HOW TO BUILD YOUR RESILIENCE WITH SUSAN DAVID

hi everyone welcome to the space book lab at Harvard Business Review my name is Susan David I'm a psychologist at Harvard Medical School the founder are a co-founder of the Institute of coaching at McLean Hospital and the author of emotional agility and so thrilled to be here today to discuss probably one of the most important topics in all of our lives how to build resilience and in that context how to manage stress and change so we wanted to start the space book live with a very quick question what is the key way that you use in your own life to manage your stress so please can you let us know some of the ways that you manage stress in your own life and feel free to also chime in with where you're watching from so I'm so excited to really talk about this idea because it is critical the world health organization tells us that by 2030 depression not cancer not heart disease not diabeetus depression will be the single leading cause of disability globally and there are many reasons for this but one of them is the unprecedented change and complexity that so many of us are experiencing in our lives today so the principles that I want to talk about in terms of how to build stress and resilience apply in all aspects of our lives and in the context of all different types of stress and change so what do I mean by this these principles are principles that apply both to major life stressors for example illness or break-up of relationships or job loss but they also apply to everyday stressors you are angry with your boss your idea has been stolen at work you applied for a job that you really wanted and didn't get it these principles also apply to stresses that others put on you for example there's a change in the workplace and suddenly your role has shifted in ways that you never imagined but as equally it applies to stress that you have chosen in your own life because one of the great myths of stress is that all stress is bad we don't get to grow in our lives we don't get to enjoy and find meaning in our lives unless we walk towards discomfort so for example if you have started a company and it's a company that you really believe in and want to be involved with you may still find that stressful so not all stress is bad and one of the things that I'm going to talk about in this Facebook live is how to navigate these different ways of experiencing stress both wanted and unwanted so again welcome please let us know how you deal with stress in your life we are featuring live from Harvard Business Review offices and I'm so thrilled to be here to talk to talk about this incredibly important topic so let me start off by talking about a key way that I came to this question in my own life and it's a personal story but really if we think about the idea of stress if we think about the idea of resilience how to grow and how to thrive really what we are fundamentally talking about is a key question that I hope to discover with you on this Facebook life and it is this what does it take internally in the way we deal with our thoughts our emotions the stories that we tell ourselves and the experiences that we of everyday in everyway that help us to live our best life in all aspects in how we love in how we live in how we parent in how we work and in how we lead so I first came to this question in my own life when I was 16 years old my father who was an icon of warmth and kindness and a rock to me was diagnosed with terminal cancer and he was given months to live now on the one hand I experienced what so many of us experienced in our lives with our change and with our stress and it is this so many people came to me and said things like just be positive everything will be okay if you just think positive everything will be fine just grit through it and you'll see you'll come out the other end but I wasn't fine my father was dying and then dead and it was a very difficult very traumatic experience for me it was an experience that was very isolating and one that a lot of my peers had not gone through and so on the one hand I had this whole narrative of just think positive you know just think positive everything's going to be okay everything will be fine and then I had this remarkable experience I had a teacher and this teacher knew what I was going through and she invited me along with the rest of the class to keep journals and so began this secret silent correspondence with this remarkable woman where every day I would write in this journal about what I was going through my regrets my trauma my lost my sense of isolation my struggling through things my guilt that I was having fun sometimes when my father was ill and everyday I would hand this journal in and I would get the most beautiful heartfelt comments questions poetry stories from this amazing woman now what I realized after that experience is that it was that it was someone seeing me but more importantly me seeing myself that ultimately helped me to be resilient and to thrive beyond that experience and I now do walk through life and I've had many other difficult transitional experiences I've dropped out of college I've had a whole range of experiences that have been tough but I walk through a life of a sense of myself as someone who can cope and navigate change in ways that I effective so this sparked my career you know what is it in terms of what society tells us versus what is the reality of how we can walk through a world that is not perfect how we can walk through a world where life's beauty is inseparable from its fragility where we are young until we're not we in relationships that are wonderful and thriving until that person is there no longer but as equally where we are in a job that we love until we don't or where we feel heard at work until our voice seems like a doesn't matter these are all stressors that all of us experience and what I recognized in on the one hand this idea of just think positive versus this experience with a journal this black book that I still have today of being seen of showing up to my emotions is I started to delve into the research and the work and became ultimately a psychologist well now at Harvard Medical School and an emotions researcher answering these key questions what does it really take for us to thrive in an imperfect ever-changing stressful and complex world so what are some of the key principles or the first is that we actually know that forcing positive thinking doesn't work while the narrative is that we should think positive and be positive all the time there are some key problems were set now don't get me wrong I am NOT an t happiness or anti being positive I am a very positive person and in fact I wrote an 80 chapter end to end textbook called the Oxford Handbook of happiness on what we know about human happiness so I'm not anti happiness and I'm not anti being positive but what we know from the research is this so often when we slap on a happy face when underneath us we are struggling with sadness or anger or grief or disappointment what this does is takes away from our opportunity to learn to grow and to ultimately be resilient now why is this firstly when we are feeling something inside and instead what we do is we just pretend and try to push those emotions aside we know from the research that there is this remarkable psychological effect that is called amplification amplification is quite simply this imagine you are on a diet and you've decided that you are not going to eat chocolate cakes so you don't want to think about chocolate cake and you just undergoing there what we know is they're trying not to think about something leads to a boomerang effect where you start thinking about that thing all the time you start dreaming about that very thing that you feel that you cannot have and we know that the same applies with difficult situations when you are upset because you didn't get the promotion or you angry at a team member who you feel is not pulling their weight but you decide that you are just going to push it aside get on with it be focused on the project ignore it often what that leads to is a boomerang effect where you start thinking about it more and more often we're in a meeting you'll end up being snide to that very colleague who you pretended you were going to just ignore it too now just to be clear I'm not talking about wearing your emotions on a sleeve or always letting your emotions out but what I am suggesting is that when you are struggling with something one of the key principles of resilience is the showing up to your emotions showing up to your emotion in the same way as the teacher did with me in that same way that I did with myself being able to say what is it that I'm feeling what is going on for me here is a critical aspect of our resilience now one of the other reasons that positive thinking doesn't necessarily work is that our emotions have evolved to help us survive as a species we need our emotions we need our fear we need our anger yes they often feel uncomfortable yes they often are not things that are pleasant but these emotions often contain signals to the things that we most care about in our world so for example when you are feeling stressed because of change in the workplace that is assigned to you that job security and that security is really important and that predictability is important and that at the moment your job may not be as secure as you thought if you are angry and stressed because someone stole your idea at work what that signals to you is that you have a key value which is around equity and fairness so when we just push our emotions aside in the service of a smiley face what we are doing is we are very often stealing from ourselves some key learning what are my values that sit underneath this emotion what is this emotion telling me about my situation now very importantly the fact that you feel an emotion doesn't mean that they motion is right you know it doesn't mean that because you are angry with your boss you should be angry with your boss and your boss's wrong and you are right it may be the case emotions are data not directions so we can look into our emotions as pieces of information that often contains signals to things that we value but we don't necessarily need to have them drive us in emotional agility I talked about how we often get hooked into AI emotions believing them and acting on them in ways that don't necessarily serve us so what I'm talking about here is the idea that our emotions content signals are important and that when we push our difficult emotions and our difficult thoughts aside what it actually does is it undermines our resilience and undermines our learning now we often push shy emotions aside with the best of intentions because society tells us to or because that's the way we've been raised or because we've got a big project to do and pushing our emotions aside seems effective so really what's really critical is that if you push your emotions aside just one day because you've got a big project or you go into a job interview that's not a huge deal but when you start using characteristic ways where time and time again I'm stuck in my job but at least I've got a job so I'm just going to ignore it when it becomes a trend in your life around particular emotions or particular experiences that's when you need to start paying attention to the fact that you are likely even with good intentions undermining your resilience so we want to be able to show up to our emotions to recognize that positive thinking is maybe well and good in some situations but in really dealing effectively with stress and in helping to cultivate positive thinking is very often an errand that is not met with success we know that people who chase too much happiness and too much positive thinking actually become less happy over time so what does this mean then when you are dealing with difficult situations what do you do with that stress I'm angry with my boss I'm frustrated with my coworker I'm stuck in my job there's all this change going on I'm ill my relationship isn't working out often what we find and what I talk about any emotion agility is that people tend to use one of two strategies they will either do what I mentioned before which is what we call bottle they'd bottle their emotions and we're going to put a pole up now which is are you a butler are you a brooder or are you a bit of both flipping from one to the next a butler is someone who pushes emotions aside in order to get through the day or achieve their goal but ultimately those emotions come back and what they're doing is they are not actually hearing the data from their emotions and more importantly when we keep saying to ourselves I'm just going to ignore it we are avoiding the very situation that is causing us the stress and so we are not changing shaping tweaking or managing that situation in a proactive and constructive way so the stress stays and the situation stays botting ultimately doesn't work what about its opposite what about brooding we're bottling is pushing emotions aside often when people are feeling stressed they brood oh my goodness I'm so stressed I feel stuck in my job this is terrible what should I do and we can also of course Co brood where everyone is stressed work where everyone is going through change and we all hang around the watercooler all telling each other how stressed we are that can make us feel better about our co-workers but what we know from the research is that again it undermines our resilience and it undermines our capability to work work through the situation so brooding is where you go over and over and over your emotions time and time again and while that is the opposite of bottling we know that brooding has similar consequences that when you brood you are so often stuck in your world that you aren't making effective changes that you aren't shaping your environment and you are ultimately being in your world rather than being in the world blotting and brooding or sometimes people slip from one to the other where they avoid their emotions and then dwell man then go back butting and brooding of both associated with lower levels of well-being higher levels of anxiety higher levels of burnout higher levels of stress over time they are not effective strategies so what do we do we need to be able to show up to our emotions and I'm going to talk later about very simple strategies to do this but what am I feeling what is going on for me I'm struggling here I'm feeling angry I'm feeling strict these are critical things to start tapping into in ways that ultimately help you to be more effective a key part of resilience also is doing what I call self-care and self kindness so often when people are going through difficult stressful change situations they beat themselves up they're going through a divorce and they blame themselves they going through a job loss and they blame themselves they've had a Sadie at work and they blame themselves and so again we live in a society that would often have us believe that we are running a never-ending Ironman or iron woman competition and that somehow being kind to ourselves is about being weak it's about being lazy and it's about being dishonest the research shows the opposite what the research shows is that people who are kind to themselves people who recognize that they are doing the best with what they've got with who they are with the resources that they have in the world today and that they are kind to themselves treating themselves with compassion those individuals what they are ultimately doing is they are creating a space within themselves that is psychologically safe where they are safe from themselves now this internal psychological safety what does it do firstly it helps people to be more motivated it helps people to grow more it helps people to recover from setbacks so we're the myth of self compassion is that it's about being weak lazy and lying to yourself we know that the opposite is true that self compassion is a prerequisite for resilience for thriving and change so how do we get to the space where we show up effectively to I emotions I'm going to give some key and very practical strategies that I explore an emotional agility but there are fundamental to our well-being but first when you are experiencing a difficult emotion we know that many people use stock standard phrases to describe that emotion so they'll say something like I'm stressed I'm stressed unstressed and soon everyone at work is talking about how stressed they are but there is a world of difference between being stressed versus angry stressed versus fearful stressed versus disappointed stressed versus I thought my career would be so much more than it is and I have a real sense of loss in my life now imagine I am coaching an executive or leader and that person says to me I'm stressed if I just took that stress excess value I might say to the person well let's learn how to delegate more but what if the stress is I'm in the wrong career at that point advice about delegation just doesn't cut it so we know that a critical aspect of resilience and well-being is this instead of labeling your emotions with the first emotion that comes to mind try to be more granular what are two other options of what I'm experiencing here because we know that when people get to a more granular level around their emotions what it ultimately does is helps them to understand the cause of the emotion the reality of the situation more effectively and it also enables them to stop planning we know that when we put things into words that actually starts to activate the readiness potential in our brains the part of our brands that helps us to set goals and to work forward towards change I'll interrupt just very briefly if you tuning in now to say welcome everyone i'm susan david a psychologist at harvard medical school i'm joining you from the harvard business review offices where we are talking about resilience how to build resilience and in that context how to manage stress and change that is so much the reality of everyone's lives please feel free to write in let us know where you are joining us from let us know if you have any answers to this question which is how do you deal with stress in your own life or how do you cultivate your own resilience and towards the end of this live we'll have some question time where you can ask me anything around this particular topic so labeling emotions is critical another very important strategy is you're sitting in a meeting and you are feeling undermined you are feeling stressed you are feeling put upon notice your thought and your feeling for what it is your thought is a thought it's not affect your emotion is an emotion it's not affect who's in charge the thinker or the thought who's in charge the emotion or you the individual who is big enough and full enough and complex enough and beautiful enough to experience a multitude of emotions so when you are sitting in that meeting and you are saying to yourself I am angry I'm just going to shut down there's no point in talking instead note you're thought or feeling for what it is I am noticing that I'm feeling anxious I'm noticing that I'm feeling angry I'm noticing that the urge to shut down I'm noticing that I'm not putting my hand up when in fact I really want to when we notice our feeling and our emotions for what they are literally by very simply saying I'm noticing the feeling I'm noticing the thought we do something that is critical psychologically we move ourselves into the space where instead of bottling the emotion pushing it aside we are with it but we're also not brooding on the emotions instead we are seeing that emotion for what it is we are observing that emotion and this ability to take an observer stance is critical to our well-being if we think about for example the experience of depression when people feel depressed they often experience depression as something that is here to stay I feel surrounded by this emotion and so we know this practice of starting to cultivate the ability to notice our emotions with courage with curiosity and with compassion is a cornerstone to resilience and to thriving I'm now going to talk very briefly to a second critical strategy and that is knowing your why what do I mean by this when we are going through change and stress it is so easy for us to be caught up in what is called social contagion social contagion is where everyone in the office is experiencing stress and we feel stress everyone is looking on their cell phones in an elevator and we pick up our cellphone in the elevator we know for example in some research that if you are trying to lose weight and you are sitting on an airplane and your seat partner buys candy even if you don't know the person you are 13% more likely to buy candy so we get automatically very frequently impacted by other people's behaviors and other people's emotions in ways that become contagious and in ways that ultimately undermine our own resilience where we compare ourselves and we adopt behaviors actions and strategies that ultimately are not about who we are so knowing your why and this is something that I explore an emotional agility is one of the most critical aspects to resilience and thriving and fulfillment and success in our lives what do I mean by this knowing who you are knowing what you stand for knowing what is important to you is fundamental so an example everyone is running around talking about the stress and about the change but you know in your heart that being a contributor is a key value of yours what that knowledge does is it helps to buffer you it helps to protect you from the stress of social contagion yes there's all of this going on around me that I still choose to contribute knowing for example that learning and growth are core values to you not just at the back of your mind or in some cheesy way put on a bulletin board in an office but really something that is personal to you helps you to say learning and growth are important and so while I'm not loving this change while I'm not loving the stress I'm still choosing to learn what I can from the situation so we know that knowing your Y is a core fundamental aspect of human resilience protecting us in every way in our lives and in every area of our careers of our leadership and of our ultimate lifelong growth lastly we talked about AI emotions we talked about our values knowing your wire but we also know that we can cultivate real and important habits on the ground that enable us to be resilient and enable us to be effective so one very important habit is the habit of mindset human beings are naturally drawn to situations that feel comfortable we may be in a relationship or in a job that we can do with our eyes shut or where we go out to dinner and we know exactly what our spouse is going to talk about over dinner now this feels very comfortable but it is a sign of what I call in emotional agility over competence where we become so trapped by what at first feels comfortable that that comfort ultimately creates a prison around ourselves that we step into a cage of comfort that undermines our resilience stops our growth and stops our thriving while we are all drawn to comfort there is a curse to comfort and that is that it ultimately weakens our lives it weakens our resilience it weakens our exploration it weakens the depth and breadth and richness of our experience so comfort feels comfortable but it is a curse at the same time we don't want to be overwhelmed in which we feel like we constantly drowning so we should always in helping to cultivate our own resilience try to do this move yourself towards the edge of your ability if you feeling stressed or stuck in your job it doesn't mean you have to give up your job you can look for ways that you can make small tweaks small changes that are meaningful that our values connected that will help you so for example I keep saying no to the thing even though I know they're doing it doing this project would help me to grow how can you move yourself knowing that your value is one of growth and keep on making what I call towards moves you in that meeting and you've got a choice point do you make a move that is away from your value of growth or do you make a move that is towards putting your hand up and saying yes as long as that thing is meaningful to you values connected it will help you to grow and to thrive very importantly also is this stress has a bad name people talk about trying to avoid stress trying to do away with stress there is no such thing as living a meaningful life as raising kids as having an effective career as living in life of purpose there's no such thing as living a meaningful life that doesn't involve strength discomfort is the price of admission to a meaningful life so what that means is recognizing that we don't get to climb Mount Everest and not have some coal cold and dark and rainy days is really important that being able to move towards stress is often as long as its values aligned a critical aspect and within that recognizing this that we're not trying to do away with stress we're not trying to do away with discomfort because courage ultimately is not the absence of fear it's not the absence of stress courage is about noticing your stress noticing your fear noticing your emotions with curiosity and compassion and still choosing to move in the direction of your values and lastly create in your life what I call want to have us want to habits our habits that are values aligned but that help to manage your situation and your context more effectively and see at this point I'm starting to close off so if you've got any questions please feel free to ask them because I'm going to have a couple of minutes to take viewers questions so what do I mean by want to hover if you find that you've got a daily stress and I'm going to use a very simple example of you lose your keys you don't have your charger for your cell phone this is what we call L aesthetic strengths this every day stress what we need to start doing is cultivating heavens that ultimately enable us to mitigate and to manage those stressful situations those L aesthetic stressful situations so for example one of the things that I talked about in emotional agility is what I call piggybacking the idea that if you've already got a habit in your life you already go home put your keys in the drawer and you do that every day you can piggyback with a new habit onto that existing habit so you can a now put your keys in the drawer and your cell phone charger and your cell phone so that everything is there creating habits not just for the sake of it but there are true ones to habits values aligned habits are critical to help us managing stress and within that these also habits around self-care fundamental to our lifelong resilience and well-being are getting enough sleep doing enough exercise trying to eat in ways that a healthy and again recognizing that these are not because you have to do them but because they are fundamentally important to you and lastly the habit of cultivating relationships because while we live in a world that is technology driven it is the support of others that truly also enables us to become resilient so showing up to our emotions knowing our why and cultivating one to two goals is absolutely fundamental to our ability to manage stress and change and to build resilience in all aspects of our lives in how we love in how we live in how we parent in how we work and in how we lead thank you so much for watching I am open to any questions that you have anything at all about stress resilience and emotions in your life and I think we already do have a question question is from Andre and he's actually asking about the poll question that you mentioned before about brewing versus bottling and his question is do you see any particular age or period where bottling or brooding or worsened so that's a really interesting question so the question is do we see any particular age with buffing or brew or worsened so not a particular age but two particular contexts the first is that often when people are experiencing a lot of stress in their lives and especially when that stress feels uncontrollable in some way they will tend to exacerbate and draw on their botting or brooding habit more frequently so that thing that was there becomes more and more of a tendency the other thing that we know about bottling and brooding is that sometimes these habits around bottling and brooding happen from when we are children so for example if we grow up in a family where the display rule what is called display rules in families are we don't do anger here we don't do sadness what that can lead to is an individual not actually feeling comfortable with anger or sadness and so pushing those emotions aside in a characteristic way so we find and we also do find some gender differences we find for example that men in general tend to bottle emotions more whereas women in general tend to brood emotions brood on emotions more but what what you know these gender differences are so interesting but what's more fundamental here is is they're the thing that you are doing that is not helping you like what does this look like for you in your personal life and how does it impact you so another question thank you for that that was a great question you wanted to just jump in quickly and say that the poor results are in okay Emmett we know how many dollars how many brood isn't how many a bit of fun yes so we have 19 percent or bottlers 24 percent brooders and fifty percent identify expose okay so around 20 percent 20 percent and then so 20 percent bottle around 20 percent brood and then some people kind of slipped from one to the other and again there's nothing inherently wrong with bossing or brooding if it's them in the moment strategy you know I've got a job interview and my girlfriend just broke up with me you know you may absolutely by definition in order to be effective in that interview need to push our motions aside and go into the interview but it's when you starting to use these strategies in characteristic ways around particular situations the person who month-on-month says I'm unhappy in my job but I'm just going to ignore it and then five years later that person is still in the same job ignoring us but now far more miserable that's what we're talking about here so thank you one more question I know we are nearly at the end yes one more question so Adi is asking I totally agree on the fact that stress is necessary to take a step forward and realize your potential eventually but how can you control its level at transition points in your life while changing careers are moving to another country for example okay so yes I have moved so the question is we know that stress is helpful but what about when you're going through real transition points in your life for example you're changing jobs or you're moving to another country having moved to four countries in my life and you know change many jobs I hear exactly what you're talking about um you know sometimes so we need to recognize that these situations are stressful there is a difference between what I call a have to go and a want to go a have to goal is where you say I have to move jobs because I hate the one that I'm in you know I have to move countries I have to move states now have to language is very interesting language because what happens when we have have to language is we can start wrapping ourselves in the story of the thing that I have to do and we know psychologically that when people wrap themselves in a have to what do we do we become resentful we become more stressed and we become less adaptable to the situation that we are facing and we often do this in very subtle ways without even realizing it so I have to go to the meeting today I have to give this person feedback I have to you know apply for a new job have to language what it does is it actually undermines our resilience have to is very often done out of a sense of obligation and shame now if you take that same goal and you try to surface this is one knowing your why is so important if you try to surface see why am I doing this yes I hate my job but what is that emotion telling me about the kind of job or the kind of things that I value in my workplace that I'm not getting from this current workplace if you can start recognizing you'll want to and surfacing your want to that is as values aligned things in the situation in the stress that you're facing it is a critical aspect then to being able to deal with that stress effectively so I have to give this person feedback versus fairness is really important to me how fair is it if I don't give this person feedback how fair is it to the rest of the team half there is it to myself if you can start surfacing your want to true value around the stress it significantly deescalate that stress and creates a greater level of resilience very importantly I'm not talking about positive thinking yeah pretending I'm truly talking about surfacing the true wanted - that is beneath you'll have to so with that I think we are at the end of our time I'm so grateful to all of you who've joined us if any of you are interested I've got a free quiz which is Susan David come forward slash learn and it's a quiz about emotional agility which talks to these very ideas how do we thrive in the world Susan David come forward slash learn it's a free quiz you get a ten page report that comes out of it and if any of you have additional questions that you want to ask please feel free to do so I'll often in the afternoon or later on tomorrow hop online and answer some of those questions in the comments so I'm grateful to all of you for joining and I hope that this is being useful thank you

Channel: Susan David, Ph.D.

Views: 44,342

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Id: oNqut813pas

Length: 49min 5sec (2945 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 08 2017