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Welcome to Episode 118 of The Non-Anxious Leader podcast. I'm Jack Shitama and before we get started today, I want to remind you that we are starting our four week course on compassionate communication this Wednesday, April 14th, at 1:00 p.m. EDT.

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All four sessions will be recorded. There is an activity feed within the Non-Anxious Leader Network to ask questions and make comments. This is going to be a time when we can learn how to communicate more effectively as a non-anxious presence, as well as how to learn to listen to others, especially anxious people. If you want to join the course, go to network.thenonanxiousleader.com and if you're not a member, just ask to join. Once you're in, go to the course link on the left hand side bar. The network and course are both free to join. We'd love to have you. And now, without further ado, here is Episode 118 on how to build resilience.

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This episode is almost entirely based upon an article by Maria Konnikova in New Yorker magazine called "How People Learn to Become Resilient." I will post a link in the show notes. It is a fascinating read, well worth the time to go through it in detail. But of course, in this podcast, I'm going to do a family systems take on it, because what I believe is that when we are resilient, we are better able to be a non-anxious presence, which enables us to be non-anxious leaders.

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The article cites the work of University of Minnesota developmental psychologist Norman Garmezy, who over four decades did research on children who were resilient. What he did was he asked the question, "Can you identify stressed children who are making it here in your school?"

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Konnikova writes about the kind of child that Garmezy was looking for. One boy who was nine years old, had an alcoholic mother and an absent father. Each day he would arrive at school with the same sandwich, two slices of bread and nothing in between; what we would call a bread sandwich. Apparently, that was the only food that was available at home. According to Garmezy, this boy wanted to make sure that he wasn't pitied because of his parents inability to provide for him.

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Prior to Garmezy, most research on trauma and negative life events focused on the factors that contributed to poor life outcomes. What Garmezy did was focus on what factors in background and personality contributed to positive outcomes, especially in people who were experiencing tough life situations.

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This is consistent with the family systems theory that says that the most important factor in the survival of anyone in a hostile environment is the response of the organism. I did an entire episode on this, Episode 92 on Edwin Friedman's formula that the toxicity in a situation is equal to the hostile environment divided by the response of the organism. If you know anything about math, the bigger the denominator, the smaller the fraction.

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The idea here is that the more a person can respond in healthy ways to any kind of toxic environment, any type of trauma or environmental threat, the better chance they have of reducing the toxicity of the situation. If you haven't listened to Episode 92, you'll want to listen after this episode to get further depth on this understanding. But it's important because Garmezy's research focused on the positive response of the children.

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Unfortunately, he was not able to finish his work due to Alzheimer's. But Emily Werner, a developmental psychologist, published the results of a 32-year longitudinal study of 698 children. Two-thirds of these children came from stable backgrounds and one-third were considered at risk. Of the at risk kids, two-thirds of those developed learning or behavioral problems by age 10, and/or delinquency, mental health problems or pregnancy by age 18. At first glance, this supports the theory that environmental factors play a huge role in developmental problems with children.

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But Werner's focus in this study was on the one-third of at risk kids who developed into functioning, responsible adults. The question was what were the contributing factors to their resilience in the face of such a challenging life? Werner was able to attribute some of this to luck, such as having a supportive adult in the lives of these children that actually made it. But here's how Konnikova writes it in the article.

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"But another quite large set of elements was psychological and had to do with how the children responded to the environment. From a young age, resilient children tended to 'meet the world on their own terms.' They were autonomous and independent, would seek out new experiences and had a 'positive social orientation.' 'Though not especially gifted, these children used whatever skills they had effectively,' Werner wrote. Perhaps most importantly, the resilient children had what psychologists called an 'internal locus of control': they believed that they, and not their circumstances, affected their achievements. The resilient children saw themselves as the orchestrators of their own fates. In fact, on a scale that measured locus of control, they scored more than two standard deviations away from the standardization group."

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In short, it was the children's response to challenge that made the biggest difference. This is the difference between a challenge and a problem. Life is full of challenges. And for these kids, there were more challenges than most had to face. But if the response to challenge was healthy, if one felt that what they did could make a difference, it in fact did make a difference and enabled them to persist and persevere.

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In the midst of obstacles that took most of the kids down, two-thirds of the kids were not able to respond and were not able to grow up to be healthy, functioning adults. In family systems terms, what happened is their challenges became problems for them. They were not able to escape it because their response did not help them to address things in a healthy way. Now, I'm not blaming the children that didn't make it, nor am I saying that the children that did make it were something special compared to anyone else. What I am saying is that resilience has certain characteristics that can be learned and developed, and that's what's important for us when we try to be a non-anxious presence.

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According to Konnikova's article, Columbia University's George Bonanno has taken a similar but slightly different approach to resilience. He believes that all humans have the same fundamental stress response system that we share with other animals. Last week's episode on mindfulness covered the idea of the amygdala hijack, which is when the stress response system takes over and prevents us from self-regulating, prevents us from being able to respond in a healthy way.

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What Bonanno found was that one of the main factors in resilience is what is called perception. So how do you conceptualize an event when it happens? Is a traumatic or is it an opportunity to learn or grow? In fact, Bonanno coined the term PTE, potentially traumatic event, because he believes that events are not traumatic until we experience them as traumatic. In fact, according to Bonnano, stressful or traumatic events in and of themselves don't have much predictive power when it comes to life outcomes. It's all about how we experience them and how we respond to them.

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Edwin Friedman would put it this way. Nobody gets the problem they can handle. We all get challenges and if we respond to challenges in a healthy way, we can learn, we can grow. It's an opportunity to get stronger from life's challenges. But when we approach them with anxiety, when we approach them with fear, then the challenge becomes a problem. And that's when it becomes difficult to handle.

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Bonanno suggests two things that we can do when we are experiencing a potentially traumatic event. The first is to reframe things in positive terms. So instead of thinking negatively, think positively, think about the opportunity that this challenge prevents. Second, instead of allowing our emotions to take over, he calls them emotionally hot situations, try to look at things in a less emotional way. That would be self-regulation. That would be regulating our reactive or adaptive response and being able to look at things with a little bit more objective eye.

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According to Bonanno, people can be trained to regulate their emotions and to do so with lasting effect. So all the things that I've been sharing in these podcasts about self-regulation and about being able to pause, to have integrity in the moment of choice, these are doable. They are possible for you to be able to be more self-regulated in those difficult times, in those potentially traumatic events.

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I just read a post this morning in The Non-Anxious Leader Network from one of our pastors in the network who came across a potentially traumatic event this week. He was looking forward to a week off from preaching, but found out late in the week that his associate was not going to be able to do it and he was going to have to prepare a sermon. He talked about how he was able to self-regulate, how he was able to reframe and look at this situation with more of a positive outlook or at least less of a negative outlook. He was able to work through and get the sermon prepared, not with as much time as he normally would be able to apply to it. But he felt good that he was able to respond in a different way and not let the potentially traumatic event take him down.

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If you are in The Non-Anxious Leader Network, you can look in the activity feed. You'll see the post. If you're not in the network, Shameless plug here, go ahead and join up and you can find out more about that. But thanks for sharing that because I think it helps us to understand what reframing does for us, how we can take a potentially traumatic event and turn it into an opportunity for growth.

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Finally, Konnikova's article shares teachings from Martin Seligman. He is the University of Pennsylvania psychologist who pioneered the field of positive psychology. This is very similar to Bonanno's approach, but Seligman lists four specific things that we can do in reframing the events themselves that tend to be potentially traumatic events, reframing the things that happen to us that are challenges so that we can use them as opportunities for growth and not allow them to become problems.

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The first thing we can do is to reframe the event from internal to external, that is that we are not responsible for the thing that happened. We are not responsible for racism. We are not responsible when something breaks. We are not responsible when covid happens. Bad things happen to good people. These are external events and we don't want to internalize them and make them our fault. Of course, from a family systems perspective, we don't want to use that as an opportunity to blame others or not take responsibility for self. There is a fine line there, but we need to remember that most often these things that happen are external to us. What's important not is who's to blame, but how are we going to respond?

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The second thing we can do is to reframe the event from global to specific. This is just a single occurrence. This is not my entire life. This is not how life is going to be for the rest of time. But this is just one thing that is happening in this moment in time. I think of Friedman's idea of perspective where when we are getting overwhelmed by an anxious situation, we need to get some perspective. We need to get outside of the situation, get with people that aren't involved in it, do things that we enjoy that aren't related to the situation. Then we can realize that whatever is going on is not our entire life. This helps us to reframe things from global to specific.

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The third thing we can do is similar, which is to reframe the event from permanent to impermanent. This is not going to last forever. Again, this is just a moment in time and it is a challenge to which we need to respond.

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Finally, the fourth thing we can do is to reframe our own attitude from a locus of control that is external, that is meaning that things are outside of our control, to a locus of control that is internal. In family systems theory, our response will make the biggest difference. My response can change this situation. What I do matters and I can control that. I can take responsibility for myself, for myself only, and I can do something. It may not fix it. It may not make as big a difference as I'd like, but it's the best shot that I have to respond in a healthy way.

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I think about these four things: reframing events from internal to external, from global to specific, from permanent to impermanent, and reframing our locus of control from external to internal, and I think about University of Alabama football coach Nick Saban, who, when one of his players makes a mistake, even if it's in a big game, will say, "So what? Now what?"

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That is the response of a non-anxious leader. Whatever has happened has happened. We can't do anything about it. We can't go back in time and change it. We can learn from it. But then also, what are we going to do about it? What is our response going to be?

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Over the years as a leader, I've worked very hard to have this kind of attitude when people come to me with challenges in the ministry I serve. When they come with bad news, I try to remain a non-anxious presence and allow us to work through the situation. It's not so much about what's happened. It's always about what can we do about it. That doesn't mean we can't work through and learn from what happened. To think about ways that we could do it better next time or avoid this type of thing. But the most important thing is how are we going to respond in a healthy way right now? How are we going to respond so that what we do can make a difference?

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If we can take that attitude, we can build resilience, because that is the kind of thing that non-anxious leaders do. That's what self-differentiation is. It's taking responsibility for self. It's knowing what we believe. It's staying connected to people and being able to then respond in a healthy way. I have found when I am able to do this, I am more of a non-anxious presence. I am more of the kind of leader that people want to work with.

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And when I don't, that's when I create problems for myself. So my hope is that you can take what is learned here today and build your own resilience, build your own self-differentiation and become more of a non-anxious presence.