[2020-12-09] Secrets of resilient people
A friend recently shared with me a TED Talk by Lucy Hone, an expert and researcher who helps individuals, organizations and communities build resilience. Hone speaks from both research and personal experience, having lost her 12-year-old daughter to a tragic car accident.
As Hone grieved the loss of her daughter, she says, she didn't want to feel like a victim. "What I needed most was hope." she says. "I needed a journey through all the anguish, pain and longing." She learned that you can come back from adversity, that there are strategies that work, and that you can make yourself think and act in certain ways that help you navigate tough times.
She relied on three strategies based on the following principles:
- Resilient people understand that bad things happen.
- Resilient people focus their attention on what's good in the world.
- Resilient people ask themselves, "Is what I'm doing helping or harming me?"
Hone states that resilient people know that suffering is part of life. She contends: "The real tragedy is that not enough of us seem to know this any longer. We seem to live in an age where we're entitled to a perfect life, where shiny, happy photos on Instagram are the norm, when actually, ... the very opposite is true."
At the same time, says Hone, humans are good at noticing threats and weaknesses, focusing on negative emotions over positive ones. However, resilient people are more likely to realistically appraise situations and to focus on the things that they can change while accepting the things that they can't. "Resilient people don't diminish the negative," says Hone, "but they have also worked out a way of tuning into the good." As she grieved, Hone focused on the huge amount of social support she and her family received and on her two boys. In her TED Talk, Hone shares the results of an experiment conducted by Martin Seligman and colleagues in 2005; the researchers asked participants to think of three good things that had happened to them each day. Hone says, "those people showed higher levels of gratitude, higher levels of happiness, and less depression over the course of the six-month study." Hone thus advises the audience to "make an intentional, deliberate, ongoing effort to tune into what's good in your world."
When Hone found herself looking at pictures of her daughter late into the evening, she would ask herself: "Is what I'm doing helping or harming me?" She would then tell herself: "put away the photos, go to bed for the night, be kind to yourself."
Hone acknowledges that applying these strategies isn't easy and doesn't remove all the pain. But she learned that "it is possible to live and grieve at the same time."
The TED Talk was filmed in August 2019—coincidentally, the same month I was grieving the loss of my brother Greg. Had I known about the talk then, it would have provided some comfort. Nevertheless, the strategies Hone shares to deal with adversity are as applicable to my current challenge of facing ovarian cancer as they would have been when grieving my brother.
Like Hone, I have never asked myself, "why me?" People get sick; people lose loved ones; people face tragedy. I have faced all of these and overcome them.
Similarly, it's in my nature to focus on the good in my life. Like Hone, I have received a tremendous amount of support from family and friends since being diagnosed with ovarian cancer. And sharing my experience through this blog is providing meaning from an otherwise difficult situation.
Finally, I know that focusing on the life-threatening nature of cancer or the possibility that I might be carrying a gene mutation that would make me more susceptible to other cancers would harm me, not help me. So, instead, I focus on what I can do to put myself in the best position to conquer cancer and see any new data I might get in the future as providing valuable information.
I recommend Hone's TED Talk. She concludes her talk by saying: "Resilience isn't some fixed trait. It's not elusive, that some people have and some people don't. It actually requires very ordinary processes. Just the willingness to give them a go."
