Latest / The Mastery Project Podcast / What Real Resilience Actually Looks Like
Transcript
- Dr. T-Michael Dougherty, Ed.D.: We have a completely toxic definition in our culture of what we think that it means to be tough. We treat resilience like a shield. We think being tough sometimes means the anxiety doesn't bother us or doubt doesn't register in our minds and fear of failure just bounces off. We've come to equate resilience with emotional suppression, kind of putting our heads down and gritting our teeth and faking it till we make it and Just pushing through pain, but being able to hide a feeling doesn't mean that you've dealt with it adequately. And telling someone to ignore what they're feeling doesn't give them much to work with when things start to unravel on them. I'm Dr. T. Michael Dougherty Welcome to the Mastery Project Podcast. Today, we're going to take apart the psychology of doing hard things. And I want to start by looking at some of the work by Steve Magnus. Steve Magnus wrote a brilliant book. Entitled Do Hard Things, and it fundamentally changes this old school authoritarian model of toughness. The old model is based on fear and suppression. It teaches us that when we feel the urge to quit, that we should just ignore it. But here's the thing that we need to remember: our nervous system doesn't care how tough we're trying to look. When things start falling apart on us or things start to become very difficult for us, our heart can start racing, our breathing changes, and we start to feel tension in our body, in the muscles, and in our cells. The old model tells you to hide that reality. But researchers have actually tested what's going on when people do that. And in one experiment, James Gross and Robert Levinson had people watch a film. Designed to make them feel disgust. Some were told to hide their reaction so that somebody watching them wouldn't know that they were feeling anything. They could reduce what was showing on their face, but they didn't report feeling any less disgust. And some measures of their physical stress response increased. Those physical effects vary across studies, but the distinction here matters. You can get better at hiding an emotion without actually minimizing it. Now, sometimes you need to keep your composure. You don't need to act out everything that you feel, but you also don't need to pretend, even to yourself, that you aren't actually feeling it. Magnus makes a useful distinction here. Real toughness isn't about ignoring the reality of how hard something is. It's about being able to experience fear, doubt, or exhaustion without immediately acting on that urge to escape it. It's about creating space. Now think about that, the space between what happens and what you do next. Let's say you're in a conversation and somebody questions a decision that you made. You feel heat starting to creep up into your face. And before they've even finished talking, you've started defending yourself. And now you're barely listening. You're just putting together your response in your own mind. Creating space might be as simple as noticing, okay, I'm starting to get defensive here and just letting them finish. You can still disagree with them. You just need to give yourself enough time to hear what was actually said. Now that sounds trivial, but think about how differently that conversation could go if you approached it differently. You haven't become a different person or stopped caring about the criticism that you are perceiving. You're actually giving yourself a chance to respond to it. And this is one part of resilience we can work on. What we do while the discomfort is still there. So, what does this look like in actual practice? If the old fake it till you make it model is just garbage, how do you actually handle the moment? First, name the reality. Stop telling yourself, I'm fine, I'm fine, I just need to push harder. When the panic hits, acknowledge it. Say it out loud if you need to. I'm feeling anxious or I'm extremely frustrated. I'm just, I'm afraid I'm gonna fail. Researchers call this effect labeling. You're putting what you feel into words. And there's an experiment that makes this a lot easier to understand. Researchers had people who were afraid of spiders spend time near a live spider. Some put their fear into words. Other groups use different strategies or simply went through the exposure itself, and a week later they faced a different spider in a different setting. The group that had labeled their emotions showed a much lower skin conductance response, which is a measure of physiologic arousal. But here's the part I want you to pay attention to. They didn't report feeling less afraid than the other groups. And that's a finding from a specific fear task. It's a useful reminder that How you feel and how you respond don't always change together. Now, you might name the emotion and still feel your heart pounding, or you might acknowledge that you're frustrated and still want to walk out of the room. Don't make feeling calm another thing that you have to accomplish before you can respond. Go back to that conversation. I'm getting defensive, is enough to start with. You don't have to figure out every reason you react poorly to criticism while somebody is standing there waiting for an answer. Acknowledge what's happening and then give yourself a moment to decide what to do with it. Second, shift the appraisal. When you face a difficult situation, part of what matters is whether or not you believe you have the resources to handle it. And that's the idea behind the distinction between threat and challenge. If the demands feel bigger than what you have available to you, the situation can feel threatening for sure. if you believe you have enough to actually work with, it can feel more manageable, even when it's still difficult for you. You're looking at the demands and what you can bring to them. There's research behind that too. Jeremy Jameson and colleagues had people give a speech in front of evaluators who were deliberately looking unimpressed. They were frowning, their arms were crossed, exactly the kind of audience you don't want to present in front of. Now, beforehand, one group was taught to interpret the physical signs of stress as something that could help them handle the task. And compared that with the control groups, their hearts pumped more blood with less resistance in the blood vessels. The audience was still unfriendly for both groups, and the speech was still difficult, but the cardiovascular response from each group was different. Now, this was a small lab study. It doesn't mean you can think your way out of every single problem. It does show that how you interpret your body's response can affect how it responds. So when you feel that spike of anxiety, look at what the situation actually requires of you. What do you know? What have you prepared? What can you control? And who can help? If somebody challenges your decision, you can ask which part concerns them. You can explain your reasoning. You can find out that they've noticed something that maybe you missed. You don't have to defend every part of your decision before you've even heard the question. And if you don't have what you need, go ahead and acknowledge that as well. You may need more information, more time, or another person involved. challenge doesn't make those needs disappear. You still will have to deal with them. Third, decide what to do next. You've named the feeling that you've had and you've looked at what the situation requires. Now you need to choose an action. If you're getting defensive, ask a question before you start to argue. If you're overwhelmed, work out which part actually needs your attention first. And if you need help, ask for it. This is where creating space becomes useful. You have enough room to consider an option you might have missed when you were reacting. And sometimes that option is to change the plan altogether. And there's a body of research on what psychologists call regulatory flexibility. the basic idea is that how well a strategy works depends on the situation. You need to notice what's happening and adjust when your approach isn't helping. That's a problem for the old model of toughness because it gives you the same answer to everything, just push harder. But what if you've misunderstood the problem? What if continuing exactly as you are is making it worse? You need to be able to recognize that. And you can be willing to do something difficult and still decide that the way you're doing it needs to change. And you don't have to wait for some massive crisis to try this either. Use the next difficult conversation that you find yourself in. And notice when you stop listening and start preparing your defense in your head. Name what you're feeling. Find out what the other person is actually asking. And then decide how you want to answer. You may still feel irritated afterwards. You may wish you've handled it better. But you can look at what you actually did. Did you let them finish? Did you ask the question? Did you change something when you realized they had an actual point, that gives you something specific to work on next time. I want you to listen to what I'm saying. You do not need to be a robot to be resilient. You don't need to suppress your anxiety to be tough. You can feel the fear and still pay attention to what's going on around you. And you can acknowledge that something is hard and give yourself enough room to decide how best to handle it. That's what I take from Steve Magnus's work. It's the willing to look honestly at what's happening including what's happening inside of your own head and to respond with some degree of judgment. Sometimes that means continuing. Sometimes it means changing the plan or asking for help. And sometimes it means looking at a massive terrifying challenge, feeling the spike of fear in your chest and saying, okay, this is going to suck, but let's begin anyway. I'm Dr. T. Michael Dougherty Let's keep expanding that space between stimulus and response, and I'll see you in the next episode.