How can we be more resilient? Humans are really bad at realising that we can bounce back and learn from failure

“In an edited extract from an interview with LSE, Grace Lordan, author of Think Big, Founding Director of The Inclusion Initiative and an Associate Professor at LSE explains how people can make themselves more resilient. Grace was talking to Sue Windebank. What’s the difference between someone who crumbles under stress and someone who manage to overcome it? It’s called resilience. Resilience is how we cope in the face of adversity. It is malleable. As individuals, we have stores of resilience that allow us to be more or less resilient to the shocks that come at us, whether that is a colleague insulting us or something bigger. These stores can be replenished. And we can also work on them to make sure that they are as full as they can be when something negative does happen. When something happens to us that we might find is upsetting, is there a way to reframe it to help us cope better? One of the most important things we can do is to get familiar with our emotions. When something negative happens we might get angry, we might get upset, we might need to withdraw and we need to allow ourselves time to process those emotions. When we have calmed down, we can revisit the issue and we take control of what we can control. For me, anytime something negative happens, I think “what’s my goal for life?” I want to be happy, healthy and safe. So okay, something negative has happened, my happiness is taken away. I’m still healthy and safe. There’s always something that I can do about a negative event. There are things that I can control enough to keep my resilience reserves high and also make sure that I tackle the situation. And that aligns perfectly with the academic research on this topic. Some of us fear failure so much that we never actually take risks. Do you have any advice for people who are highly sensitive in this way? It is worth remembering that if something doesn’t work out for you there is usually another way. If you fail to get a promotion, you try again next time. Yes, it hurts for your ego, but you can definitely go forward again. Realising that there are other opportunities to get to the same destination can be enough to remove the fear of failure. In my book, Think Big , I’ve written a lot about the relationship between anticipated loss aversion and the fear of failure. The anticipated loss aversion is where we start thinking about the costs and benefits of our choices. If I said to you today, I’m going to go forward for promotion at LSE, and if it doesn’t turn out, I might be embarrassed in front of you. I’m also going to be embarrassed for myself because I think my work is good enough. That anticipation becomes real. I’ll start imagining what it’s going to be like to see you again and have to tell you that I didn’t get the promotion. I’m going to start thinking about what am I going to feel like when I fail and start thinking about that emotion. And the research tells us that that anticipation is a real physical exercise and it really impacts our resilience. We get higher blood pressure, higher cholesterol, we might eat more unhealthily. On the resilient side, our stores deplete. So if I’m somebody who ends up in cycles of rumination about what might happen if I fail, I really affect my resilience reserves. The most interesting thing about anticipated loss aversion is that as human beings, we’re really bad at realising that we can bounce back and actually we learn from failure. We learn that failure doesn’t sting as much as we might think, but also we tend to underestimate the people around us. So in my story I think that you are going to really think negatively of me because I didn’t get the promotion, but actually, I know you’re a really nice person and probably you would be very high on empathy and very careful to realise that there’s a kind of ego attached and you would be very supportive in that moment. So again, if we think about how we can overcome the fear of failure, we need to recognise anticipated loss aversion. We need to know that if we go forward, there’s a positive probability of success, but there’s also a probability of learning in the failure – that we can do it and we can bounce back. Keeping a gratitude journal is often suggested as one way to improve our resilience. Is that something you would encourage? Yes. Having gratitude is absolutely linked to increasing resilience reserves, more successful marriages, more successful friendships, even higher levels of income. So practicing gratitude is something that we should all do in our daily lives. It takes the focus off our losses. I’m not a great journaler. But at 6pm every evening an alarm goes off and I take a very short burst of time, sometimes 30 seconds, sometimes a minute, and I just start recounting all the things that went well that day. If a negative event pops into my mind, I’ll say, “okay, that’s for later”. I’ll schedule a time to deal with you later. I’m focused on the positive and I really feel in the moment that it lifts my mood. Again, this aligns with the research , but also I can feel myself putting into perspective just how my day went. And if something negative did happen, it’s much less likely to deplete my resilience reserves and I’m much less likely to go to bed that evening thinking about the negative event. Do you have any other tips for improving your resilience? Really focus on absolute versus relative comparisons. As human beings we tend to really get caught up with what our peers are doing or what our colleagues are doing. And that focus we know is really bad for our well-being, really bad for our resilience and it’s also not good for personal growth. So if you find yourself looking at other individuals and thinking, “oh, they’re doing so much better than me. Why are they getting ahead faster than me?” Bring yourself back to your journey and look at the progress that you made in the last five years. And then think about what the next five years can bring given that progress that you’ve made. This article gives the views of the author, not the position of LSE Business Review or the London School of Economics. You are agreeing with our comment policy when you leave a comment. Image credit: eamesBot provided by Shutterstock. The post How can we be more resilient? Humans are really bad at realising that we can bounce back and learn from failure first appeared on LSE Business Review .

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