Resilience 101
“More than education, more than experience, more than training, a person’s level of resilience will determine who succeeds and who fails. That’s true in the cancer ward, it’s true in the Olympics, and it’s true in the boardroom.” Dean Becker, CEO Adaptiv Learning Systems
Emotional resilience is incredibly important to health, happiness, and success. If you are looking for professional success- resilience is one of the qualities shared by the super achieving elite (think Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, or Michael Phelps). Want to be healthier? Stress contributes to health problems including heart failure, weight gain, and insomnia and emotional resilience decreases stress.
What is resilience? More importantly, how do I become resilient?
At its core, emotional resilience is simply the ability to bounce back from the inevitable challenges of life. Ok, theoretically that makes sense but it does beg the question, HOW? Read more
Without taking care of your brain how can you expect to perform at your cognitive best? As recently as ten years ago, depression, anxiety, and memory problems were exclusively labeled as a chemical imbalance in the brain and treated as such. We know better now, and we are striving to do better. The generally held concept of depression as a “chemical imbalance” has essentially been debunked. Rather than an imbalance of serotonin, dopamine, or norepinephrine (neurotransmitters), depression and anxiety actually begin further up the chain of events in our brains. 
every picture I took had a defect on it. They looked like crap! I was done. I wanted to get rid of the whole mess.
“It’s just one beating after another. I can’t stand the thought of next week’s meeting. She isn’t at all collaborative, and talks to me like I am a child. I can’t talk to anyone about it because the problem is coming from above. When she gets on a tirade, the mid-managers throw me and my team under the bus to protect their own asses. It’s just a mess.”
This past week I got up close and personal with shame. I met with a client, and pretty much got my ass handed back to me. I intended to discuss the results of some initial analytic profiling with him, but instead he felt that I had psychically punched him in the gut- and he punched back HARD.
Christine felt that asking questions about things she did not know or understand would weaken the initial impression her CEO and team had of her. Somehow, she believed that she was expected to already “know” the answers.
For the third time in a row I heard my inner voice explode, “These people are all idiots!” Confession? When I am struggling, I see idiocy around me because my brain is looking for it. The brain is a wonderful thing…it will find proof for what it already believes is true. (Known in the biz as confirmation bias.) Fortunately, over time I have become more effective at recognizing this pattern. As I am the only common link between the people irritating the shit out of me-I may be the problem. 