Do not judge me by my success, judge me by how many times
I fell down and got back up again.

― Nelson Mandela

We have now begun a journey towards the kind of life we most want for ourselves. In Chapter 2, we learned about the kinds of things we might want to aim for to increase our happiness and well-being. In Chapter 3, we learned about positive reappraisal as our ability to see our lives in a new and better light, behavioural activation as a way to find and focus more on things that we love to do, and gradually exposing ourselves to the things we fear as a way to build courage. In the last chapter, we learned about how mindfulness can enable us to be present and accept where we are so that we can really move begin to forward.

The purpose of this chapter is to focus on what we can do when the inevitable things happen that cause use stress and get in our way. There are probably few realities that become more apparent to us as we go through life than the fact that “stress happens.”

Yet there are also few things that we admire more in others than the capacity to be resilient in bouncing back and even learning and growing from stress. This is where positive psychology has shown through the dark clouds like the sun after a long rainy season. If you only paid attention to clinical or abnormal psychology, with their focus on what goes wrong with us, you might think that resilience was a rare thing.

But in recent times, psychologists like George Bonanno have shown that even when people experience traumatic events, only about one out of four develop posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and as many as one half experience something you may not have even heard of – “posttraumatic growth,” which has also simply been called “stress-related growth.” Posttraumatic or stress-related growth refers to the learning, growth, and benefits that can result from the traumatic and stressful experiences we have in our lives.

Another great thing that psychology has discovered in the past 20-30 years is that there is so much that we can do to increase our resilience and also our ability to learn, grow, and benefit from the stress in our lives. Let’s start with the things we can do to increase our resilience.

• The first harkens back to the lesson in the previous chapter about mindfulness and the other five things we will mention will also be a focus in later chapters of this workbook. When stress happens, our sympathetic nervous system has evolved to quickly put us into fight or flight where we may hastily act out of anger or fear. Mindfulness can interrupt this initial knee-jerk reaction to a stressful event. It can give us time to pause and more fully take in and assess the situation and think about how best to respond rather than to just simply react.
• The second thing that can help us increase resilience is positive reappraisal – thinking about the situation in new and more positive and potentially beneficial light. Once we pause and begin to think about how we want to respond to a stressful situation, we can challenge our fears about the worst happening, envision ourselves as being resilient in response to the stressful situation, and begin to discover new more constructive ways to cope.
• The third thing we can do to increase resilience is simply to not give up when a goal is really important to us. We will talk more about this in our lesson on perseverance and grit in the second part of this challenge. But at the end of this chapter, there is a link for dramatic and memorable example of this in a young woman who embodies resilience when the worst happens while she is running in a big race during an indoor track meet.
• The fourth way to increase resilience is by increasing what is called self-efficacy, which is the belief that we can do what it takes to bounce back and be resilient. We will have a whole lesson in the second part of this challenge about self-efficacy. During this lesson, we will give you the five well-established ways that you can increase your self-efficacy for resilience or for achieving any other goal you might want to achieve.
• The fifth way to increase resilience involves a having a sense of meaning or purpose in life. This is illustrated in life of Viktor Frankl, whose strong sense of meaning and purpose enabled him to survive four concentration camps during World War II in Nazi Germany. When you have something to live for, someone who depends on you, or a reason to keep living; you are much more likely to prevail during stressful times.

Finally, just as there is strength in numbers, so there is also resilience in numbers. Social support is the psychological term for having people to count on when we are under stress and really need them. Social support in the form of friends, family, a team, a work group, a church, or the larger community can play a critical role in resilience. We might reverse the familiar saying to make it – “Divided we fall and united we stand!”

So, these are some of the primary ways that we can foster resilience:

1. Mindfulness, which involves pausing to assess the situation and think about how to best respond.

2. Positive reappraisal, which involves seeing ourselves as resilient and finding ways to cope that enable us to bounce back.

3. Perseverance, which means simply not giving up when something is really important to us.

4. Self-efficacy, which is the belief that we have what it takes to be resilient.

5. Meaning and purpose – which involve having something that is worth living or a reason for being resilient.

6. Social support which means having people we can count on in times of stress and reaching out and allowing them to help us when we need it.

What about posttraumatic or stress-related growth – which is not just bouncing back but learning, growing, and benefitting from stress? What can enable us to make this happen or at least more likely when we are under stress?

First, it may help just to be aware of the different kinds of benefits that people report coming from stressful events so we can begin to look for them and believe that they may be possible for us.

These benefits have included:

• Finding new opportunities and possibilities
• Becoming a stronger person
• Having improved personal relationships
• Making new friends
• Developing a greater appreciation of life
• Developing a greater sense of meaning and purpose
• Spiritual growth.

In addition to being aware of the different kinds of growth or benefits that are possible, there are other things we can do to foster them.

• The first is something we have already talked about in relation to resilience: positive reappraisal. You remember that positive reappraisal involves changing your mind to see things in a new way that may be more beneficial to us now or in the future. So even when the worst happens, positive reappraisal involves daring to think about a stressful situation in a new way and being open to how you might learn, grow, or benefit from it.
• The second way to foster stress-related growth is to think about our stress in the context of the kind of hero’s journey that Joseph Campbell wrote about and you learned about in Chapter 1. The stages of the hero’s journey not only include facing our greatest fear, but also gaining a reward or benefit as we emerge on the other side of fighting our scariest dragons. Many people have drawn inspiration from stories of people like Jesus or Buddha because they were reborn or grew to higher level of existence after death or a dark night.
• The third way to increase stress-related growth is to talk or write about our experience with stress or trauma while keeping positive reappraisal and the potential rewards of a hero’s journey in mind. This can involve sharing the experience with a trusted friend, counselor, or mentor who can help us learn, grow, and find benefits. This can also be done by writing about the experience in the context of a story that inspires us or where we just begin to brainstorm about the ways we may be able to learn or grow from the experience.

So, the lesson for this chapter is a basic and critical one for all of us. It is the good news about the possibility of resilience and stress-related growth and how to foster them. These are two of our greatest weapons in the face of the inevitable stress that will get in our way and also two of the greatest gifts for enabling us to move from only surviving to thriving and making the most of our lives.

Resilience enables us to get back to our previous level of happiness and well-being and maintain it in the midst of stress.

Stress-related growth enables us to go above and beyond making it possible to gain something from the experience and, as we see in the final stage of the hero’s journey, offer it back to the world so that others can also benefit.

Yes, “stress happens,” and will undoubtedly continue to happen in our lives. The good news is that we are learning so much about the capacity we all have to bounce back and make it the very occasion for us to become our best and make the most of our lives.

I began the first chapter quoting Mary Oliver’s question asking us “what we plan to do with our one wild and precious life?” The “wild” part may have something to do with the stress that will continue to challenge us, the “precious” part may be what we have the opportunity to bring to life the wild things come out.

Stay tuned! There is much more about this to come!

Workbook Tasks for the Chapter

With these in mind, here are some things you can do to foster resilience and stress- related growth and enable you to see and create more good things that happen around you every day:

First, there is a video of an extraordinary example of resilience in the life of a young woman. When I have shown this video in a large class, there are often audible gasps and tears in the eyes of the students as they see what she did when the worst happened. Pay attention to your reaction and see if you can think of times in your life when you may have responded in a similar way.

The second and third tasks involve writing about a time that you were resilient in the past and about a time you might need to be resilient in the future. This may seem like a simple exercise that only involves answering questions about your own experience. However, research has shown that taking the time to freely and thoughtfully write about this often helps people better cope with stress and also improve their happiness and well-being.

The more you reflect on when you have been resilient in the past, the more you increase your confidence to be resilient in the future and remember to do the things that may help you be more resilient. The more you reflect on when you may have to be resilient in the future, the more you will be confident and ready when the time comes.

Fourth, the last task again involves writing down three good things that happen in the next day. But this time, you are also asked to write a sentence about how you can make at least one of the three good things happen more in the future. This will not only help you discover what you can do to make more good things happen, it will also make you less likely to miss them and be more aware of and ready to appreciate them.