This page may contain affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases, at no extra cost to you. Thank you for your support of Tria Corda Ministry!
Andrew Shatte and Karen Reivich, authors of The Resilience Factor, argue that how we think about ourselves, others, and the world around us significantly contributes to our resilience. This ability helps us heal from trauma, bounce back from daily struggles, and thrive.
This review will cover some key insights from this book and how they can help us improve our mental health and, ultimately, our resilience. I recommend picking up a copy so you can learn more about these exercises.
The Definition of Resilience
According to the book’s authors, resilience is something that everyone needs. When we are resilient, we tend to be more satisfied with our lives. We experience better physical and mental health, greater success in life, and stronger, more fulfilling relationships. In a word, we thrive.
Resilience also helps us deal better with daily hassles (such as annoying people or being stuck in traffic) and with larger, more stressful events like trauma.
To better describe what resilience is, the authors break down four ways that we use our resilience:
- To overcome the obstacles of childhood so we can thrive in adulthood
- To get through everyday adversities like arguments and disagreements
- To move forward after major setbacks and life-altering events
- To find meaning and purpose in life
How Do We Build Up Our Resilience?
Resilience is an important ability. So, how do we improve in it?
Lots of things can build our resilience, but the authors specifically emphasize the following:
- Emotion regulation
- Impulse control
- Empathy
- Optimism
- Being able to determine the relationships between events
- Belief in your ability to do things
- Reaching out to others
Additionally, the authors emphasize that changing our perspective on adversity can enhance our resilience. They spend the rest of the book describing seven exercises that can alter our thinking patterns and, in turn, strengthen our resilience.
Seven Exercises to Change Your Thinking For the Better
Learning Your ABCs
For the authors of The Resilience Factor, your ABCs are the following:
- Antecedent: An event that challenges our ability to bounce back and move forward
- Beliefs: The antecedent triggers these.
- Consequences: Our beliefs then lead to behavioral and emotional reactions to the antecedent.
The first skill is to become more aware of the events that challenge our resilience, the beliefs they evoke, and the behaviors and emotions they elicit.
Avoiding Thinking Traps
Once we have identified the beliefs that are triggering adverse emotional and behavioral reactions to events, we can see if they fall into a thinking trap:
- Jumping to conclusions: Jumping to conclusions without having all of the facts about a situation
- Tunnel vision: Focusing on things that suit our narrative and not on the whole situation
- Magnifying and minimizing: Similar to tunnel vision, we focus only on things that support our narrative, magnifying those that align with our beliefs and minimizing those that don’t.
- Personalizing: Attributing all problems to our own doing
- Externalizing: Attributing our problems to things outside of our control
- Overgeneralizing: Using the words “always” and “everything” to describe the reason for an event, making it seem bigger than it is.
- Mind reading: Thinking that people around us know what we are thinking or expecting them to
- Emotional reasoning: Making conclusions based on our emotions instead of facts.
If you discover in this step that you have fallen into a thinking trap, the following steps will help you to get out of it.
Detecting Icebergs
The authors use the term “iceberg” to describe deeper values and motivations that unconsciously drive our thoughts and behavior. Our childhood typically helps us develop these deeper values and motivations.
Most icebergs fall into one of three categories: We tend to be motivated by:
- Achievement
- Acceptance
- Control
As we identify our beliefs, we can see which motivation we tend to fall into and begin to challenge it.
Challenging Beliefs
Now, we can use the previous knowledge to begin to challenge irrational or negative beliefs that we hold using the following steps:
- Pick an event and write out its ABCs
- Make a pie chart of the causes of the event. Write out potential causes and assign a percentage of the total cause to each one. Decide if each cause is changeable, kind of changeable, or very changeable
- Rate each potential cause of the event on the following scales:
- Caused by me or caused totally by other people or circumstances
- Will always be present or will never again happen.
- The event influences everything in your life, or it influences just the present situation.
- Brainstorm, with no filtering, other additional explanations of the events
- For each potential explanation, look for information that supports or refutes it.
- With this new information, create a new pie chart.
- Take steps to change the things that are changeable so you can improve your reactions to similar events in the future.
Doing this process with one event a day can significantly help you to change your beliefs.
Putting It Into Perspective
This skill can help us continue to challenge our beliefs. We can take adversity (real or imagined) and list the worst-case outcomes, the best-case outcomes, the most likely outcomes, and their likelihood. We can then brainstorm solutions for the worst-case scenario. This exercise helps us realize that events that may seem to have a significant impact on our lives or that we are anxious about are likely not as impactful as we think they are.
Calming Down and Focusing
These exercises are things that we can practice when we are not stressed and then do in the moment when facing stress. They include:
- Deep breathing
- Progressive muscle relaxation
- Focusing on relaxing images.
Doing these things helps calm our nervous system, allowing us to think about events logically and pay intentional attention to our thoughts.
Developing Real-Time Resilience
Once we have been practicing the above skills regularly, taking intentional time out of our days to do so, we will be able to challenge irrational, negative thoughts as they arise.
How to Implement The Resilience Factor In Your Life
I recommend carving out 15-20 minutes a day to work through the first six skills. Doing this regularly will help you challenge negative beliefs so that when they arise in real life, you will be able to act resiliently and bounce back from adversity.
Conclusion
Intentionally discovering and challenging your negative beliefs can significantly improve your mental health and your resilience. I recommend picking up a copy of The Resilience Factor so you can learn more about these exercises.
To learn more about resilience and mental health, check out the following pages: