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Some people just seem to bounce back from whatever life throws at them. Whether it’s illness, loss, or tragedy, they do the tough work of picking themselves up, dusting themselves off, and carrying on—even when it seems impossible. If you’ve ever thought, “I could never do that” when looking at one of these apparent “superheroes,” don’t be so sure. It’s actually possible to build resilience to make yourself better able to bounce back from even the most difficult times. “It’s the ability to get back in the game after you’ve had some sort of failure. And indeed, we can learn to become more resilient,” says social scientist and leadership expert Frank Niles, PhD. Niles says there are a number of science-backed areas people can address to help them be more resilient. Here are some ways you can shore up your “resilience bunker” to better prepare for when tough times strike.
Via The Learning Factor
Maybe you want to start a business. Maybe you want to change careers. Maybe you want to get fit, or gain a new path, or in some way take your life in a new direction. To do that, sometimes all you need is a little push, a little nudge. A little burst of motivation and inspiration. Here are fifty of those nudges. Pick the one that makes your skin tingle, your heart race, your motor rev, and place it somewhere you'll see it every day: your monitor, your screen saver, your background, and let it help take you to the place you've always wanted to go.
Via The Learning Factor
Let's call this call this curator friend Cynthia. Cynthia wrote back, “Two other curators worked with me on this (and may join us!), so I can’t take full credit.” She asked that I instead reference her with the significantly less exciting descriptor, “one of the curators of this exhibition." She was understandably hesitant to get all the credit and wanted to make clear that there were other people involved with the exhibition. While accurate, the new version was far less descriptive and complimentary than what I’d suggested. Feel familiar? The balancing act women navigate surrounding self promotion can be exhausting.
Via The Learning Factor
I’m a big to-do list person. I’ve probably been making daily to-do lists on yellow Post-its for close to 15 years now. Every night before I go to bed I pen a bulleted list of all the things I need to accomplish the next day. However, inevitably, at the end of the next day I usually have a few items that aren’t scratched off the list. Those items get added to the top of tomorrow’s to-do. Yet the same thing happens the following day: I move a few uncompleted items to tomorrow’s list . . . and repeat the next day . . . and the next.
Via The Learning Factor
Self-help advice isn’t exactly in short supply. There are research-backed tips out there for boosting confidence, resilience, risk taking, and adaptability. The message is pretty clear: Feel better about yourself or change your beliefs about what you’re capable of, and you’ll excel. Indeed, ample scientific evidence supports each of these claims. Nevertheless, most self-improvement strategies focus too much on the person who’s trying to do the improving. Much of the time, the same outcomes you’re trying to achieve by changing your own habits, attitudes, and behaviors depend on how you view other people.
Via The Learning Factor
Ever zone out while someone is talking? Of course. We all do. The average human has an eight-second attention span. With electronic distractions competing for your time and an abundance of responsibilities at work, it makes listening attentively to someone else speak pretty difficult. “We are living in a time when it’s more challenging to be consistently aware and intentional because so many things are demanding our attention. Our brains haven’t caught up to the technology that’s feeding them,” says Scott Eblin, author of Overworked and Overwhelmed: The Mindfulness Alternative. “The impact of this leaves people in a chronic condition of fight or flight.”
Via The Learning Factor
Whether you're at the starting line preparing to compete for the gold in the 100 meters or you're trying to be at your most productive state--how you start often predicts the outcome.
Via The Learning Factor, Bobby Dillard
We spend an awful lot of time in school throughout our lifetimes, diligently studying and cramming and writing exams, all in the quest to be more intelligent human beings. How how much time do you spend on your emotional intelligence? If you're like the average human being, the answer is probably: "Um, not much." That's too bad, because according to researchers from Rutgers, there are 19 different ways emotional intelligence contributes to the bottom line in any work organization. Emotional intelligence guides our ability to deal with others; to understand their emotions, as well as our own.
Via The Learning Factor
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My great-grandparents, Cleve and Zelma Carder, lost almost everything they owned during the Dust Bowl years. After losing their homestead and ranch, they packed what they could into a Conestoga Wagon and made the trek from Northern New Mexico to find work picking cotton in the fields of Oklahoma. When my great-grandmother told me stories of those difficult times, it wasn't with bitterness or anger. She would laugh as she recalled her husband's refusal to remove her grand piano from their wagon, despite the fact that it weighed over 1000 pounds. Instead, the family would spend several hours digging the wagon free from the sand in the dried-up riverbeds that they crossed. In the last years of her life, her strongest memories were not of her failures or disappointments but of the love and hope experienced within them. I am grateful to her for helping me learn at an early age that we get to choose how we view our circumstances and how we let them affect our mindset.
Via The Learning Factor
A decade ago, I was a fresh-out-of-college entrepreneur trying to convince a Sri Lankan tea seller to make a deal with me. It wasn’t going very well. I wanted the seller, who owned a boutique tea company, to become a supplier for the loose-leaf retail tea business I was trying to get off the ground. I could sense the man’s skepticism—in fact, his first instinct was to refer me to his distributor—but even so, he heard me out. Rather than a flat-out “no,” be basically told me, “not yet.” Eventually, I managed to convince him to give me a shot. This ended up being the right decision for both of us. His teas helped fuel my startup’s early growth, and he now enjoys a huge contract as one of the suppliers to DAVIDsTEA.
Via The Learning Factor
Geeks—the two of us might fit the profile. Yes we have tendencies to contemplate things that probably shouldn’t be contemplated. We question. We prod. We poke…at everything. And, we’ve been known to engage in long, seemingly meaningless conversations about random things like: “Is the love of curry a genetic disposition or a socially experiential acquisition?” Or, what is the real meaning of the word “of?” That’s a valid question, right? Or, is it just geeky? Being geeky, according to research by Imgur, is actually cool in today’s world—especially among Millennials. In fact, 60% of the 83 million Millennials consider themselves geeks compared to just 38% of GenXers and Boomers. And, the study also shows that geeks are the trendsetters and influencers (84% of geeks say people look to them for advice while only 60% of non-geeks say they get asked for advice). This is, of course, welcome news for all of us who happen to randomly know Peter Parker’s height and weight (yes, we’re referring to the fictional character who turns into Spiderman). But, more than that, it’s also welcome news for all of us who geek-out about our own work—passionately probing to innovate, improve, dissect, and lead others to the discovery of their best selves.
Via The Learning Factor
Want your kids to grow up to be successful? Make them do chores. When they balk (and trust me: they will probably balk), you can tell them that scientific research supports you. It sounds great, and it's true--but there is a catch. (We'll get to that in a minute.) For now, the science. In the Harvard Grant Study, the longest running longitudinal study in history, (spanning 75 years and counting--from 1938 to the present), researchers identified two things that people need in order to be happy and successful: The first? Love. The second? Work ethic. And what's the best way to develop work ethic in young people? Based on the experiences of the 724 high-achievers who were part of the study (including people like future-President Kennedy and Ben Bradlee, the Watergate-era editor of The Washington Post) there's a consensus.
Via The Learning Factor
I’ve been asked on a number of occasions the “secret” to harnessing mental toughness to overcome adversity. The “secret,” I tell them, isn’t a secret but a fact that they don’t want to hear because it’s simple. But simple isn’t easy. That secret is this: make a decision and go with it. That’s it. I remember waiting for Hell Week to begin in BUD/S (Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL training) and students asking the instructors—in a somewhat uncommon cordial setting—what the secret was to making it through five and a half days of constant, nonstop activity. Here’s what the instructors said, “The secret to making it through BUD/S, is knowing you’re going to make it through BUD/S.” It’s belief. You need to believe that you’re the type of person who has the skill and will to make that goal happen, and then make it happen. Don’t worry about what’s right and don’t wait for the perfect opportunity because “perfect” doesn’t exist—it’s an excuse to procrastinate.
Via The Learning Factor
When it comes to success, it's easy to think that people blessed with brains are inevitably going to leave the rest of us in the dust, but social psychologist Amy Cuddy knows first-hand how attitude can outweigh IQ. Cuddy suffered a car accident at the age of 19 which resulted in brain damage that took 30 points from her IQ. Before the crash Cuddy had an IQ near genius levels; her post-crash IQ was just average. As someone who had always built her identity around her intelligence, the significant dip in Cuddy's IQ left her feeling powerless and unconfident. Despite her brain damage, she slowly made her way through college and even got accepted into the graduate program at Princeton. Once at Princeton, Cuddy struggled until she discovered that it was her lack of confidence that was holding her back, not her lack of brainpower. This was especially true during difficult conversations, presentations, and other high-pressure, highly important moments.
Via The Learning Factor
You stare at a blank screen for what seems like hours, waiting for your brain to come up with a brilliant idea, and it never comes. There has to be a better way to brainstorm, right? There is--and it might be as simple as doing the laundry. In the new book The Net and the Butterfly: The Art and Practice of Breakthrough Thinking, Olivia Fox Cabane and Judah Pollack--former faculty members of Stanford's Start X incubator program--explain how breakthrough insights come about. The two describe these insights as "that feeling of sudden clarity when you feel the answer staring you in the face." "The biggest misconception about breakthroughs is that they're accidental or that they're spontaneous," says Fox Cabane. "But in reality that aha! moment is just the tip of the iceberg. It is the single conscious moment you have at the end of a very long, complex, unconscious process." To understand how to prime the human brain for creative breakthroughs, one must first understand what parts of the brain help power them. As Fox Cabane and Pollack explain, the brain has two networks: the executive network, which is the "goal-oriented" part of your brain that you access to complete an action; and the default network, the part of your brain that's home to what the authors call the "genius lounge," or the place where creative insights lie. But, to access the genius lounge, your brain needs to tune out the executive network.
Via The Learning Factor
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Several studies showed having a sense of purpose beyond your occupation or everyday role plays a big role in resilience.