perhaps one day you’ll even delight in remembering this!
Through all these misfortunes, these dangerous times, we head for Latium, where the fates hold peaceful lives for us: there Troy’s kingdom can rise again. Endure, and preserve yourselves for happier days.’
Translation by A. S. Kline

That they have ‘endured worse’ before is a reminder of resilience. The bringer of hope is the promise of ‘happier days’. But the key to grit is the ‘consistency of interests and goals over time’: “to head for Latium where Troy’s kingdom can rise again.”

Still, perhaps the most telling line is the one that follows – where Aeneas’s ‘grit’ meets the challenge of ‘leadership’…

So his voice utters; and sick with the weight of care, he pretends hope, in his look, and stifles the pain deep in his heart.

As for Aeneas, the task at work right now is to ‘pretend hope’, ‘endure’ and ‘preserve ourselves for happier days’.

Aeneas carrying Anchises ca. 520–510 BC. Louvre

Life, Work

The Lancaster

In years gone by I used to liken one of my old colleagues to a WWII Lancaster bomber.

You could always rely on her to slowly but surely drone towards the required organisational target; drop her bombs all over it, and chug back over the North Sea – usually with a rueful smile, half a wing blown off and one of her engines misfiring.

In that era I fancied myself more the de Havilland Mosquito: fast, accurate – but lightly armoured; the ideal pathfinder.

Now I realise it’s my turn to be the Lancaster pilot.

Thankless (and at times seemingly pointless) long lonely missions; flying through the dark; constant flak and regular strafing; searchlights hunting you down; uneven inexperienced crews – no sooner back from one mission before back in the cockpit again toward another improbable and impregnable target.

But the penny dropped the other week; this is what my kind of job now is. A big operational job is much more Bomber Command than fast reconnaissance and precision bombing with an expert co-pilot.

Resilience, calm under fire, keeping a crew intact and in the sky; and taking it one day at a time are the thing. The Lancaster wasn’t the prettiest machine, but it got the job done.

This footage I found – from the cockpit radio of a Lancaster on two raids in 1943 – is a sobering listen. There’s plenty of tension at 20,000 feet, but spare a thought for the destruction down below.

Makes my modest troubles seem small beer indeed; it took something special to fly a Lancaster.

Life, Philosophy, Psychology

Sunny

😎

After two house moves in two weeks; last Sunday, post visiting a loved one in terminal decline and absolutely physically and emotionally shattered – I cried for the first time in a decade. It was just too sad.

But five days later the sun has come back out. Life is very simple. Get some sleep, be kind, work hard, do stuff, and crucially (as I’ve recently discovered) ruminate less; and the sun comes out.

My single biggest achievement in the last year – and arguably in my life – has been to train myself to think, act and be more positive. If you’re kind, interested, positive and helpful there is no situation you can’t improve.

For me it is a feat of application, discipline and will. It’s not my natural disposition. But sunny is the best way to be. Today it absolutely was; and I absolutely have been.

: )

Ethics, Life, Psychology, Work

Empathy, Pain and Compassion

https://www.newscientist.com/artihow-sharing-other-peoples-feelings-can-make-you-sick — New Scientist (11 May 2016) – How sharing can make you sick

Something I’ve done a lot in the last decade is empathy. Indeed it has become one of the things I do the most at work: connecting with people and quite literally ‘feeling their pain’.

Walk a mile in another person’s shoes and you see the world differently; better understand different opinions and why people do what they do – even when it seems to be hurting both them and you.

But it comes at a cost. Connecting with the pain of others is painful for me too. It hurts to see someone hurting; and even more if you go with them to the very source of their pain – deep fears, anxiety, sadness and loneliness.

And this is a problem, because once you’ve seen the contents of someone’s soul, you can’t just shrug and say: “Oh dear, how sad, never mind.”

Not least because neuroscience is proving that our own brain copies the pain and suffering of others when we empathise. We do literally ‘feel their pain’ when we listen and put ourselves in their place. Mirror neurones fire in sympathy – in exactly the same pattern as in the sufferer; and the suffering is shared.

So I was fascinated to read in the New Scientist (in the article pictured above), that we should consider cutting the empathy; and boosting our compassion instead.

What’s the difference? I’m not sure I exactly know – but I can ‘feel’ the difference… Empathy feels like touching a person and connecting directly with their emotions – literally feeling what they are feeling. The science says that’s also what’s happening in your brain.

The problem is that in sharing, experiencing and absorbing the pain of others, we lessen our own reserves of optimism, energy and resilience. And that means ultimately we are less able to summon the strength to help or improve anything. Empathy feels draining.

Compassion feels different. Compassion ‘connects’ like empathy does but instead of firing the pain-mimicking mirror neurones, compassion digs deeper: for warmth, care, appreciation and common humanity.

I reckon this must be how the Pope, aid workers and others who have the suffering of hundreds, even thousands of people thrust upon them daily must cope. Not by directly empathising; but by digging deeper for compassion. Certainly it’s the Dalai Lama’s philosophy.

One thing’s for sure I haven’t cracked it yet. Now I know it, I can feel the difference – beleaguered by too much empathy; strangely strengthened by tapping into warmth and compassion.

But I can’t manage compassion confidently yet; I still want to say at the end of sad conversations “I feel you pain.” But I know now that’s the invitation and trigger to fire those mirror neurones, and carry away my share of another’s suffering.

Talking to a very smart work colleague about it this week, we concluded: if a person is in a deep dark hole, you’re not always helping them that much, if you just jump in next to them.

Similarly if you do try to feel another person’s pain and offer the classic line “I know how you feel” you risk real failing yourself and the person you’re talking to – how can you really know how someone feels?

When someone is in a dark place this week’s realisation is the answer isn’t necessarily to join them in the gloom. Compassion – if I can learn how to channel it – creates the same connection, but offers a better chance of staying happy and healthy; and being some help.