Richard Li

Dane Jensen -- Resilience 1

8 min read

Definition of resilience

  • Responding from setbacks
    • Analogy: How to rehab balance?
      • Approach one: how to how stable defensive posture
        • How to stand in a way were you won’t get off balance
      • Evolution
        • Focus on how we respond and recover to being off balance
        • The reason is that there are no postures strong enough that won’t knock us off balance
          • Can’t build a thick skin for everything
      • How do we stay centred as we get shoved off balanced?
  • Performance on demand
    • Can you perform when the pressure is highest (olympics example)
      • Canada had talent, skills, and athletes ultimately performed well at events a year before the Olympic games but would “choke” at the real games (low conversion rates compared with other countries)
    • Are we able to rise during the moments that matter?

What challenges and pressures am I currently facing?

  • Impair my performance
  • Drain your physical energy
    • Evenings when I don’t get enough sleep
    • Adjusting from timezone differences when coming back home from Japan
    • Getting back home late from evening hangouts (or having too many hangouts)
    • Not having enough time to myself
    • Winding down with devices
  • Emotionally exhaust you
    • Feeling on “edge” about my dating situation
    • We’ve been emotionally involved deeply over the past 3 years (on/off) due to religious differences
    • I want to give us another shot again, she’s just come back from being on exchange and travelling a lot
    • We did limit a lot of contact during these past few months
  • Cause you anxiety
    • Same situation as above
    • I deleted Instagram (all other social medias except for LinkedIn and YouTube)
      • Mainly because I’d get anxiety from seeing her Instagram posts
      • Not because I don’t want to see her happy, but they make me spiral
    • Right now I do have some anxiety from starting up contact with her
      • Current thoughts creating anxiety
        • I’m not sure how she feels about me
        • Did she meet someone new during the past month?
        • Did she grow closer with some other guys?
        • Did she forget about me?
        • Did she text someone else about landing back in Toronto but not me?
      • Thoughts about the future
        • Would she still be interested in having a conversation with me
      • I think a lot of uncertainty about not knowing how she’s been feeling the past 4 months, is just causing my head to spin and think in these hypothetical scenarios
    • Why I want to rebuild with Jemima
      • It is incredibly rare to grow authentically with someone
      • “While becoming who I am today, you are my favourite person”
      • We did our best to handle conflict, communicate, feel secure, navigate uncertainty
      • We both know each other so well
      • Everyday life in a relationship is about these small things and this I’d value this connection/willingness over anything
      • I don’t want to give up on this without having a proper conversation about the future
      • When I imagine who I want to do these little things, make decisions, grow with curiosity → these are what matter long term to me
      • She’s really helped me to think more deeply about life, change my perspectives on careers, and inspired me to become better for us
  • Take away the fun
  • Keep you rushing

Tools for Resilience

  • Internal shift from a feeling of helplessness → self efficacy (control)

What is pressure?

  • Energized state
    • Physical, emotional, cognitive
    • This is a double edged sword
      • Exciting and Anxiety
      • Motivating and Overwhelming
    • World records
      • They get set at Olympics due to having to perform under pressure
  • Sense of control can help us leverage pressure to feel more exciting/motivating rather than anxious/overwhelm
    • When pressure feels like it’s happening to us → can get corrosive
    • If we can act on the sources of pressure → can feel energized

Domain Choices to build Control

  • Eliminate the stressor (modify the environment)
  • Physical resilience
    • Aids mental resilience
    • Avoiding neglect and take care of the basics
      • Sleep
        • Research from Nature: fatigue alcohol and performance impairment nature
          • As people get more sleep deprived → cognitive performance declines
          • As people get more drunk → cognitive performance declines
          • 6 hours or less of sleep is equivalent to somebody of blood alcohol concentration 0.06 → 0.08 in terms of cognitive performance
            • Above the legal limit for driving a car
        • There are seasons of life where getting adequate sleep is not possible
      • Movement
        • 30 minutes per day
      • Nutrition
  • Relationships
    • Metaphor
      • When people go through disruption (change + pressure) we are circus performers between trapezes
        • How are these people are to be 40 feet in the air not connected to anything?
          • Train with a safety net
          • They will get caught if they fall
    • Our safety net comes from people who love us unconditionally
    • Associate pressure with reaching out and building the safety net
  • Inner skills
    • Mental model
        • Centre is the self
          • Self awareness is the biggest inner skill
          • We can’t manage ourselves without being aware
        • Self is separate from the body, feelings, and mind
          • What we think, feel, and do
          • Humans are given capacity to observe these things
            • Notice thoughts (meta cognition), emotion, physiology
          • Difference with animals
            • They aren’t able to reason — they are wired to deal with stimulus by responding with an action
            • This is where we least resilient through a pattern of stimulus/response
          • We are at our most resilient when we feel pressure
            • Step back and notice the impact of pressure
            • From a position of observation, we have free will to choose how we respond
            • Difference between being angry and noticing we are angry
        • Perspective
          • Definition: the way how we interpret a situation
          • This is the one thing in which we have influence/control
          • This starts in our head, but doesn’t stay there
            • The story we tell about a situation, we project onto the world
            • “We don’t see the world as it is, we see the world as I am”
          • Approaches
            • Power of positive thinking
              • Can verge into toxic positivity
                • “Everything is fine”
                • Can be naive and not consider drawbacks
            • Hardiness perspective
              • People who had best outcomes through relentless change and disruption who chose to see what they were going through:
                • Commitment
                  • “I choose to see this as interesting and important” vs “This is too stressful, I can’t care and alienate”
                    • One question I have is that to build control, one of the 4 choices is to eliminate the stressor — what is the difference here?
                • Control
                  • Focus attention on what they control
                • Challenge
                  • Challenge we can rise vs a threat we protect ourselves
        • Energy Management
          • Be a thermostat rather than a thermometer
            • Thermostats controls the temperature where as a thermometer read the temperature
          • Challenge
            • We are wired as thermometers
            • Through our 5 senses, our central nervous system tries to adapt ourselves to the environment
            • When dealing with a situation with uncertainty and importance
              • There is a gas pedal that gets pressed (sympathetic nervous system) to ready ourselves for action
              • As activation increases, our attention gets narrower
              • This is hardwired into our biology and we can’t counteract this
          • What happens “in the tunnel”
            • Miss relevant information
              • e.g. we did an activity where there was a sheet of numbers from 1-100 in random order and we had to circle the numbers in sequence
              • In the debrief, we were tasked to step back to write down all of our thoughts we had while doing this activity
                • For high performers they respond with: “nothing, looking for numbers” → flow state, focused on the task
                • Most of us hit a stumbling block and start talking to ourselves
                • We become our own heckling (mind, feelings, body are not aligned)
              • When we get stuck, thermostat creeps us, we miss information (couldn’t see the numbers)
              • Hard to see broader context, hold long term views, lose our expertise, environmental cues, disconfirming facts
                • In a job interview, we feel like our head is empty but then in retrospect after the interview we go “ohhh I should’ve said that”
            • Reduced flexibility
            • Become a more extreme version of ourself
          • How we get out of the tunnel
            • Mind, feelings, body are interlinked (we can pull them out of alignment)
            • Mind
              • Reframing
                • Commitment, Control, Challenge
              • Self talk
              • Affirmation
            • Body
              • Breathing
                • Not physically possible to have calm body and racing mind
                • Calm body, the mind will follow
              • Acting ‘as if’
            • Feelings
              • Imagery
              • Humour
        • Imagination
          • We run movies in our head
          • Images we run, they are the most powerful way we communicate with ourselves
            • What we imagine, goes into the mind, feeling, and body
          • Physical
            • Once an athlete knows what it feels like, if they have mental rehearsal in vivid detail, they get 85% of the benefit compared with physical rehearsal
            • Be a goldfish - Ted Lasso
              • Have short memories, don’t want to overplay our failures
            • We pay a physical price imagining uncertain futures that haven’t happened yet
              • Can be an additional weight
        • North Star
          • Line of sight from what we do everyday up to everything that bring meaning and purpose in our lives
          • Meaning and purpose at work
            • “If you love what you do, you’ll never work a day in your life” is BS
              • There is a reason why it’s work
              • There is a reason why we get paid
              • Not sunshine and connection with purpose and meaning
            • Meaning is not a constant thing, it happens in moments
              • Example is having kids
                • 70-80% of the time parenting is a pain
                • Majority of parenting is trying to make them do things they don’t wanna do, stop what they do wanna do
                • But there are moments where you are filled with positive emotion
              • Life is ups and downs and it sometimes intersects with what really matters
            • Can we increase the frequency of moments of meaning?
            • Do we notice and appreciate them when they occur?