The three secrets of resilient people | Lucy Hone | TEDxChristchurch

Summary

Lucy Hone's TEDx talk on resilience explores the profound impact of life's adversities and how to navigate them. She delves into personal tragedy after losing her daughter in a car accident, sharing insights from resilience research to handle grief and adversity. Hone emphasizes that adversity is a universal experience and highlights three strategies for building resilience: accepting that suffering is part of life, focusing on what can be changed, and evaluating whether actions are helping or harming one's well-being. These practical approaches offer hope and empower individuals to become active participants in their recovery and growth.

Highlights

• Lucy Hone shares her personal journey through grief after losing her daughter in an accident. 🌟
• She emphasizes the importance of understanding that adversity is a part of everyone's life. 🤝
• Hone outlines three strategies that help in building resilience and coping with challenges. 🔧
• The talk provides practical advice on focusing attention and making intentional decisions. 🧠
• Resilience, according to Hone, involves actively participating in one's healing journey. 🚀

Key Takeaways

• Adversity is a universal experience; resilience is not about avoiding it but navigating through it. 🌍
• Resilient people accept that suffering is part of life, which helps them manage tough times better. 💪
• Focusing attention on what can be changed rather than what's beyond control boosts resilience. 🔍
• Consistently evaluating if your actions are helping or harming you provides a sense of control and direction. 🔄
• Resilience strategies are accessible to everyone and involve ordinary processes, not extraordinary traits. 🌱

Overview

Lucy Hone's talk, given at TEDxChristchurch, is a poignant exploration of resilience through the lens of her personal tragedy. Losing her daughter in a sudden accident reframed her understanding of adversity, pushing her to apply resilience strategies she once taught others. Through her story, Hone underscores that adversity and suffering are universal challenges everyone faces.

Drawing from her expertise as a resilience researcher, Hone shares three key strategies for navigating life's inevitable hardships. These strategies include accepting suffering as a part of life, focusing on what can be controlled, and questioning whether one's actions are helpful or harmful. Hone brings a unique perspective, turning personal loss into a case study for resilience.

Her insights offer hope to those encountering grief, highlighting that resilience is not an innate trait, but a set of skills that can be developed. Hone encourages listeners to engage actively with their healing process, showing that even amidst profound pain, life and growth are possible. Her strategies offer practical, applicable advice for anyone facing personal challenges.

Chapters

• 00:00 - 01:30: Introduction The introduction begins by inviting the reader to reflect on personal experiences of loss, heartbreak, and emotional struggles. This sets the stage for exploring deeper themes throughout the chapter.
• 01:30 - 04:00: Resilience Research and Early Professional Journey In this chapter, the focus revolves around understanding resilience through personal adversities. It begins with the narrator asking listeners to stand if they've experienced events such as divorce, infidelity, natural disasters, bullying, job redundancies, miscarriages, abortions, or infertility. This interaction serves to highlight the commonality of personal struggles and sets the stage for discussing resilience, exploring how individuals manage to cope and persevere through various challenging experiences, which is a significant component of the narrator's early professional journey in resilience research.
• 04:00 - 07:00: Personal Tragedy and Grief The chapter titled 'Personal Tragedy and Grief' discusses the universality of adversity and personal struggles. It highlights that mental illness, dementia, physical impairments, and suicide impact many lives, emphasizing that no one is immune to life's challenges. The excerpt creates a powerful visual moment by asking those affected by these issues to stand, symbolically showing how widespread and nondiscriminatory these experiences are.
• 07:00 - 13:00: Three Strategies for Resilience This chapter delves into the study of resilience, reflecting on a journey that began at the University of Pennsylvania a decade ago. The author describes the vibrant academic environment of the time, highlighting the significant contract secured by the professors to enhance the mental fitness of 1.1 million American soldiers, aligning it with their physical readiness. This initiative underscores the importance and applicability of resilience training in high-stakes, real-world scenarios.
• 13:00 - 16:00: Conclusion The author reflects on their experience interacting with American Drill Sergeants who have returned from Afghanistan, noting them as a discerning audience. This interaction was inspiring because it aligned with the author's quest to bring scientific findings from academia into everyday life. The chapter concludes with the author finishing their studies in America and returning home to Christchurch to begin a new chapter in their life.

The three secrets of resilient people | Lucy Hone | TEDxChristchurch Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 So I'd like to start if I may, by asking you some questions. If you've ever lost someone you truly love, ever had your heart broken, ever struggled through an acrimonious
• 00:30 - 01:00 divorce or being the victim of infidelity, please stand up. If standing up is inaccessible to you, you can put your hand up, please stay standing and keep your hand up there. If you've ever lived through a natural disaster, been bullied, or been made redundant, stand on up. If you've ever had a miscarriage, if you've ever had an abortion or struggled through infertility, please stand up. Finally, if you or anyone you love
• 01:00 - 01:30 has had to cope with mental illness, dementia, some form of physical impairment or cope with suicide, please stand up. Look around you. Adversity doesn't discriminate. If you are alive, you are going to have to or you've already had to deal with some tough times. Thank you. Everyone takes seat.
• 01:30 - 02:00 I started studying resilience research a decade ago at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. It was an amazing time to be there because the professors who trained me had just picked up the contract to train all 1.1 million American soldiers to be as mentally fit as they always have been physically fit. As you can imagine, you
• 02:00 - 02:30 don't get a much more skeptical, discerning audience than the American Drill Sergeants returning from Afghanistan. So for someone like me, whose main quest in life is trying to work out how we take the best of scientific findings out of academia and bring them to people in their everyday lives, it was a pretty inspiring place to be. I finished my studies in America and I returned home here to Christchurch to start
• 02:30 - 03:00 my doctoral research. I'd just begun that study when the Christchurch earthquakes hit. So I put my research on hold and I started working with my home community to help them through that terrible post-quake period. I work with all sorts of organizations, from government departments to building companies and all sorts of community groups, teaching them the ways of thinking and acting that we know boost resilience. I thought
• 03:00 - 03:30 that was my calling my moment to put all of that research to good use. But sadly, I was wrong, for my own true test came in 2014 on Queen's Birthday weekend. We and two other families had decided to go down to Lake Ohau and bike. At the last minute, my beautiful twelve-year-old daughter Abby decided to hop in the car with her best
• 03:30 - 04:00 friend Ella, also 12, and Ella's mum Sally, a dear dear friend of mine. On the way down as they traveled on Thompson's track, a car sped through a stop sign, crashing into them and killing all three of them instantly. In the blink of an eye, I find myself flung to the other side of the equation, waking
• 04:00 - 04:30 up with a whole new identity. Instead of being the resilience expert, suddenly I'm the grieving mother, waking up not knowing who I am, trying to wrap my head around unthinkable news. My world smashed to smithereens. Suddenly I'm the one on the end of all this expert advice and I can tell you, I didn't like what I heard one little bit. In the days after Abby died we were told we were now prime candidates for family
• 04:30 - 05:00 estrangement, that we were likely to get divorced and we were at high risk of mental illness. Wow, I remember thinking, thanks for that. I thought my life was already pretty shit. Leaflets describe the five stages of grief. Anger, bargaining, denial, depression, acceptance. Victim support arrived at our door and told us that we could expect to
• 05:00 - 05:30 write off the next five years to grief. I know the leaflets and the resources meant well but in all of that advice they left us feeling like victims totally overwhelmed by the journey ahead and powerless to exert any influence over our grieving whatsoever. I didn't need to be told how bad things were. Believe me, I already knew things were truly terrible. What I needed most was hope. I needed a journey through all that
• 05:30 - 06:00 anguish, pain, and longing. Most of all, I wanted to be an active participant in my grief process so I decided to turn my back on their advice and decided instead to conduct something of a self experiment. I'd done the research. I had the tools. I wanted to know how useful they would be to me now, in the face of such an enormous
• 06:00 - 06:30 mountain to climb. Now I have to confess at this point I didn't really know any of this was going to work. Parental bereavement is widely acknowledged as the hardest of losses to bear. But I can tell you now five years on what I already knew from the research, that you can rise up from adversity, that there are strategies that work, that it is utterly possible to make yourself think and act in certain ways that help you navigate tough
• 06:30 - 07:00 times. There is a monumental body of research on how to do this stuff. Today I'm going to share three strategies with you. These are my go-to strategies that I relied upon and saved me in my darkest days. There are three strategies that underpin all of my work and they're pretty readily available to us all. Anyone can learn them, you can learn them right here today.
• 07:00 - 07:30 So number one: resilient people get that shit happens. They know that suffering is part of of life. This doesn't mean they actually welcome it in. They're not actually delusional. But when the tough times come they seem to know that suffering is part of every human existence. And knowing this stops you from feeling discriminated against
• 07:30 - 08:00 when the tough times come. Never once did I find myself thinking why me? In fact, I remember thinking why not me? Terrible things happen and to you just like they do everybody else. That's your life now. Time to sink or swim. The real tragedy is that not enough of us seem to know this any longer. We seem to live in an age where
• 08:00 - 08:30 we're entitled to a perfect life where shiny happy photos on Instagram are the norm when actually as you all demonstrated at the start of my talk, the very opposite is true. Number two: resilient people are really good at choosing carefully where they select their attention. They have a habit of realistically appraising situations and managing to focus on the things
• 08:30 - 09:00 that they can change and somehow accept the things that they can't. This is a vital, learnable skill for resilience. As humans, we are really good at noticing threats and weaknesses. We are hard-wired for that negative - we really, really good at noticing them. Negative emotions stick
• 09:00 - 09:30 to us like velcro, whereas positive emotions and experiences seem to bounce off like teflon. Being wired in this way is actually really good for us and served us well from an evolutionary perspective. So imagine for a moment I'm a cave woman and I'm coming out of my cave in the morning and there's a saber-toothed tiger on one side
• 09:30 - 10:00 and a beautiful rainbow on the other. It kind of pays for my survival for me to notice this tiger. The problem is we now live in an era where we are constantly bombarded by threats all day long. And our poor brains treat every single one of those threats as though they were a tiger. Our threat focus, our stress response is permanently dialed up. Resilient people don't diminish the negative - but they also have worked out a way of tuning into the good.
• 10:00 - 10:30 One day when doubts were threatening to overwhelm me I distinctly remember thinking "No, you do not get to get swallowed up by this. You have to survive. You've got so much to live for. Choose life not death. Don't lose what you have to what you have lost." In psychology, we call this benefit-finding. In my brave new world it
• 10:30 - 11:00 involved trying to find things to be grateful for. At least our wee girl hadn't died of some terrible, long, drawn-out illness. She died suddenly, instantly, sparing us and her that pain. We had a huge amount of social support from family and friends to help us through. And most of all, we still had
• 11:00 - 11:30 two beautiful boys to live for, who needed us now and deserve to have as normal a life as we could possibly give them. Being able to switch the focus of your attention to also include the good has been shown by science to be a really powerful strategy. So in 2005, Marty Seligman and colleagues conducted an experiment and they asked people to think of three good things
• 11:30 - 12:00 that had happened to them each day. What they found over the six months of this study was that those people showed higher levels of gratitude, higher levels of happiness, and less depression over the course of the six-month study. When you're going through grief, you might need a reminder, or you might need permission to feel grateful. In our kitchen, we've got a bright pink neon poster that reminds us to accept the
• 12:00 - 12:30 good. In the American Army, they framed it a little differently. They talked to the army about hunting the good stuff. Find the language that works for you, but whatever you do, make an intentional, deliberate, ongoing effort to tune into what's good in your world. Number three: resilient people ask themselves "Is what I'm doing helping or harming me?" This is a question that's used a lot in good therapy and boy is it powerful.
• 12:30 - 13:00 This was my go-to question in the days after the girls died. I would ask it again and again. Should I go to the trial and see the driver? Would that help me or would it harm me? Well, that was a no-brainer me. I chose to stay away but Trevor, my husband, decided to meet with the driver at a later time. Late at night I'd find myself sometimes
• 13:00 - 13:30 pouring over old photos of Abby, getting more and more upset. I'd ask myself "Really? Is this helping you or is it harming you? Put away the photos, go to bed for the night, be kind to yourself." This question can be applied to so many different contexts. Is the way you're thinking and acting, helping or harming you in your bid to get that promotion, to pass that
• 13:30 - 14:00 exam, to recover from a heart attack, so many different ways. I write a lot about resilience and over the years, this one strategy has prompted more positive feedback than any other. I get scores of letters and emails and things from all over the place of people saying what a huge impact it's had on their lives, whether it is forgiving family transgressions, arguments from Christmases past, and whether it is just trolling
• 14:00 - 14:30 through social media, whether it is asking yourself whether you really need that extra glass of wine. Asking yourself whether what you're doing, the way you're thinking, the way you're acting is helping or harming you puts you back in the driver's seat. It gives you some control over your decision making. Three strategies. Pretty simple.
• 14:30 - 15:00 They're readily available to us all, anytime, anywhere. They don't require rocket science. Resilience isn't some fixed trait. It's not that some people have it and some people don't. It's actually requires very ordinary processes. Just the willingness to give them a go. I think we all have moments in life where our life path splits and the journey
• 15:00 - 15:30 we thought we were going down veers off to some terrible direction that we never anticipated and we certainly didn't want. It happened to me. It was awful beyond imagining. If you ever find yourselves in a situation where you think "There's no way I'm coming back from this," I urge you to lean into these strategies and think again.
• 15:30 - 16:00 I won't pretend that thinking this way is easy. And it doesn't remove all the pain. But if I've learned anything over the last five years, it is that thinking this way really does help. More than anything. It has shown me that it is possible to live and grieve at the same time. And for that, I will always be grateful. Thank you.