Kate Bartolotta: Four Things That Make the Difference BetweenSurviving and Thriving

By Kate Bartolotta

What makes the difference between people who get knocked down by life and stay down, and those who get back up?

In his book The Resiliency Advantage, Al Siebert wrote that:

... highly resilient people are flexible, adapt to new circumstances quickly, and thrive in constant change. Most important, they expect to bounce back and feel confident that they will. They have a knack for creating good luck out of circumstances that many others see as bad luck.

While defining the characteristics of highly resilient people is helpful, what habits can we cultivate to strengthen our ability to respond to the difficult parts of life?

We cannot change our innate personalities. We cannot change how we were parented. We also cannot choose many of the circumstances we will encounter in our lives. In light of those things we cannot change, it makes sense that we would do everything in our power to choose habits that will serve to strengthen our ability to bounce back in difficult times.

The following habits can make the difference between getting up in the morning to face the day when life gets hard and wanting to crawl back under the covers:

1. Choose connection.

It can be tough to reach out when we are going through difficult times -- even if we crave connection. For those of us who tend to be introverted, it can be even more difficult.

Like all of the physical and mental resilience factors, this is a habit that we can cultivate; like building muscle, it gets stronger the more we do it. We don't have to become extroverted social butterflies to reap these benefits. Reaching out to a single friend or family member on a regular basis to touch in about how things are going is sufficient.

In our social media-saturated world, it might seem like this isn't an area that needs work, but consider how short and often superficial these interactions can be. Making the effort to have a genuine connection with a few friends or family members on a regular basis can help create that habit, so that when things are hard, it's already second nature to reach out instead of collapsing inward.

It will also help in difficult times, because those you are connected with will be in the habit of checking in with you and may notice you've withdrawn.

2. Be present.

Our brains have an area called the "default mode network." We are in this mode when we are distractedly thinking about the future, or re-hashing a conversation we had yesterday.

While entering into this distracted default mode may sometimes be helpful for creative inspiration, too much time functioning at this default mode level keeps us from being fully present and engaged with what's going on.

Constantly being in this state of self-referential examination can make us unhappy -- if not neurotic.

One simple activity that can help us find balance here is developing a meditation practice. When we practice stilling our minds and being present, we shift from default mode and experience greater focus, even when not meditating.

3. Be positive.

This doesn't mean becoming an idealistic Pollyanna or just wishing your troubles away.

What it does mean is choosing to look for the good in life and cultivating gratitude.

Studies indicate that those with a spiritual practice reap physical and emotional benefits from having faith. This doesn't mean that you need to start going to your church or synagogue in order to be emotionally resilient, but connecting with others and a higher power is a huge boost for many people.

For those who don't feel drawn toward a particular spiritual path, belief in the goodness of humankind and having hope may have similar effects. Einstein may have said it best, "The single most important decision any of us will ever to make is whether or not to believe that the universe is friendly."

4. Give back.

The choice to give back and be of benefit to others and the world strengthens us as well.

Recent research shows that even practicing small acts of kindness raises levels of the neurotransmitter serotonin in the body as well as boosting the immune system.

As with number one on this list, when we feel connected to the greater whole of humanity, we strengthen our own ability to respond to life with resilience.

On a final note, another piece of emotional resilience is being gentle to ourselves.

Being emotionally resilient doesn't mean that we keep our chins up and paste on a smile when we feel rotten. It's okay not to feel okay.

Choosing these habits that help keep us connected can make the difference between having a "not okay" day and a "not okay" year.

If we can cultivate habits that create resilience during low stress times, we will have a greater chance of accessing them when things are difficult.

David Rock: Managing with the Brain in Mind

Neuroscience research is revealing the social nature of the high-performance workplace.

by David Rock

 

Illustration by Leigh Wells

Naomi Eisenberger, a leading social neuroscience researcher at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), wanted to understand what goes on in the brain when people feel rejected by others.

She designed an experiment in which volunteers played a computer game called Cyberball while having their brains scanned by a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine.

Cyberball hearkens back to the nastiness of the school playground. “People thought they were playing a ball-tossing game over the Internet with two other people,” Eisenberger explains. “They could see an avatar that represented themselves, and avatars [ostensibly] for two other people. Then, about halfway through this game of catch among the three of them, the subjects stopped receiving the ball and the two other supposed players threw the ball only to each other.”

Even after they learned that no other human players were involved, the game players spoke of feeling angry, snubbed, or judged, as if the other avatars excluded them because they didn’t like something about them.

This reaction could be traced directly to the brain’s responses. “When people felt excluded,” says Eisenberger, “we saw activity in the dorsal portion of the anterior cingulate cortex — the neural region involved in the distressing component of pain, or what is sometimes referred to as the ‘suffering’ component of pain. Those people who felt the most rejected had the highest levels of activity in this region.” In other words, the feeling of being excluded provoked the same sort of reaction in the brain that physical pain might cause. (See Exhibit 1.)

Eisenberger’s fellow researcher Matthew Lieberman, also of UCLA, hypothesizes that human beings evolved this link between social connection and physical discomfort within the brain “because, to a mammal, being socially connected to caregivers is necessary for survival.” This study and many others now emerging have made one thing clear: The human brain is a social organ. Its physiological and neurological reactions are directly and profoundly shaped by social interaction. Indeed, as Lieberman puts it, “Most processes operating in the background when your brain is at rest are involved in thinking about other people and yourself.”

This presents enormous challenges to managers. Although a job is often regarded as a purely economic transaction, in which people exchange their labor for financial compensation, the brain experiences the workplace first and foremost as a social system.

Like the experiment participants whose avatars were left out of the game, people who feel betrayed or unrecognized at work — for example, when they are reprimanded, given an assignment that seems unworthy, or told to take a pay cut — experience it as a neural impulse, as powerful and painful as a blow to the head. Most people who work in companies learn to rationalize or temper their reactions; they “suck it up,” as the common parlance puts it.

But they also limit their commitment and engagement. They become purely transactional employees, reluctant to give more of themselves to the company, because the social context stands in their way.

Leaders who understand this dynamic can more effectively engage their employees’ best talents, support collaborative teams, and create an environment that fosters productive change. Indeed, the ability to intentionally address the social brain in the service of optimal performance will be a distinguishing leadership capability in the years ahead.

Triggering the Threat Response

One critical thread of research on the social brain starts with the “threat and reward” response, a neurological mechanism that governs a great deal of human behavior.

When you encounter something unexpected — a shadow seen from the corner of your eye or a new colleague moving into the office next door — the limbic system (a relatively primitive part of the brain, common to many animals) is aroused.

 Neuroscientist Evian Gordon refers to this as the “minimize danger, maximize reward” response; he calls it “the fundamental organizing principle of the brain.”

Neurons are activated and hormones are released as you seek to learn whether this new entity represents a chance for reward or a potential danger. If the perception is danger, then the response becomes a pure threat response — also known as the fight or flight response, the avoid response, and, in its extreme form, the amygdala hijack, named for a part of the limbic system that can be aroused rapidly and in an emotionally overwhelming way.

For more, go to:

http://www.strategy-business.com/article/09306?gko=5df7f

On Social Neuroscience

I'm now reading Leonard Mlodinow's Subliminal How Your Unconcious Mind Rules Your Behavior (recommended). In it he mentions the relatively new field of Social Neuroscience.

From Wiki:

Social neuroscience is an interdisciplinary field devoted to understanding how biological systems implement social processes and behavior, and to using biological concepts and methods to inform and refine theories of social processes and behavior.

Humans are fundamentally a social species, rather than individualists. As such, Homo sapiens create emergent organizations beyond the individual—structures that range from dyads, families, and groups to cities, civilizations, and cultures.

These emergent structures evolved hand-in-hand with neural and hormonal mechanisms to support them because the consequent social behaviors helped these organisms survive, reproduce, and care for offspring sufficiently long that they too survived to reproduce.

The term "social neuroscience" can be traced to a publication entitled "Social Neuroscience Bulletin" that was published quarterly between 1988 and 1994. The term was subsequently popularized in an article by John Cacioppo and Gary Berntson, published in the American Psychologist in 1992.

Cacioppo and Berntson are considered as the legitimate fathers of social neuroscience. Still a young field, social neuroscience is closely related to affective neuroscience and cognitive neuroscience, focusing on how the brain mediates social interactions.

Traditional neuroscience has for many years considered the nervous system as an isolated entity and largely ignored influences of the social environments in which humans and many animal species live.

In fact, we now recognize the considerable impact of social structures on the operations of the brain and body. These social factors operate on the individual through a continuous interplay of neural, neuroendocrine, metabolic and immune factors on brain and body, in which the brain is the central regulatory organ, and also a malleable target of these factors.

Social neuroscience investigates the biological mechanisms that underlie social processes and behavior, widely considered one of the major problem areas for the neurosciences in the 21st century, and applies concepts and methods of biology to develop theories of social processes and behavior in the social and behavioral sciences.

Social neuroscience capitalizes on biological concepts and methods to inform and refine theories of social behavior, and it uses social and behavioral constructs and data to advance theories of neural organization and function.

Throughout most of the 20th century, social and biological explanations were widely viewed as incompatible. But advances in recent years have led to the development of a new approach synthesized from the social and biological sciences.

The new field of social neuroscience emphasizes the complementary relationship between the different levels of organization, spanning the social and biological domains (e.g., molecular, cellular, system, person, relational, collective, societal) and the use of multi-level analyses to foster understanding of the mechanisms underlying the human mind and behavior.


YouTube video on the book:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJ-IfVHJH58