When the Bottom Falls Out, Look Up
Though it is now more than 25 years ago, I remember distinctly what I felt on waking up that first morning: an immense heaviness on my chest, a whirling, dizzy mind that could not seem to focus, and above all, an almost overwhelming sense of loss and fear. The day before, I had been summarily terminated from my job. Grief-stricken, I padded uptown to the glitzy studio apartment I had rented only one year earlier upon first arriving in Manhattan, only to find an angry demand-for-rent notice taped to my front door. In full panic mode and needing comfort, I reached out to my romantic interest at the time, only to be told that the relationship no longer ‘felt right’ and that it seemed a good time for us to go our separate ways.
How had I managed to pull off this hideous trifecta? How could a steady, well-educated young man from a good family have lost control of his finances, made so many flawed decisions, befriended the wrong sort of people, and even taken his eye off the ball at work? These and a dozen other questions raced through my mind on a seemingly endless loop. Even the thought of getting up, of beginning the slow climb out, seemed impossible. I felt a strong impulse to pull the covers over my head and simply let the day, and perhaps Life itself, pass me by.
But instead, after five minutes or so, I got out of bed. I went through my ablutions. I dressed for a work day and, sitting in my apartment in suit and tie, began to call a list of prospective employers, send out CVs, and arrange first interviews with anyone who agreed to meet me. Despite a lack of appetite, I disciplined myself to eat. Despite a huge desire to drown my sorrows, I disciplined myself not to drink. As I began to regain focus, to enact my plan, and to take steps away from the challenging events of the day before, I slowly began - - even on that first day - - to recover myself, my confidence, and my clarity.
Despite the historical nature of this anecdote, and the many crises I have survived since then, just reliving those events as I write this article stirs up strong emotions. Perhaps that is the nature of crisis, not just for me, but for all of us. Many reading this will have lost a job, experienced a breakup, been threatened by financial calamity, whether of their own making or not. Nearly all of us have felt, at times, unfit for purpose: too old, too inexperienced, too weak, too at odds with the boss, too helpless in the face of social or professional uncertainty.
The difference, psychologists tell us, between those who surrender to Life’s challenges and those who soldier on despite them, is Resilience. The word itself comes from the Latin to “bounce back” or to “resume one’s original shape”, but definitions aside, how can we tell whether we have it or not? “Resilience presents a challenge for psychologists,” writes Maria Konnikova (“How People Learn to Become Resilient”, The New Yorker, February 11, 2016), “Whether you can be said to have it or not largely depends not on any particular psychological test, but on the way your life unfolds.” In other words, resilience only shows itself when we’re “faced with obstacles, stress, and other environmental threats”. Short of that, science has few tools at its disposal to confirm the presence of resilience in a given person.
Konnikova describes the work of Dr. Emmy Werner, a developmental psychologist, who followed a group of several hundred children from birth, beginning in 1989. Two out of three children came from stable, happy backgrounds, while the remaining third were considered ‘at risk’, given poverty, family issues, or other challenges. By the time the cohort had reached their early 20s, clear patterns began to emerge. While some of the children in both groups had developed “serious learning or behavior problems”, many kids, including many of those considered ‘at risk’, had gone on to become “competent, confident, and caring young adults”. The difference, argues Dr. Werner, was not primarily attributable to early environment, but to the innate resilience in each, individual child. “The resilient children saw themselves as orchestrators of their own fates,” writes Werner, “They believed that they, and not their circumstances, affected their achievements.”
If, as Werner seems to suggest, a significant source of resilience resides in our attitudes toward Life, then it follows that resilience is something we can, to some degree, develop in ourselves. Sheryl Sandberg, the Chief Operating Officer of Facebook, who famously lost her husband to cardiac arrhythmia in 2015, has made resilience a focus of her work and writing. “The most important thing I learned,” she said in a recent commencement address to Virginia Tech’s graduating class, “is that we are not born with a certain amount of resilience. It is a muscle and that means we can built it. We build resilience into ourselves. We build resilience into the people we love. And we build it together, as a community.”
Sandberg’s view is seconded by General Martin Dempsey, who until recently served as the Chair of the Joint Chiefs of the United States Military. When asked by President Richard H. Brodhead of Duke University - - General Dempsey’s alma mater - - about the importance of individual and community resilience in the face of the global threat of terrorism, General Dempsey replied, “The threat of terrorism can neither change the way we live nor the way we interact with the rest of the world unless we allow it to do so. Terrorism aims not just to inflict finite physical destruction, but to create a limitless feeling of insecurity and vulnerability…..To resist this effect, it is critical that we rebound – that we confidently reassert what we are and what we are proud to be.” (Dr. Richard H. Brodhead, Baccalaureate Commencement Address 2017, Duke University).
Sandberg’s view is seconded by General Martin Dempsey, who until recently served as the Chair of the Joint Chiefs of the United States Military. When asked by President Richard H. Brodhead of Duke University - - General Dempsey’s alma mater - - about the importance of individual and community resilience in the face of the global threat of terrorism, General Dempsey replied, “The threat of terrorism can neither change the way we live nor the way we interact with the rest of the world unless we allow it to do so. Terrorism aims not just to inflict finite physical destruction, but to create a limitless feeling of insecurity and vulnerability…..To resist this effect, it is critical that we rebound – that we confidently reassert what we are and what we are proud to be.” (Dr. Richard H. Brodhead, Baccalaureate Commencement Address 2017, Duke University).
Know What You Value
When faced with calamity, the sense of loss can be overwhelming. When two tornadoes tore through Albany, Georgia, on January 21, 2017, the town was devastated, with numerous local residents rendered homeless and even several fatalities. WALB News-10, a local television station, sent a film crew to survey the damage and to talk to survivors. Although the images were difficult to watch, perhaps what stood out most in the broadcast were the interviews with the survivors. One woman, whose name was never provided, was filmed on the site of her former home, picking through the rubble for keepsakes, but mostly just standing, crying and sadly shaking her head at this turn of events. When asked by the reporter to quantify her loss, however, the woman gave a surprising answer, “I may have lost all my things,” she said, “But I still have what’s most important. My poor neighbor lost her son. Nothing we have lost at our house matters compared to that.”
This nameless Albany resident reveals a vital lesson about resilience. If we know what we truly value, if we know what we care about at our core, then the loss of other things, no matter how terrible, can be minimized and managed. The lady in Georgia may have lost her furniture and family photographs and many other things of value, but the fact that her family had survived gave her the strength to continue.
Practice, Practice, Practice
Fortunately, for most of us, life-changing or even life-threatening crisis of the sort we have described here is a rare visitor. Most have us have never experienced a natural disaster and will experience the loss of a job or a romantic relationship, or face a serious illness or financial crisis, only once or twice in a lifetime. Along the way, however, we will encounter almost daily adversity, albeit on a smaller scale. We will have our parking spaces ‘stolen’ at the grocery store or drop our phones by accident into the toilet or be criticized by a friend when we had expected praise. None of these incidents, or the countless others like them, matter very much in the greater scheme of things, but they do represent an opportunity for us to connect consciously with our own, internal resilience. If we learn, in such moments, to recognize even the minor setback and commit ourselves to bouncing back positively - - smiling at the person who took ‘our’ space, turning a dropped phone into an amusing anecdote, determining to grow as a result of a friend’s criticism - - we will slowly nurture the practice of resilience in ourselves. In time, such “muscle development” could make the difference when bigger troubles come.
Feed an Attitude of Hope
Frank Sonnenberg, author of the award-winning blog America’s Top 100 Thought Leaders, wrote in a recent post, “A positive attitude can boost your energy, heighten your inner strength, inspire others, and garner the fortitude to meet difficult challenges. According to research from the Mayo Clinic, positive thinking can increase your life span, decrease depression, reduce levels of distress, provide greater resistance to the common cold, offer better psychological and physical well-being, reduce the risk of death from cardiovascular disease, and enable you to cope better during hardships and times of stress.”
It is important to remember that our feelings derive from and follow our thoughts, not the other way around. Despite this, in moments of crisis our feelings may well get the better of us - - flooding us with a sense of despair, fear, and paralysis. In such moments, it may be useful to remember that while we seldom can control our emotions, we have the clear ability to control our thoughts and to determine our focus. Keeping a positive thought, feeding an attitude of hope, helps to turn our eyes away from the negative thing that has just happened (or is still happening) to us. Instead, it can start us thinking about next steps and a life after the crisis.
Lean on the Resiliency in Others
On July 7, 2005, I was in my office in London when news began to reach us that bombs were going off around the Metropolis. First came reports of an explosion in the Tube, then another on a public bus. We were under attack, with no idea where and how the next explosion might take place. As a senior manager in the business, my mind immediately went to how we might help our people home safely. Ought we to arrange taxis? Should we send people home in pairs? Would it be possible to allow the more nervous among our employees to somehow stay near, or even in, the office?
Although the British are famous for their dogged determination to “carry on” come what may, the behaviors I observed that day inspired me, and they inspire me still. Far from wanting to discuss options to protect, hide or shield themselves, my colleagues were instantaneous in their decision about how to respond to the unfolding crisis. All those who typically used public transportation insisted they would do so at day’s end, as always. A number of others who more commonly drove cars to work, announced that they would be leaving their vehicles in the car park, preferring to join their colleagues, families and friends, in taking public transportation home.
At its core, their decision not to be cowed by senseless acts of terrorism and violence flowed not just from British culture, but from deeply ingrained resilience that the culture had imparted to my colleagues. But I also observed that the resilience, the courage, on display in one person helped to ignite or bolster similar resilience in another.
Indeed, even if the particular crisis we are facing seems individual - - a job loss, for example, or a frightening medical diagnosis - - the fact is that we can help stoke and strengthen our resilience in the face of these adversities by drawing on the resilience of those around us. We need not face our perils alone and have a greater likelihood of persevering if we do not try.
Keep your Eyes on the Goal
Perhaps the most dangerous element of any serious crisis in our lives is the way it seems to derail us from our plans, our imagined futures, and our sense of direction, meaning and purpose. Recently, I was visiting a dear friend, whom I shall call ‘Jane’, now in the throes of chronic and debilitating illness. When I inquired as to her health, she replied (with only thinly-veiled sarcasm), “I’d be better if people stopped asking me about my health!” We laughed a bit, but went on to have a more serious conversation in which she shared that the hardest part of this chapter in her life is how the illness itself seems to have taken center stage. “I am a still a mother and grandmother,” she said, “I still write poetry and enjoy listening to music. I like to think I still have a sense of humor and, as far as I know, my mind. But if I am not vigilant, my whole life - - every waking thought and every conversation - - will be not about those things, but about the disease.”
Jane is determined to keep her focus on the Life she was living when the crisis came rather than perpetually focusing on the crisis itself. True, the calamity she faces is ongoing, and perhaps even worsening, but Jane - - poster-child for resilience that she is - - is determined not to be defined by it. By directing her thoughts toward the future and the people and things she loves, Jane engages her resilience muscles, keeps her eyes focused on the positive, and reduces the capacity of her illness to rob her life of joy or meaning.
In our work with executives of many stripes, we not uncommonly come across those marked in some way by past or present troubles, including some for whom the bottom has recently fallen out. Whether facing job loss, lack of fulfillment, a health crisis, a financial disaster, family woes or any other setback, such executives display, usually without being aware of it, either a palpable sense of defeat or an incredible reserve of resilience. Over the years and quite consistently, my heart goes out to each of these in equal measure. For both groups, calamity has come, but it is still possible to recognize the resilient: invariably, they are the ones looking up.
-Chris van Someren