The ABCs of resilience: Kathryn Meisner at TEDxYMCAAcademy

meet the water bear this guy is one of the toughest creatures on Earth he can handle almost anything you throw at him extreme pressure radiation the vacuum of space freezing boiling and he's only about this big 1 mm the water bear copes extremely well with Challenge and setbacks the water bear is resilient but what does resilience actually mean well the Webster's Dictionary defines it as the ability to become strong healthy or successful again after something bad happens it also says it's the ability of something to return to its original shape after it has been pulled stretched or bent and it cites nylon as an example of resilience but what does that mean for us as humans why should we care about resilience well I've got some good news and some bad news I'll start with the bad news first bad things are going to happen to us they're going to happen to all of us to you to me today tomorrow for the rest of our lives and considering bad things and challenges and setbacks are going to be with us for the rest of our time on Earth how we respond to these challenges should be kind of a big deal right also I'm going to go on a limb here and assume we all want to be happy that's something we're generally seeking is happiness and research has shown that resilient people tend to be happier than the average person resilient people tend to have better relationships higher life satisfaction and less hopelessness anxiety and depression so that's great for people that are resilient and we now know what the definition of resilience is and how resilient people benefit from this but what does that mean for the rest of us let's go back to the water bear this little guy the water bear is born resilient some humans are also born resilient I'm sure you can all think of those kind of people that every failure they have they bounce back even better than they were before but not everyone is born resilient what if we could all become resilient what if we could be like the water bear well remember I said there was good news there is research by people like Dr Martin Seligman at the University of Pennsylvania has shown that research is a skill which means that research is something that can be learned we can all all become resilient so I'm going to pause there because it doesn't sound that interesting but this is actually pretty wild up until recently it was thought that this was an inherent quality that you were born with either you had it or you didn't like the water bear but now research has shown that it's a skill and a skill that can be honed like any other skill learning to read play a new instrument learning a new technology or playing a new sport we can all become resilient regardless of our backgrounds or the challenges that we face but how how do we come become resilient how do we move beyond the self-help gooiness of Don't Worry Be Happy everything's going to be all right how do we move beyond that I work for Mozilla which most of you may know Mozilla as the Builders of Firefox the browser but Mozilla also has a big focus on teaching and learning And Hive is the youth branch of that as a director of Hive shano I get to work with youth serving organizations to bring more connected learning and dig digital literacy opportunities to youth in Toronto and when I started to think about what's an ideal worth sharing what do I want to share I naturally gravitated towards topics like Youth and Technology learning to code and making but as I reflected I realized there's something that the general public and the champions of these movements are overlooking and that's the valuable life skills like resilience that are being cultivated through these experiences iteration and experimentation encourage and breed resilience and they equip youth that have the opportunity to have these experiences with skills that will stay with them for the rest of their lives I want to share with you a couple of well actually just one specific strategy that can help build resilience and it comes out of the pen resilience program this was created by researchers Dr Martin Seligman like I had mentioned before and a couple of his colleagues and they did research around a bunch of resilience building strategies and they put them all together and they created the p resilience program to teach resilience and so the one that I want to focus on is the ABCs of resilience because it's something that you can do anywhere anytime you can do when you're with other people or alone and it works for everyone regardless of background or regardless of the challenge that you're facing facing whether it's something small or something very traumatic but first I wanted you to meet someone else this is Big John swimming instructor and or owner of John georgees Aquatics I started taking swimming lessons when I was 8 years old not because I wanted to mostly because I was insanely jealous of my cousin Ashley who had been enrolled to take them and I wanted to take them just to be as good as her so my parents enrolled me and I started taking lessons and I loved it much to my surprise I loved everything about it the way the water was see-through but kind of like a blanket at the same time the way that I could be in the pool with a bunch of other people but as soon as I went underwat it was like I was totally alone I even liked the little hackles that formed on my hair it was longer back then uh when I left the pool during the winter and I progressed through swimming levels like one does and I can continue to progress until there was just this one one level that I could not pass my classmates graduated I got held back more classmates graduated I still got held back and even though I liked swimming I felt really frustrated and wanted to quit Big John pulled me over to the side of the pool one day and I thought I was in trouble but instead he asked me what did I think about not passing this was really a weird question to be a kid and have an adult don't ask me this but I went with it and I told him I felt like I was going to be stuck in this forever everyone else got to pass but I just wasn't good enough and nothing I was going to do was going to change that and I felt frustrated and a little bit alone Big John challenged me and started arguing with me he said look at what you've accomplished before look at all the levels you've gotten through so far why can't you do this one maybe it's if you spend spent a little less time chatting I was a very chatty swimmer in those days and you spent a little more time focusing and practicing like you had in your other levels you might get there Big John was pretty convincing you can tell he got his own park named after him so I took his advice and I passed the level and I actually ended up staying in swimming and passing all of the levels that there were to pass now I share this story with you because well because I enjoyed my time with Big John but also because it's example of how the ABCs work Big John whether he knew it or not walked me through the ABCs and so to start with the ABCs and to become resilient we need to change how we think and this is part of what Big John did for me first I don't know if you've noticed but it's really hard to identify what you're thinking often we feel feel the feels the feelings before we can figure out what are the thoughts behind those feelings so we'll start the ABCs by slowing down our thinking and as you sit here today I challenge you to think of your own personal setback could be something big small something from the past or something recent and hold that setback in your mind as we walk through the ABCs of resilience ABCs stand for adversity beliefs and consequences and this is a model that has been researched and developed by Dr Steven Holland Dr arth Arthur Freeman and Dr Martin selberg Seligman so adversity ask yourself what's the challenge or setback that I'm facing for a 10-year-old me in swimming lessons it was the fact that I couldn't get through this one level B what are the belief thoughts and worries around this challenge I was worried that I was going to be stuck there forever I thought I wasn't good enough as my I thought I wasn't as good as my friends and see what are the consequences how is this thought or belief impacting how I feel and how I'm acting I felt frustrated and I was going to quit as a result and D I lied it's actually ABC D this is the most important part to this resilience building strategy dispute this this is where you get a chance to argue with yourself so for within the D is e AIU and now I'm kind of annoyed they didn't develop a really cool pneumonic device for this part but you're going to have to bear with me so big John let me led me through the first two evidence and Alternatives what is the factual evidence for this thought because you know what your thoughts aren't always real or objective mindblowing I know and for me I challenged he challenged me asking me to look back to my past experiences there was evidence that I had passed levels before so there's evidence I could probably pass this swimming level Alternatives what are alternatives ways to looking at this challenge Big John challenged me to look at uh maybe why I wasn't passing perhaps because I wasn't practicing enough implications is what's the worst case scenario here what's the worst thing that could happen if this thought is true cuz sometimes they are for Me Maybe I really did suck at swimming maybe I really needed to practice a lot as a result maybe it just wasn't for me and I did need to quit but looking at that even though I was really scared of quitting and it made me sad it's not the end of the world and you what's the usefulness of this belief thoughts and beliefs can be really motivating even if they're stressful so if it was a motivating belief for me I could hold on to it but if it was a useless belief and it was just making me worry I could figure out a way to let it go or find a way to distract myself when I thought of this particular thing so AB b c d e a i u it seems like a simple formula for to build resilience and it is but like any skill it's something that you have to practice and you have to hone to see results and because it's something that can be learned it's something that can be shared and taught and Big John is a perfect example of this he probably didn't even know about the ABCs of resilience yet he helped me become more resilient you don't even have to identify as a resilient person to be able to help someone else so I'm going going to leave you with two things one is a challenge to learn the ABCs for yourself and practice them that's one B two share the ABCs with others help others become resilient we all know people that have challenges have setbacks deal with failures as I mentioned that's all of us and whether you're an educator or you're a parent or a business leader or you work with within a team or maybe you just have that one friend who always leans on you for support you can help integrate the ABCs even without them knowing into your approaches into your interactions with others and even your programs and curriculums that you teach when we build a world full of resilient people we are actually building a better world so we learn your ABCs to become resilient thank you

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 131,379

Keywords: English Language (Human Language), tedx talk, ted talks, tedx, Technology (Professional Field), Education (Word), ted x, TEDxYMCAAcademy, Canada (Country), ted talk, TEDx, tedx talks, ted

Id: bAHQJSKZDB0

Length: 14min 4sec (844 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 04 2014