Resilience Begins with Modest Expectations that Expect Potholes
As previously announced, we are devoting the entire 2024 year to helping readers build a Personal Resilience Plan. We have previously covered the topics of mature adult neuropsychology and locus of control. If you missed these, we recommend that you double back and read them.
Our focus for this month’s article is our private self-narrative. Renowned Neurologist Oliver Sacks 1 gave us this perspective on self-narratives. “We have, each of us, a life-story, an inner narrative — whose continuity, whose sense, is our lives. It might be said that each of us constructs and lives, a “narrative,” and that this narrative is us, our identities.
U.K. Psychologist Charles Fernyhough has this ‘take’ on the subject: “We spin narratives about ourselves to make sense of who we are, and those narratives make us simultaneously the author, the narrator, and the protagonist of the story. We are the cacophony of our mental voices. We listen to them as well as utter them; they construct us through their incessant chatter.”
The problem many of us confront is adeptly put by San Francisco Bay Area Psychologist Rick Hanson: “The mind acts like Velcro for negative experiences and like Teflon for positive ones.” This unfortunate reality frequently shapes the self-narrative in a critical, disparaging tone. Most people can offer sincere and heartfelt sympathy to our best friends when they experience setbacks. However, when those same supportive individuals encounter a personal setback, they can often criticize themselves with painful severity.
My own Silicon Valley research reveals the veracity of this quality. We surveyed 1600 adult residents of Silicon Valley regarding their lifestyle habits as well as their psychological beliefs and habits. When asked how they respond to a planned fitness outing that gets cancelled or pushed out, we found stark differences between the group that had already established an active lifestyle routine vs. the part of our sample who had little to no fitness activity.
For the group who had established fitness routines, a failed outing meant very little. One in five people in that group got discouraged. For the sedentary group, a failed outing seemed to be a confirmation that their efforts to build and sustain fitness activities were doomed to failure. More than 70% of the latter group got discouraged and 75% of them were inclined to give up their attempts to build active lifestyle habits.
Resilience begins with modest expectations that anticipate potholes and obstacles on the road to goal achievement. Resilient people have contingency plans prepared and ready to implement when something goes wrong in the original plan.
Resilient folk break down big, ambitious plans into bite-sized chunks. They are committed to taking little steps in the direction of larger goals knowing that it may take time to achieve the more ambitious goal. Lose the idea of running a marathon. Start with regular outings on a modest scale. Build confidence in your ability to make progress on a consistent basis.
Resilient people are self-compassionate. Adopt the same sympathetic and supportive tone in your self-narrative that you would offer to a close friend who is experiencing frustration with repeated setbacks.
Our personal self-narrative provides the ideal opportunity to put these practices in place. Build your personal resilience with a self-narrative that coaches gradual behavior change supported by self-compassion.
1. Robin Williams played the role of Oliver Sacks, starring in the 1990 film “Awakenings.”
Richard Houston, Ed.D., is an aging baby boomer who is ramping up his productivity rate in his mid-70’s. He swears that his brain has never been more productive. Check out his web sites at Senior-psych.com and Resilience-Advocate.
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