Resilience: How to Build a Personal Strategy for Survival

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Resilience: How to Build a Personal Strategy for Survival

by Gill Corkindale  |   7:52 PM January 26, 2009

A few months ago I was lucky enough to work with someone who really understood resilience. Atef was one of a small group of international leaders I was coaching in London. On the first day, by way of introductions, I had asked them to describe their roles, their current business issues and a little about their backgrounds.
Atef spoke last. A senior vice-president in an American bank, he described the challenges he was facing with his team and in his business. The story of relentless pressure, change projects, long hours and difficult people was a familiar one. But after a few minutes, the story took a different and unusual direction.
With little emotion, he described his early life growing up in the West Bank. A Palestinian, he had no proper education, health service or even a nation-state. At 15, his father had died, leaving him -- the eldest son -- to support his family. He took whatever work he could find, on building sites, as a waiter and driving taxis. Somehow, he managed to scrape together enough money to educate himself and, at the age of 20, won a scholarship to an American school. After graduating, he took a lowly job in a bank and worked his way up into increasingly senior roles. His hard work was rewarded with promotion and, at the age of 35, the bank sponsored his MBA at an elite business school.
We all listened attentively as he recounted story after story of how he had coped with danger and deprivation and how he had ultimately survived and prospered with very little support. He described how the lessons of his early life left him stronger, more vigilant and determined to make a success of his life, whatever the threat or disruptive change. He was balanced, assured and disciplined, with a great energy and passion for life.
I have no doubt that Atef will survive whatever life throws at him. The financial crisis may force his bank to restructure - he may even lose his job and have to start all over again. But I am certain that he will cope - and he may well prosper. Why? Because the lessons he learned early in life taught him how to be resilient.
Resilience is emerging as the seminal skill for leaders as more economies slide towards recession. The American Psychological Association, which has studied resilience closely since the terrorist attacks of 9/11, defines it as the ability to adapt well in the face of adversity, trauma, tragedy, threats, and from sources of stress such as work pressures, health, family or relationship problems.
A resilient person is not only able to handle such experiences in the moment, but also to bounce back afterward. The good news is that leaders can develop resilience by managing their thoughts, behaviours and actions. The Road to Resilience, the APA's guide to developing individual resilience, sets out 10 steps which every leader should take time to study:

1. Develop supportive and caring relationships at home, among friends and colleagues. Accept help and support and help others when they need it.
2. Remember that some crises are beyond your control. You can't change events but you can change the way you interpret and react to them. Try to accept this and look ahead.
3. Accept that change is part of life and that you will have to adapt to changing circumstances.
4. Set some realistic goals and take regular small steps towards achieving them. Ask yourself, "What's the one thing I can accomplish today?" rather than focusing on the overarching goal.
5. Be decisive. Do as much as you can rather than avoiding problems and hoping they will go away.
6. Try to understand your own experiences of dealing with loss, hardship or emotional problems. Appreciate what you have learned from these events.
7. Develop a positive view about yourself and be confident in your strengths and abilities.
8. Try to take a longer-term perspective and don't blow the significance of the event out of proportion.
9. Stay hopeful and optimistic. Visualise what you want, rather than worrying about what you fear. 
10. Look after yourself - your health, fitness and need for relaxation and peace. This will give you the strength and balance to deal with difficult situations.

Another useful port of call is The Hardiness Institute, which offers leaders an easy online hardiness test to assess their levels of resilience. The institute is based on the work of Dr Salvatore R. Maddi of the University of Chicago who carried out a landmark study of Illinois Bell Telephone (IBT) in the 1970s-80s. Dr Maddi wanted to find out why some people stayed well even during the stress of a major downsizing programme. They discovered that the most resilient people held three key beliefs, known as the three C's:

• Commitment: they strived to be involved in events rather than feeling isolated.
• Control: they tried to control outcomes, rather than lapse into passivity and powerlessness.
• Challenge: they viewed stressful changes (whether positive or negative) as opportunities for new learning.

Positive psychology is a powerful tool to develop resilience. Authors Andrew Shatte and Karen Reivich used research from a 15-year study for their book, The Resilience Factor, which details seven key steps to building resilience based on positive thinking.
Here in the UK, we are beginning to build the skills of resilience early in life by using positive thinking. This month, the University of Bath began an 18-month trial on positive thinking for 7000 teenagers in British schools. Teenagers will be taught to acknowledge their personal strengths, identify negative thought processes and develop problem-solving skills. Perhaps these ideas will soon be brought into the business world where they are equally useful, especially for many younger employees who have no experience or understanding of the challenges of recession.
What are your views on resilience? Do you agree that it is a quality leaders need to develop more than ever before? Is it simply the result of experience or do you think it can be learned? And do you have any stories - or advice - to share with other leaders on how to build a personal resilience strategy?

More blog posts by Gill Corkindale

More on: Crisis management, Managing yourself, Personal effectiveness

Gill Corkindale

Gill Corkindale is an executive coach and writer based in London, focusing on global management and leadership. She was formerly management editor of the Financial Times.

Quick and Easy Ways to Quiet Your Mind

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Quick and Easy Ways to Quiet Your Mind

by Matthew E. May  |   8:00 AM December 24, 2012

Neuroscience tells us that, to be more productive and creative, we need to give our brains a break. It's the quiet mind that produces the best insights. But it's a challenge to take that sort of time off in the midst of a busy day. Here are three specific, quick and easy ways to build purposeful break time into your day.

Quick meditation
New research from the UCLA Laboratory of Neuro Imaging suggests that people who meditate show more gray matter in certain regions of the brain, show stronger connections between brain regions and show less age-related brain atrophy. In other words, meditation might make your brain bigger, faster and "younger". As lead researcher Eileen Luders explains, "it appears to be a powerful mental exercise with the potential to change the physical structure of the brain."
Tip: If you commute via public transportation (or even if you're a passenger in a car pool) use the time to close your eyes for 10 minutes. If you drive, leave a little early, park and spend 10 minutes in the car before you walk into work. Choose a very specific image, such as a waterfall, beach or tree, and try to focus on it alone. If other thoughts get in the way, gently push them aside. Do this once or twice per day. The goal is to let your mind achieve a sense of relaxed awareness.
Pulsing
Psychologist K. Anders Ericsson, renown for his research and theories on expertise, points out that top performers in fields ranging from music to science to sports tend to work in approximately 90-minute cycles and then take a break. We are designed to pulse, to move between spending and renewing energy. Pulsing is the simplest, easiest, most immediate way to build breaks into your day.
Tip: Download a "break-reminder" utility, such as Scirocco or Healthy Hints, and set it to ping you every 90 minutes. Focus hard on a particular task until that cue. And then take a walk, talk to a colleague, doodle or listen to music. Do anything that renews you and gives you a "second wind," even if you think you don't need it. You do. Five minutes later, get back to work.
Daydream walks
Most people have heard the story about how 3M's Arthur Fry came up with the idea for the Post-it note: he was daydreaming in church. Jonathan Schooler, a researcher at UC Santa Barbara, has repeatedly shown that people like Fry who daydream and let their minds wander score higher on creativity tests. What separates this from meditation is that, instead of emptying your mind, you're letting it fill up with random thoughts. The trick is to remain aware enough to recognize a sudden insight when it comes.
Tip: Start by taking 20 minutes, two days a week during your lunch break to take a stroll and daydream. Think about anything you want besides work — a beach vacation, building your dream house, playing shortstop for the Yankees, whatever. Ramp it up to three or four days a week. The next time someone catches you daydreaming on the job and asks you why you're not working, tell them that in fact you're tapping into your creative brain.

More blog posts by Matthew E. May

More on: Creativity, Managing yourself, Productivity

Matthew E. May

Matthew E. May is the author of The Laws of Subtraction: 6 Simple Rules for Winning in the Age of Excess Everything. He is a speaker and advisor to companies such as Toyota, Edmunds.com, Intuit and ADP.

Mourning a man who mourned for Pakistan

Nadeem F. Paracha | 24th November, 2012

Ardeshir Cowasjee – Dawn.com file photo

In 2006, an obituary appeared on the pages of Dawn of someone called A. Cowasjee.
Many well-meaning fans and friends of famous columnist and social activist Ardeshir Cowasjee, rushed to his home, only to find the man up and about, playing with his dogs and inspecting his garden.
Yes, the obituary was of some other Cowasjee. Ardeshir couldn’t help but exhibit his amusement regarding the episode in one of his columns.
He was first bemused by seeing people appear at his gate, look at him as he walked around in his shorts, and then turn away, some without even uttering a single word.
The bemusement turned into a dark comedy when he finally realised what was going on. An old colleague of his told me how he laughed at a bureaucrat who, like many others, appeared at his gate, stood on his toes and silently peeked at Cowasjee.
In the typical style that he spoke Urdu, Cowasjee shouted out: ‘Tum fikar na karo. Hum abhi tak zinda hai!’ (Don’t you worry, I’m still alive). What a character.
Tomorrow the newspapers will be carrying another obituary for an A. Cowasjee. But this time it will be about the Cowasjee so many Pakistanis have come to love, loath or simply get perplexed by.
For almost three decades, Ardeshir Cowasjee remained one of the most read and influential columnists in Pakistan.
Though he wrote for an English language daily, his words reached and echoed in the most significant corners and corridors of power.
Cowasjee came from a well-off Zoroastrian family. Based in Karachi, he was still managing his family business when, in 1972, Prime Minster Zulfikar Ali Bhutto appointed him as the Managing Director of the Pakistan Tourism Development Board (PTDB) – a body formed to accommodate and further attract Western tourists who had begun to come in droves from the late 1960s onwards.
Despite the fact that Cowasjee turned out to be an asset for the board, three years later in 1976, Bhutto suddenly got him arrested. Cowasjee spent days behind bars, where he continued writing letters to Bhutto asking him why he was put in jail. Bhutto never answered, even though he finally ordered his release after 72 days.
Many believe that Cowasjee faced Bhutto’s wrath because he had begun to criticise the Bhutto regime’s growing authoritarianism, in spite of it coming into power through the democratic process.
After Bhutto was toppled by General Ziaul Haq in a military coup in 1977, Cowasjee began writing letters to Dawn’s ‘Letters to the Editor’ section castigating the fallen Bhutto regime.
His well-written and evocatively worded letters became a frequent fixture in Dawn as he then ventured into other topics; topics that gradually began to attract the anger of the Zia dictatorship as well.
In a time when the press was being openly gagged and harassed, Cowasjee was one of the first Pakistanis to invent and articulate a way that has now become a common device used by liberals and secularists to critique political Islam in Pakistan.
After taking Bhutto to task, his letters turned their attention towards the draconian doings of the Ziaul Haq dictatorship and its so-called ‘Islamisation’ project.
Cowasjee did this by simply stating over and over again that the Jinnah (founder of Pakistan) he had met and followed as a young man did not conceptualise Pakistan the way the country’s politicians and military generals were doing.
This argument of his struck a nerve with a number of Dawn readers and soon Cowasjee was invited by the newspaper’s editor, Ahmed Ali Khan, to write a regular column for what was and still is one of Pakistan’s largest English dailies.
In his columns of the mid and late 1980s he continued to bemoan how both Bhutto and Zia had gone about shattering Jinnah’s dream. After Zia’s demise in 1988, Cowasjee became even more pointed against the civilian governments that followed Zia, accusing them of corruption and nepotism.
Also, by the early 1990s, he had slowly been moving away from his old rhetorical style and towards putting on paper hard facts and figures as he went about like a man on a one-way mission putting parties like the PPP, PML-N and the MQM to sword.
Also being a passionate Karachiite with a desire to see his beloved city return to being what it had been before the 1980s, Cowasjee directly confronted the powerful ‘building and land mafia,’ using both his pen and the courts to halt the construction of a number of illegal and gaudy shopping arcades and parking lots – especially on lands that were originally allotted to support parks.
This was also the period when Cowasjee began receiving serious death threats, but he soldiered on.
Though in his columns of the 1980s and 1990s, Cowasjee had always spoken about his understanding of Jinnah being a progressive man, it was from the late 1990s onwards that he openly began to suggest that Jinnah perceived Pakistan to be a progressive, secular Muslim country.
This was Cowasjee reacting to what the second Nawaz Sharif government was planning to do: To introduce a constitutional bill that would have actually endorsed Sharif’s jump from being a prime minster to becoming an ‘Ameerul Momineen.’
So when General Pervez Musharraf overthrew the Nawaz regime in 1999, Cowasjee cynically mocked Sharif almost exactly the way he had done Bhutto, Zia and Benazir. His overall message remained to be that all these leaders were misfits in a Pakistan that Jinnah had conceived.
They were misfits because they were selfish, authoritarian and never far from using religion and other populist gimmicks to retain power.
During his early years, Cowasjee seemed supportive of Musharraf, but all the while advised him not to repeat the mistakes of other Pakistani military dictators like Ayub Khan and Ziaul Haq.
In other words, Cowasjee was warning him to stay away from the usual civilian lot that becomes active only when allowed into the corridors of power through the backdoor. Cowasjee knew better and as the society under Musharraf and after the September 11 episode began to fully reap what was sown in the name of Islam by Zia, Cowasjee started to sound extremely bitter and cynical.
Shrugging at Musharraf’s political misadventures, Cowasjee became more direct and critical against the religious lobbies and parties, so much so that many of them began to accuse him of being anti-Islam.
In 2003, banners went up in Karachi cursing Cowasjee of working against the so-called ‘ideology of Pakistan’ and Islam, and the government had to post police guards outside his home in Karachi’s Bath Island area.
This was also the period when Cowasjee began appearing as guest on privately owned television channels that had exploded onto the scene after 2003.
But on TV Cowasjee was nothing like he was in print. Instead of the articulate columnist with a great command over the English language, Cowasjee decided to almost entirely speak in Urdu.
His Urdu was crude and unsophisticated but ironically perfect to express the more frustrated aspects of his personality that had been building up for decades as he saw his country rapidly slip into a quagmire of authoritarianism, corruption, intolerance and violence.
By now he had also become extremely cynical. First, about this country’s leadership that kept producing one bad apple after another and then about the Pakistani people, whom he began to describe as a lot without any ability to learn from past mistakes or correctly decide what was actually good for them.
So on TV, no matter how hard an anchor would try to make Cowasjee sound like he did in his columns, Cowasjee would refuse and instead continue to use Urdu slang and words like ‘khachar’ (donkey), ‘chariya’ (demented), ‘chor’ (thief), among others, to define politicians, military men and their followers.
For example, during one such TV show when asked what he thought about Pakistan’s status of being a nuclear power, he smirked, pressed mischievously upon his walking stick, and said: ‘Sala iss qaum sey guttur to bundh hota nahi, bum kya chalaye ga …’ (how can this nation be a nuclear power when it doesn’t even know how to stop the flow of an overflowing gutter).
Though he first appeared to be a man whose old age had given him the license to scold the powers that be in the crudest of Urdu, he ultimately became a caricature of himself; or rather was reduced to being one by an electronic media whose own cynicism was not only more amoral but wrapped in all the hypocritical trappings Pakistan’s establishment, polity and society have been quivering in.
Alas, better sense prevailed and Cowasjee’s TV appearances gradually came to a halt. But his columns kept coming and by the time he announced his retirement late last year, he had gone back to once again remind his many readers that this was certainly not the Pakistan Jinnah had dreamt about.
He lamented the fact that Jinnah had passed away too early and that it was left to old men like him to see this dream crumble, piece by piece, right in front of their eyes.
At the time of his death the police guards were still posted outside his house as threats from the building mafia and religious outfits never did stop. But these guards, though provided by the government, were largely financed and fed by Cowasjee.
A Zoroastrian, he always explained himself to be a humanist because to him all religions were basically about humanitarianism.
Cowasjee was also involved in a number of charities, where he liberally donated money for the education of needy students, the construction of parks and a number of other causes.
And though he usually came out as being an angry old man in his columns, in private life he was a warm-hearted family man and someone who always cherished receiving all kinds of people at his home.
In the area where he lived throughout his life in Karachi (Bath Island), his beautiful old bungalow with old shady trees, a neatly manicured garden and low walls is a reminder of what Karachi was once like.
In fact, the street where his house stands is also the only street left in Bath Island that maintains a semblance to what the area was like before it was turned into a congested bundle of ugly apartment buildings and uglier bungalows of the neuvo-riche, who began arriving here after the late 1980s.
As a columnist and more so, as a genuine fan of Jinnah’s, I’m sure Cowasjee passed away heartbroken, unable to actually see Pakistan become what he thought Jinnah wanted it to become. But as a man he lived a full life, leaving behind a huge number of fans and friends to remember him for a very long time.
Nadeem F. Paracha is a cultural critic and senior columnist for Dawn Newspaper and Dawn.com