Sandy and Resiliency – How to Stay Afloat during a Crisis
As a New Yorker, my heart goes out to the people struggling to recover from the super storm Sandy. I wanted to offer my thoughts and experiences on being resilient as we all attempt to get our lives back to normal. My aim is to share some approaches that might be helpful for those of you out there who like me may have perfectionist or pessimistic tendencies.Resilience is the ability to bounce back FAST from mental, emotional or physical energy drains. For me, resiliency involves two strategies:
managing my perfectionist/pessimistic fears , and
reaching out to and feeling supported by my community.
Most of what I learned about how to manage myself came from playing competitive tennis. The biggest lesson from playing tennis has been to NOT be so hard on myself when I make mistakes or just don’t play well. What taught me the most was James Loehr’s 16 seconds between the points methodology. Loehr was one the first sports psychologists who studied professional tennis players. He found that those players who had some kind of between the points ritual were able to be in their Ideal Performance State – highly focused and relaxed. I adopted Loehr’s approach to business by calling it the Between-the-Meetings strategy (which I discuss in my book on pages 199-204: Collaborative Competition: A Woman’s Guide to Succeeding by Competing). The idea is to learn to use small windows of time to manage your reactions to adversarial situations so that you respond in the most effective manner. For example, imagine that you just made a terrible mistake on the tennis court or you were told that you were not going to get power back for another week. The strategy includes three steps:
Begin by doing something physical such as move the tennis racket from your right to left hand and then acknowledge the mistake; or in reaction to the news you could take a 5 minute walk or take a few minutes to breathe and center yourself;
Visualize yourself correcting the mistake or effectively dealing with the problem; this could involve thinking through your options and the message your want to tell your family;
Let go of that mistake or situation that you can't control and take an action such as move the racket back to the right hand and play the next point; or in this crisis, you move to acceptance versus complaining and take action to resolve the situation, such as call your relatives who live in an area where they have power.
While Loehr’s three steps provides a useful letting go ritual, the pessimist in me has found the works of Martin Seligman and Heart Math help me bounce back faster with more energy.Martin Seligman is a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and the founder of Positive Psychology. A few years ago, I took his Authentic Happiness Inventory Questionnaireand realized that I tended to be more of a pessimist and demonstrated learned helplessness at times of stress. This was rather surprising and distressing to me. Seligman’s research has found that those people who attribute specific explanations for bad events are able to recover more quickly and produce RESILIENCE. In contrast, people like me who tended to find permanent explanations for bad events ended up feeling helpless or depressed for longer periods of time. My perfectionist tendencies would lead me to be rather hard on myself and feeling I wasn’t good enough! However, those giddy optimists see bad events as a result of something temporary or specific and trust in the universe that things will get better. So, instead of mocking those giddy people, I have been teaching myself to attribute specific reasons as to why something didn’t work out rather than say I am not good enough. What I have noticed is that I have started to recover faster from mistakes and challenges and feel better – almost giddy! Given that I am a risk taker, this is helping me engage in life more.The other tactic is from this month's recommended reading; it is one of my favorite book for stress management from recent Heart Math research, Transforming Anxiety by Doc Childre and Deborah Rozman. According to the Institute of Heart Math, Heart Intelligence is the flow of awareness, understanding and intuition we experience when the mind and emotions are brought into coherent alignment with the heart.As I watched the destruction from Sandy on TV, my reactions ranged from sadness and horror, gratitude that me and my family were safe, to a little guilt. To help me manage all of this emotioanl drainage, I did a Heart Math exercise which involves making a list of the 10 things that I am grateful for and spending the next 60 seconds breathing deeply thinking of these things. This exercise of gratitude INCREASED MY RESILIENCE as it is your heart that gives you the intelligence and power to be flexible through challenging situations with less stress and to bounce back faster. I vow to see if I can keep my heart open and stay resilient during this crisis.Feeling energized now, my next thought is how are my friends and family doing? I focused on calling and texting all of them and seeing who might need assistance. The ones I reached were fine but there were many that I didn’t reach. So naturally, when the new emotion of worry comes into play, what next? I simply return to staying grateful and breathing for thirty seconds. This renews my emotional buoyancy.Turning on the news and seeing the destruction and death all around me, I hear how the Red Cross needs money. The TV commentator says that if everyone just gave a little bit they would have enough. I took action and went online to make a donation and this made me feel inspired since giving from the heart refills us again and again. I know I can’t be a first responder but I am doing something to help my community - feeling a part of the community, rather than just some lucky New Yorker who didn’t lose power. That is important because the key to being resilient is that the sooner you bounce back, the more you can contribute. As Anne Mulcahy, the former CEO of Xerox said:
“When you have that window of opportunity called a crisis, move as quickly as you can, get as much done as you can. There's a momentum for change that's very compelling.”
It is going to take time for things to get back to normal but we are all in this together; how can we learn and help each other and our community? Please do something to help those in need which could include giving $10 to the Red Cross or helping to clean up on Rockaway beach....or maybe there is something new that we can try to move things forward. I would love to hear your comments and thoughts.