Resilience and Career Success

Anita Brick: Hi, this is Anita Brick. And welcome to CareerCast at Chicago Booth. To help you advance in your career. Today we're delighted to be speaking with Linda Graham. She is an Expert psychotherapist who integrates modern neuroscience, passionate mind, by the way, mindfulness practices and relational psychology in her international trainings on resilience and well-being. She is the author of Resilience, which is what we're going to talk about today, and also Bouncing Back, which was the winner of a 2013 books for a Better Life award. Linda first of all, thank you so much for doing this today and thank you for writing the book. It is a lot to think about.

Linda Graham: Thank you for having me, and thank you for the welcome about the book as well. It's meant to be practical and useful, so I hope it can be.

Anita Brick: Maybe to put us on the same playing field. Could you briefly define what resilience means?

Linda Graham: So we start with resilience being our capacities to cope with challenges and crisis of life, to be able to bounce back from difficulty and adversity. And when there's trauma, sometimes to be able to bounce forward into a new life. So traditionally, resilience has been thought of as qualities grit, determination, the will to endure, the will to survive. And that's a good place to start.

The behavioral sciences come in and teach us that there are three elements to our resilience: how resilient we're going to be, and one is the severity of the external stressor. And then there's the strength of the external resources. How supported we are by friends and family and community. And we have medical services and financial security. And then the third is our own internal strengths and traits.

So that's the traditional definition of it. The neuroscience then comes in and distinguishes between a stressor which is the event and our response. So we have a stress response to an external stressor. But we are responsible for our responses. We can have a stress response to a stressor, but it's how we manage that stress response that makes us more resilient.

And the key to our resilience is our own response. Flexibility. Being able to shift gears to change our patterns of response. So what I teach, the way I teach about resilience is that it is foundational. Whatever the external stressor, whatever the internal message we have about our stressor, the resilience is foundational to any level of disruption to our resilience. The quote that I like to use is from my colleague Frankie Perez. How do you respond to the issue is the issue, and that can be directly applicable to business students or people in business.

Anita Brick: That's a great place for us to start a student, he said, “Thank you very much for doing this. I am about to enter a very competitive time in my life. When I look for a job, I know that I am confident in my abilities, but I also know that I won't win with every outreach, every interview that I go on. What advice would you have for me to avoid being swayed by the interim wins and setbacks before I actually land a new job?”

Linda Graham: This is the wonderful research that was done by Carol Dweck when she was at Columbia, discovering the difference between a fixed mindset and a growth mindset with a fixed mindset. And it often happens when people are intelligent, they're talented, they're gifted, they're educated. Sometimes things come easy for them. When there's the mindset of, well, I am talented, I'm smart, I should be able to do this, and there's a setback or a failure or a disappointment.

People can get discouraged and kind of withdraw and give up. And so people tend to shrink back from the challenge of the situation. But people who have a growth mindset or who cultivate a growth mindset know that their success, their accomplishments probably depend more on their effort, their perseverance, their own oops that they put into it, rather than any innate talent.

People with a growth mindset are more likely to keep going when they have a setback or a failure. They're more likely to see that setback or a failure as an opportunity to learn, to grow, to try something different. And so they're more likely literally to bounce back from a disappointment or a discouragement and keep on trying. So they're the ones more likely actually to be able to achieve their goals.

Anita Brick: Not to interrupt you, but if we take this and now say her work is amazing, but how do we put that into practice? Because we don't know if the student looking for a job has a fixed mindset or a growth mindset. What are a couple of things that he can do to open up a window to have more of a growth mindset.

Linda Graham: As we learn the steps that people go through in recovering from any disaster, and this is what's now part of the science or the research about post-traumatic growth and I'm not saying that a setback or a failure is going to be at the level of trauma, but the steps are nonetheless are very relevant. So the first is acceptance of reality.

Just understanding what happened and the consequences. I think with our mindfulness practice, it's bringing in awareness of our reactions to what's happening. So we pay attention to the event, the setbacks, the consequences, but also to our reactions. Did we go into discouragement? Does it make us want to try again harder? And then the next step is resourcing with other people, getting feedback, getting advice, getting encouragement at the time.

We're not doing our life alone. We're always resourced with teachers and mentors and colleagues and friends. So turning to other people for encouragement and then this might seem counterintuitive. Finding the positive in the midst of the difficult because of the positive shift, the functioning of the brain is something really important to understand. So when people are facing a setback, they go into contraction or reactivity or discouragement.

When you can practice something like gratitude or kindness or generosity, the positive emotions shift the functioning of the brain out of the contraction and the negativity that's out to the bigger picture. Back out to optimism, back out to being creative. So the direct, measurable cause and effect outcome of practicing positive emotions is resilience. That's measured in behavioral sciences.

We bring in some gratitude or whatever for the opportunity to learn and grow. And then when possible, finding the lessons. What can I take away from this that I'll do better next time? What's the gift in this mistake? And that allows us to create a different story about ourselves in relation to this event, and especially claiming ourselves as a learner, as someone who tries, someone who is becoming resilient, that brings us back into the oh, I get it. I learned a lesson that I wouldn't have learned if it hadn't been for that setback. Not just in spite of it, but because of it. And so that's how we're developing the growth mindset, really taking any opportunity in life as an opportunity. How can I grow? How can I learn what could be different here?

Anita Brick: And those are really great things to get started. If someone wants to craft a story that they tell, especially if they've had a setback in their career, do you apply what you just said or are there more things to it? There was an alum who wanted to know how to craft her story to be more affirmative, especially because she's in the midst of an obstacle right now.

Linda Graham: A couple things I would say about that. We bring our mindfulness to bear, because we need to know what story are we telling ourselves? I mean, that's the first thing. Very often we come upon patterns where we can be negative, we can be self-critical, we can be self judgmental. We can go into a sense of shame or failure. So we need to know what the story is that we're telling about ourselves. And then I think we bring in our mindful self-compassion. It's a whole protocol where we bring awareness and kindness to ourselves for having the experience. So, for instance, someone's facing an obstacle. They try to become aware of their reactions to facing that obstacle, but they also bring some kindness to themselves as a human being who is facing that obstacle and having those reactions to the obstacle.

So the mindful self-compassion practice, it creates a pause. It interrupts the automaticity of our patterns and gives us a chance to shift into something more positive. When we can accept ourselves for how we're reacting to the obstacle, we've created some space, and then we can shift how we're reacting, how we're viewing ourselves. We can shift how we craft that story. We have some options, and we have some space to discern what a wise option would be. That's where I would begin.

Anita Brick: What if, let's say you were interviewing me and I needed to, as part of my story, share something that didn't go well in my history? How would you take that same construct and craft that story that is much more affirmative or even emancipatory. When someone says, Anita, walk me through your resume or tell me about yourself.

Linda Graham: When we're creating the whole narrative of our whole story, even if there's something difficult or went off the rails that happened. There was that event and there was an after. The event itself can be framed in terms of this happens, but this is how I bounce back. This is how I recovered. This is what I learned. And so coming into a sense of competence, not just about the event, but about coping with the event, being able to learn. And so that sense of confidence in one's own competence becomes the larger frame of the story. I mean, the idea is whatever happened, we're still bouncing back and learning from it. So when the emphasis is on the learning and on the growth, that can be very, very positive. That's evidence of our resilience.

Anita Brick: It seems to me that people can share the same words, but if they don't believe it themselves, the interviewer or the person that they are trying to engage with won't believe them either.

Linda Graham: We're getting into the realm here of communication and even emotional communication. Can you communicate confidence or are you communicating hesitancy and fear? We know that Albert Moravian, in his book Silent Messages, found that emotional communication is something like 55% facial expression and body language, 38% tone and prosody of your voice, and 7% words. Whatever you're trying to communicate, you want to have that inner confidence within.

You're feeling that physically, you're feeling that emotionally so that you're able to convey that even without words to the person that you're being interviewed by. One of the things I teach a lot in the book, we begin with somatic intelligence, which are our body based tools so that we're able to work with any feeling of doubt or hesitancy or lack of confidence and be able to rewire it, be able to move it by moving the body. When you move your body, you're shifting your physiology, you're shifting your nervous system. And you can use that to shift your emotional experience. If people close their hands tight in a fist and feel what that feels like, and then they open their hands again into an open palm and feel the difference, you can use that on a large scale.

If you feel fear or anger or sadness, and then let your body move to the opposite past you, you've shift what you're feeling inside and you shift your sense of self inside. And then you can walk into the interview or answer the question in the interview from strength and confidence. You know this is used by any Cuddy's power posing. I have people begin not to start in the posture of strength. Start in the posture where you feel vulnerable and actually move it actually shift it by moving into the posture that you want. And that's more powerful in the body.

Anita Brick: Good point. Shifting gears a little bit. Sure. This seemed like such a university of Chicago question to me, the student said of a very good creative problem solver. I've been trained to look for external causes and find the solution. No disrespect, but I'm not sure how looking for the source of the problem within myself will help my clients. That said, I'm open to learning.

Linda Graham: When we have an internal focus that is taking responsible for our internal responses, and we're responsible for changing those responses when they're not effective. Everything that I'm teaching in the book is to strengthen the functioning of the prefrontal cortex. That's the structure of the brain that we use for problem solving. But it is really the CEO of resilience. It does more than analysis and judgment and problem solving. It's the structure that we use for response flexibility. So anything we can do to strengthen the functioning of the prefrontal cortex is going to make us more resilient.

So that's why in the book I offer somatic intelligence because that's the basic body based tools. It's also the fastest way we have to recover our resilience. And then I go through emotional intelligence and our relational intelligence. All these tools that we're learning are reflective intelligence that strengthen the functioning of the prefrontal cortex. So that it shows up in a moment of stress or distress and helps us regulate, pause and reflect and respond skillfully. That internal focus is the foundation for how we act in the world. It's not at all selfish or self-indulgent. It is the basis of our resilience.

Anita Brick: Part of his question was about how that will help clients. It would seem to me, when he has that sense of confidence, that will be part of how his clients experience him, which would to me, engender a greater credibility and confidence of him. There's this interplay of internal, external.

Linda Graham: And because when we're relating to other people, there's always this interplay of internal and external. If there is such a thing as emotional contagion and it's very, very powerful, it may be that when the person is regulated and in their own emotional equilibrium themselves, number one, they're not going to be so strong if a client is being reactive, angry, belligerent in any kind of way, and they might even be able to regulate the nervous system and the emotions of the client that they're working with and bring them into more calm, more openness, more receptivity. Your person already has a secure base of resilience within them. And then they're talking. I contact all the communication. They can help create a kind of resonance between the two. That makes it much easier to come to an agreement to come to a decision.

Anita Brick: There was another student who talked about how she's a sponge for other people's emotions. So it almost like if she takes a stand for the kind of experience or the emotions she wants to have. And I know this is a little bit maybe esoteric, but if she takes responsibility, she can decide the experience she wants to have internally by shifting physically or psychologically or however she does it and then influence rather than being a sponge of all the negativity in her company.

Linda Graham: Being a sponge is actually a pretty big topic. We're talking about emotional intelligence. We're talking about emotional contagion. And one of my teachers said it's very important to be affected, but not infected. If I stay grounded in my own reality, then I can pay attention to yours. I can respond to yours, but I don't have to get pulled into it.

So when a student can be centered in their own emotional equilibrium, they have good theory of mind. I'm paying attention to you. I know what you're saying, but I can stand in my own reality, too. I don't have to apologize for that. I don't need your permission for that. Then they can learn to set limits and boundaries. And those are skills.

Sometimes we learn them in our families of origin, or when we're teenagers, or in college or graduate school or on our job. Sometimes we learn those skills and sometimes we don't, but it's important that we have them. It's important that we have permission to have them. Learning those skills of setting limits and boundaries is really essential if we're going to be functional and resilient.

Anita Brick: Good point. There are two related questions. One came from a staff member, one came from an Allen Pearson, who said, “You talk about practicing little and often, and you talk about that a lot in the book. Yeah. How can I affect the change now? Speed up the resiliency process and still do little in office?”

Linda Graham: We're going to come at that in two ways. We can be resilient quickly. So the two things I start with are the somatic body based practices because that's the fastest way we have our body. Brain responds to a stimulus far faster than our higher brain does. And so we're going to respond in our bodies first. So when we can use tools of breath and movement, we're able to manage our own automatic survival responses that happen within milliseconds.

Our own fight, flight trees, our own numbing out, shutting down, collapsing. We're able to manage those responses quickly so that we can be resilient very, very quickly. One of the first tools that I always teach is hand on the heart, and it's simply putting a hand on the heart, breathing in a sense of ease and goodness, and then remembering a moment when you felt safe with another human being.

All of that activity allows you to activate the release of oxytocin, which is the brain's hormone of safety and trust. It is the brain's direct and immediate antidote to the stress hormone cortisol. So when you get the oxytocin flowing, then the stress response goes down. So we use our body based tools first to calm down the nervous system.

And then the next thing I teach is to use these positive emotions and little and often. I'm not saying not just in the moment, but many times a day noticing or writing down or sharing with a friend what you're grateful for, noticing moments of kindness that you have received or that you have done to another human being. Noticing moments of generosity and the benefit of that as you go through the day, little and often through strengthening the neural circuitry that will respond quickly to a negative stimulus or negativity bias.

And you respond quickly to that. Remembering these moments and feelings of gratitude and pulling out of the negativity bias into something that's more open and more resilient. So we practice those tools little and often. So they show up in the moment when you need them. And then, of course, they show up for the long haul too. They show up when things are really difficult and it takes time to process something.

Anita Brick: Very good point. I think the people saying that you have to be done, okay, I'm going to do all this resilience stuff and then I'll be resilient. But it really is much more of a process like muscles. And when you go to the gym, you're always growing. I would assume, right.

Linda Graham: The gym muscle metaphor is very apt for strengthening the functioning of the prefrontal cortex, which is not a muscle. The brain is not a muscle. But we repeat the firing of the neural circuitry over and over and over again. So that gets easier for the brain to find that pathway. The brain learns to be resilient from experience. In other words, if we make a mistake, well, what are the experiences around making a mistake that would make us more resilient? If I'm scared to go in an interview with my boss, what are the experiences I can use to train my brain to be more resilient? We're creating new patterns of responding to the same old stressors, and it takes repetition for the brain to be able to do that.

Anita Brick: That makes sense to me every time we have an experience where we were able to. I love the phrase to bounce forward. We're like, yeah, this is not very pleasant, but wow, I remember that this and this happened and the challenge actually took me where I am today, remembering the times that we were challenged that actually were beneficial and help us get into resilience faster as well.

Linda Graham: So besides having the experience and we get to become more resilient, noticing that you're shifting, noticing that you're becoming more resilient because that's part of building your resilience, claiming your resilience is part of building your resilience.

Anita Brick: Good point. Do you have time for one more question?

Linda Graham: Oh, sure. Yeah.

Anita Brick: Great. I know that resilience is a process and there's some foundational pieces and so on. What would you say are three things that you would advise someone who wants to increase the level of accessible resilience.

Linda Graham: So the first is new conditioning. This is a new experience that's going to create a new pattern. If you're practicing gratitude, if you're practicing kindness, if you're practicing your generosity, that's going to create new patterns in your brain. But those patterns don't rewire the old patterns. When we're stressed or tired or exhausted, the brain will fall back to what it already knows how to do best.

So sometimes we want to recondition those old patterns if they're not working so well anymore, and we recondition by juxtaposing a negative and a positive step, the basis of our cognitive behavioral therapy is the basis of all trauma therapy. When you have something negative and then you light up the memory of that, you get it all going in your brain, that you juxtapose something positive that directly contradicts with this confirms that negative.

It's a completely different new positive experience, but the idea is to hold them in your awareness, to hold them in your brain at the same time that juxtaposition causes the neurons to fall apart and rewire again a fraction of a second later. It's called memory deconsolidation reconsolidation, and the neuroscience of seeing it in a scanner is just in the last 5 to 7 years.

We know it's what's happening in the brain. So whenever there is a negative pattern that just keeps looping over and over again to begin to develop the positive patterns that will antidote it or will cause it to be rewired. Of course, there's many, many ways that we do that. And then the third way is deconditioning. And this is important to know, perhaps especially in business, where we can be very focused on action.

And on bottom line, deconditioning is simply the brain operating in a different way when we're not in our focused attention of accomplishing a task or focused on a project. If the brain is left free to kind of daydream and have a reverie and meander a little bit, the brain can be very creative. It can be very intuitive. This is how people can solve problems just overnight in a dream or out of the blue.

And we can use deconditioning when we use our imagination, when we use kind of visualization or guided meditation to create the play space in the brain, for the brain to connect the dots in a new way on its own, it's making its links and associations on its own. So this is where our intuitive wisdom can come from. And sometimes it's important to let the brain not be focused and productive all the time.

Give it a rest, let it play, and see what new ideas it might come up with. And that's another way that we can rewire our old habits. So those are the three things I would leave people with. They can pay attention. Are they doing something new? Repeat, repeat, repeat. Are they doing something to juxtapose something negative or bring in plenty of positive to do that? Are they just letting their brain meander and then noticing? Oh, I hadn't thought of that before. So those are the three ways I would leave people.

Anita Brick: With good information, new perspectives. Any other final words of wisdom you'd like to leave with us today?

Linda Graham: The brain learns best, little and often. That's how the brain learns new experiences and responses to experience. Trust that process and then to notice it, to reflect it and notice it so that you can begin to see the changes when they're incremental and trust over the long term will actually result in big, big, big changes in a person's resilience.

Anita Brick: That's wonderful Linda, thank you so much again. Thank you for writing the book. Thank you for giving us time today and we wish you all the best. Thank you.

Linda Graham: It was a joy.

Anita Brick: Wonderful. And thank you all for listening. This is Anita Brick with CareerCast at Chicago Booth. Keep advancing.