Interdisciplinary Psychology:

Resilience is a core necessity for everyone. Some people are lucky enough to be born with high levels of resilience, but the rest of us have to work and learn to maintain and build our resilience. In order to improve anything, a person needs to know what it is and how it works, people must become intimate with their thoughts. What is done with our thoughts determines whether or not our resilience reserves are depleted or built. Building resilience is “… a mind-set that enables you to seek out new experiences and to view your life as a work in progress.” (pg. 26)

One of the primary ideas presented in The Resilience Factor is a metaphor, “Learn your ABCs.” The authors explain this metaphor, the idea of which is based on following a familiar pattern, by laying out a sequential technique of identifying adversity, beliefs, and conclusions. Adversities are events that happen to us, and, as with any action, they elicit a consequence. If the human element is eliminated, the same action would be much more likely to have the same consequence. Our beliefs filter or influence how we interpret and react to adversities.

Identifying beliefs is accomplished by becoming aware of surface thoughts. The example of this idea presented in the reading is that the mind creates “tickertape beliefs” in an ongoing, somewhat automated process. These thoughts are divided up in to four different types; “why” beliefs explain the cause, “future” beliefs predict what will happen, “narration” is stating what is or has happened, and “describing” is identifying the consequences.

“Why” and “future” beliefs lead us to feel negative emotion that deplete our resilience reserves. The connection between belief and consequence produce anger, sadness, depression, guilt, anxiety, fear and embarrassment. Analyzing emotions can help identify the beliefs associated with them, providing insight into developing solutions.

An illustration of this point used in the book, is a lawyer who believes his company has betrayed his trust when they appear to contradict their claim of family values. The lawyer has feelings of anger because of his belief that his company is being hypocritical, and he has feelings of anxiety because of his belief that he will lose his job because of circumstances beyond his control. By taking 20 minutes to identify his emotions and their causes, he is able to stop ruminating and instead is able to engage in informed problem solving.

In a section called “Thinking Traps”, the next portion of the book focuses on what to do in relation to identifying thinking processes and beliefs. The eight thinking traps are: Jumping to conclusions, mind reading, mini-max, tunnel vision, personalizing, externalizing, over generalizing, and emotional reasoning.

The idea of being warned about thinking traps is to identify the few that are your favorite, or the ones you use the most and to then work on changing beliefs to stop your resilience from being undermined. “Resilience comes when you believe that you have the power to control the events in your life, and the power to change what needs changing - and that belief is accurate.” (pg. 106)

Iceberg beliefs are “a deeply held belief about how the world ought to operate and how you feel you out to operate within that world.” (pg. 123) If your tickertape beliefs are your surface thoughts, then in a similar analogy, Iceberg beliefs are your deeper thoughts.

Iceberg beliefs are broken down into three main categories: achievement, acceptance, and control. These deep beliefs are developed from our environment, family and communities. “Failure is a sign of weakness” and “I must never give up” are both examples of Iceberg beliefs.

Often people elicit behaviors in which they react irrationally to adversity but are unable to understand the underlying cause which, in many cases, is iceberg thinking. One method of identifying iceberg beliefs is to ask “what” questions. As an example, “what is the most upsetting part of that for me?” Through continual questioning, one can uncover the iceberg belief. The authors describe finding this belief as an “Aha!” experience, the moment where you gain insight into the belief and consequence connection.

Avoiding thinking traps and detecting icebergs are critical in being able to accomplish the skills discussed in the section of the book called Challenging Beliefs and Putting it into Perspective. The idea of challenging beliefs is first to identify your belief, then be flexible by coming up with “why” beliefs that are opposite of your explanatory style. When you have an alternate way of explaining why things happen, you are able to analyze what is most accurate and come up with new solutions.

In the same vein, Putting It In Perspective focuses on dealing with your future beliefs and how to think more accurately. For many people, anxiety hijacks their thinking and they “catastrophize”, ruminating on an adversity and then projecting it into future events until it has become inflated to epic proportion. Listing catastrophic thought possibilities and then mirroring opposite thoughts can help rebalance cognition.

Many of the skills discussed in the latter portions of the book are helpful for maintaining resilience. Being able to apply these skills opportunistically, which the authors refer to as “Real-time Resilience” requires a good understanding of all preceding skills as they tend to build on one another sequentially.

The style of examples used to illustrate points in the book was focused, realistic, and easy to understand, although they glossed over (in my opinion) some of the practical applications and techniques for skills towards the end. I could relate to almost every example given and never found any to be particularly implausible (with perhaps the exception of Throgg and Dregg, our cavemen brethren) but the application to my own life is going to take some time.

Humans have developed shortcuts in the way we think and process information. I think the most important thing I gleaned from reading the book is that while these shortcuts are a primary and necessary part of being human, they can sometimes lead to thinking traps, glacial beliefs, and catastrophic thinking among other issues. If we examine our thinking with an eye for these styles, they can be identified and addressed to help us maintain and build resilience. The key to building resilience is practice and mindfulness.