I see a lot of stuff about resilience, persistence and grit. What I don’t see is a lot of legitimate info on how to actually increase those qualities.
How can we be more resilient? How can we shrug off huge challenges in life, persist and — in the end — succeed?
So I looked at the most difficult scenarios for insight. (Who needs resilience in easy situations, right?)
When life and death is on the line, what do the winners do that the losers don’t?
Turns out surviving the most dangerous situations has some good lessons we can use to learn how to be resilient in everyday life.
Whether it’s dealing with unemployment, a difficult job, or personal tragedies, here are insights that can help.
1) Perceive And Believe
“The company already had two rounds of layoffs this year but I never thought they would let me go.”
“Yeah, the argument was getting a little heated but I didn’t think he was going to hit me.”
The first thing to do when facing difficulty is to make sure you recognize it as soon as possible.
Sounds obvious but we’ve all been in denial at one point or another. What do people who survive life-threatening situations have in common?
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They move through those “stages of grief” from denial to acceptancefaster:
They immediately begin to recognize, acknowledge, and even accept the reality of their situation… They move through denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance very rapidly.
What’s that thing doctors say when they’re able to successfully treat a medical problem? “Good thing we caught it early.”
When you stay oblivious or live in denial, things get worse — often in a hurry. When you know you’re in trouble you can act.
Nobody is saying paranoia is good but research shows a little worrying is correlated with living a longer life.
(For more on how a little negativity can make you happier, click here.)
Okay, like they say in AA, you admitted you have a problem. What’s the next thing the most resilient people do?
2) Manage Your Emotions
Sometimes when SCUBA divers drown they still have air in their oxygen tanks. Seriously.
How is this possible? Something goes wrong, they panic, and instinctively pull the regulator out of their mouth.
M. Ephimia Morphew, a psychologist and founder of the Society for Human Performance in Extreme Environments, told me of a series of accidents she’d been studying in which scuba divers were found dead with air in their tanks and perfectly functional regulators. “Only they had pulled the regulators out of their mouths and drowned. It took a long time for researchers to figure out what was going on.” It appears that certain people suffer an intense feeling of suffocation when their mouths are covered. That led to an overpowering impulse to uncover the mouth and nose. The victims had followed an emotional response that was in general a good one for the organism, to get air. But it was the wrong response under the special, non-natural, circumstances of scuba diving.
When you’re having trouble breathing what’s more natural than to clear an obstruction from your mouth?
Now just a brief second of clear thinking tells you this is a very bad idea while diving — but when you panic, you can’t think clearly.
Rash decision making rarely delivers optimal results in everyday life either.
Resilient people acknowledge difficult situations, keep calm and evaluate things rationally so they can make a plan and act.
Al Siebert, in his book The Survivor Personality, writes that “The best survivors spend almost no time, especially in emergencies, getting upset about what has been lost, or feeling distressed about things going badly…. For this reason they don’t usually take themselves too seriously and are therefore hard to threaten.”
(For methods Navy SEALS, astronauts and the samurai use to keep calm under pressure, click here.)
So you know you’re in trouble but you’re keeping your cool. Might there be a simple way to sidestep all these problems? Yeah.
3) Be A Quitter
Many of you might be a little confused right now: “A secret to resilience is quitting? That doesn’t make any sense.”
What do we see when we look at people who survive life and death situations? Many of them were smart enough to bail early.
“…It’s a matter of looking at yourself and assessing your own abilities and where you are mentally, and then realizing that it’s better to turn back and get a chance to do it again than to go for it and not come back at all.” We are a society of high achievers, but in the wilderness, such motivation can be deadly…
The best way to take a punch from a UFC fighter and to survive a hurricane are the same: “Don’t be there when it hits.”
You quit baseball when you were 10 and quit playing the piano after just 2 lessons. Nobody sticks with everything. You can’t.
When the company starts laying people off, there’s always one guy smart enough to immediately jump ship and preemptively get a new job.
And some people are smart enough to realize, “I am never going to be a great Tango dancer and should double my efforts at playing poker.”
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And you know what results this type of quitting has? It makes you happier, reduces stress and increases health.
Wrosch found that people who quit their unattainable goals saw physical and psychological benefits. “They have, for example, less depressive symptoms, less negative affect over time,” he says. “They also have lower cortisol levels, and they have lower levels of systemic inflammation, which is a marker of immune functioning. And they develop fewer physical health problems over time.”
You can do anything — when you stop trying to do everything.
(For more on how to determine what you should stick with and what you should abandon, click here.)
Okay, so maybe you can’t bail and really do need to be resilient. What does the research say you can do to have more grit? It sounds crazy…
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