This book is dedicated to all those who have helped produce resiliency in me. Thanks to those of you who were strong enough to watch me fail, but refused to step in to “protect” me from learning the difficult lessons. Thanks to those of you who were patient with me as I was failing and discovering how to get back on my feet. And a special thanks to those of you who loved me and supported me through the process of change. Your support has allowed me to succeed. (And your stories made this book more interesting).
Special thanks to: My wife, Amanda. You put up with my incessant need to discover things for myself. You continually allow me the space and time to learn and grow and develop in so many ways. Thanks for being my partner in everything. My daughter, Hope. You have helped me learn more about love in your short life than I had experienced in the 31 years prior. You give me joy and purpose every day. My pastor, Doug Rhind. Your leadership has meant more to me than you will ever know. I am the pastor, writer, leader, husband and father I am today because of what you have invested in my life. It’s my privilege to serve on your team.
Table of Contents Introduction………………………………………...................................................................... 2 Section 1 - Resiliency of the Mind I. What Happens When You Tell Yourself You Can’t...…........... 10 II. Believing in Small Successes ………………….......................................... 18 III. Bruised Psyche ………………………………......................................................... 24 Section 2 - Resiliency of the Body I. The Over Medicated Society ……...…………............................................. 32 II. Japanese Pitching Coaches …………………............................................. 37 Section 3 - Relational Resiliency I. What Happens When We Date, Break-Up and Repeat....... 42 II. Teaching Your Kids Resiliency ……........................................…….....…. 48 III. The Goalie Pads ………………………….............................................................. 53 Section 4 - Financial Resiliency Young Adults - You Weren’t Rich. . .Your Parents Were.......... 58 Conclusion: Don’t Do It Alone …………………………………..................................
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Failure is one of life’s greatest teachers. The ability to get back up after a fall produces character and perseverance. It also produces a lot of sprained ankles and skinned knees.
Introduction "A righteous person may fall seven times, but he gets up again. However, in a disaster wicked people fall." Proverbs 24:16 Men are driven by competition and goals. Granted, many of these goals are childish and pointless; they are goals nonetheless. If there is something to be conquered, we will set aside life in order to go after it. We will let work, relationships and household responsibilities suffer because we are going after a challenge we have deemed worthy of conquering. Some want to learn a new skill, others want win the girl’s heart or get the big job. It’s the caveman instinct within us that wants to club something into submission and drag it home as our prize. Then we can say, “Look what I can do!” Helen Fischer is an anthropologist and professor from Rutgers who suggests that male and female brains differ in their level of connectedness. The female brain will connect more feelings to thought processes, which will typically make them more people oriented or experience oriented. The male brain is much less fluid, and results in men thinking more singularly about things, giving them the ability to be much more goal oriented. "The two brain hemispheres are less well connected in men than in women. This gives men the ability to focus on one thing at a time and be very goal oriented, whereas the female brain is built to assimilate many feelings at once, and to connect sex and love much more rapidly."1 For me, it’s sports. A few years ago I decided (quite arbitrarily actually) that I should run a marathon. It was in the midst of a casual mid-winter lunchroom conversation at work where we were complaining about summer road closures due to area races that I decided that I wanted to be part of that problem. Right then and there I began a journey towards completing the Mississauga Marathon. (Which coincidentally is a much nicer course than the Toronto,
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run on the same weekend, and is less traffic problematic as much of the course is on a trail instead of a downtown street. Though it is possible I am biased.) I’m not sure how much you know about preparing oneself for a marathon, but just in case you’re unenlightened, it involves a lot of running. A lot. Like really, a lot. For three months, the answer to, “What do you want to do on Saturday?” is, “Run. I’ll be back before noon though.” Over the course of training you will completely mangle your once beautiful feet to the point where they are calloused, blistered and possibly missing a toenail or two. You will have the pleasure of introducing yourself to a product called “nipple tape”, because up until this point in your life you never realized that that your nipples could bleed. You’ll discover that the indigestion you once thought was only possible from downing a plate of deep fried cheese appetizers can’t hold a candle to what happens inside your stomach after bouncing up and down for 3 hours. And remember, for me this is all in the name of completing a goal I set out before myself quite haphazardly over lunch. I was three months into my training and had moved into the taper phase, where you allow your legs to rest and heal, so that on race day you can perform at your peak. My race was only 7 days away when, during a rec league indoor soccer game (part of another goal of learning a new sport in my thirties), I stepped on the ball and sprained my ankle quite badly. The months of training in isolation and pain endured while I was pushing my body to new physical limits all flashed through my mind as I lay on that turf, ankle raised, already starting to try to compress the injury to avoid swelling. I booked an appointment with my physiotherapist the next day and asked him to give me the bad news about how there was no way I could race on the weekend after sustaining an injury like this. I’ll never forget the advice he gave me that day. He explained to me that for most injuries we use RICE (rest, ice, compression and elevation). It minimizes immediate pain, and allows the injury to heal itself naturally over time. However the moment you want to start using that muscle again, there is an immense amount of pain and very little strength because we haven’t allowed any blood flow to that part of the body. Immediate usage of the injured muscle and blood
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flow will actually speed up recovery, but there will be some pain associated with it. Basically we can choose to avoid all use of this muscle, and over the course of a long time we will hopefully be able to use it again, or we utilize focused strength training of the injured area that can allow for a much more rapid recovery, as well as giving us confidence that we can reuse that injured area. That week I did one legged calf raises while holding weight on my sprained ankle, forcing my ankle to stretch itself, rebuilding muscle, yet also psychologically convincing myself that I could use that muscle. That weekend I completed the marathon in 3:26:15 and even carried my daughter on my shoulders for a short section of the run. My ankle was a little purple at the end, showing the scars of the battle, but my body had won the victory. Resiliency is the ability to get back up after falling, and keep moving forward towards the goal. It’s fascinating how vastly we differ in our ability to recover and restart. Siblings raised in the same home, fed the same food, given the same kind of care and advantages, have been shown to respond completely opposite when faced with adversity. We see opposite levels of resilience within the same culture and nationality and gender and age. In fact although there are so many factors that play into the development of a person’s resilience, there is no way to identify one or two determinant things that make or break their ability to recover. But make no mistake, discovering these factors that develop a person’s ability to get back up after a fall is crucially important.
“It is maintained that resilience is what determines the happiness and longevity of our relationships, our success at work, and the quality of our health. More than any other factor in the scheme of emotional intelligence, resilience is what determines how high we rise above what threatens to wear us down.” 2
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The thing that sets resiliency apart from any other skill is rooted in human imperfection. Each of us is flawed with shortcomings. None of us is immune to experiencing failure. Some of us actually feel much more prone to failing than others, but regardless of ability, we all will go through times when things don’t go our way.
A successful person is not defined by their success; they are defined by how successfully they respond to failure. The most wonderful finding in resilience studies over the years is that it is not genetic. It’s not something that we are either born with or not, it’s a skill that is developed over time and can be nurtured. It’s something that anyone at any point in their lives can start to experiment with his or her own personal level or resilience, and start to increase their ability to bounce back from defeat. The very laws of nature teach us that we were uniquely designed to bounce back.
Newton’s 3rd Law: For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.
As hard as you have failed, you were designed to rebound and succeed with that same amount of force. However in this broken world we are repeatedly discovering that human beings who should be able to recover, simply are not.
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We fail in relationships It seems that relationships are more difficult today than they used to be. All around us, couples are breaking up because they’re experiencing what they feel to be irreconcilable differences. Is it possible that relationship issues have not actually become more difficult, but our ability to make a relationship endure through difficult times, and stay intact, has decreased? Maybe we just give up on each other too quickly. Relational resiliency has the power to turn the trend of disposable dating and marriage relationships, and result in couples that get together and stay together. We Get Emotionally Stuck Life naturally throws us challenges and curve balls, and we experience disappointment or even hurt. While we continue to advance in age, our emotional and psychological growth is stunted, getting stuck at the age and place where the hurt originally occurred. Resilience is the key factor in guiding a person through the healing process with the ability to move ahead with confidence. A resilient mindset has the ability to examine thought patterns and habits that tend to limit a person’s ability to move forward from challenging life experiences. Focusing on the messages we give ourselves on a daily basis is critical to resiliency. Our Bodies Break Down The average elderly Canadian person is currently taking 15 different medications 3. You would think that, in a society that has come so far in our understanding ofgood health habits and nutrition, our need for medication for would be decreasing instead of increasing. But in spite of the knowledge available to us, our lifestyles and health care system train us to require medications to maintain a life we may not even desire, if we were to examine an alternative. Your body was
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designed to be naturally resilient without the need for regular medical intervention. We might just require an adjustment in the way we understand a “need” for pharmacology and medication instead of focusing on building natural stamina and resilience from within. We’re Broke and In Debt I wrote this book on one of the 3 laptops in my home, and reviewed it on one of the 5 personal devices that the three members of my family share. My Canadian middle class status makes me one of the 1% richest in the world, yet all around I see friends who are in debt, more than they can manage, and unsure of what changes they would need to make to reverse their trend. They’re financially stuck and hopeless. Financial resiliency gives a stuck, hopeless person a mindset that will allow them to build wealth and recover, rather than continually accruing more debt and more defeat. Because resiliency is a learned process, something that anyone can develop, the best news is that there is hope for us all when we deal with any or all of these kinds of situations. The balance of this book will examine how you and I can grow our resiliency, and help to identify patterns that might be working against us. Watty Piper had it right all those years ago when he gave us that wonderful piece of literary history, “The Little Engine That Could”. The tiny train lived in the same station as the big engines and heard the same messages that they all did. There was just something inside of him that helped him determine that he was able to do the very thing that no one seemed able or interested in doing. If we invested as much time and energy improving our situations as we did complaining about the things that have gone wrong, who knows what kinds of amazing things we would be able to accomplish. You’ve probably picked up this booked wondering if there is any way that you’ll be able to get past a certain mountain you're facing in your own life right now. We live in such an immediate society. Almost anything we want, we can get within the scope of a
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matter of seconds. We can use search engines to get information that once required an encyclopaedia or a discussion with a wise friend. We can instantly video chat with a friend who lives on the other side of the world, who is days of travel away from us. That was a novelty that was once reserved for people in sci-fi movies. We eat giant red strawberries in Canada in January because we aren't limited to eating only food grown within our region of the world. We have customized our world to the point where we feel we deserve to get what we want immediately. Things may work this way, but people sure don’t. We can’t manipulate a feeling of defeat away with the click of a phone. We can’t “right a relationship” or forget about an offense we’ve experienced from a loved one with a delete button. It requires time, effort, and resiliency. You can bounce back; it just may take some work. Even poor Humpty Dumpty could have made it back if all those negative people and animals surrounding him hadn’t given up so quickly. Just because you didn’t get there today, doesn’t mean you won’t ever get there. Picking up this book may be your first step in figuring out how to run your own life marathon on a wonky ankle.
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Not everyone who tells themselves they can, does. But be sure that no one who tells themselves that they can’t will ever do.
Section 1 - Resiliency of the Mind I. What Happens When You Tell Yourself You Can’t My daughter played on a soccer team that had a lot of fun, but wasn’t very good. In fact two months into the season, our team had 0 wins, 6 losses and 2 ties. On this particular evening, the score was 1-1 at the half, and our coach used the alltime motivational method of “taking you all out for ice cream if we win this game” strategy. I’m convinced that there is no defence against a team who has been promised ice cream if they can win. Despite our team’s inferior skill, size and overall soccer aptitude compared to the rest of the league, these girls put together a second half of soccer that was one goal better than that daunted “Team Pink”. Our team won by a final score of 2-1, sending us all off to McDonalds for sundaes. The coach raved about how hard the girls had worked all year, and how they deserved this win, and it left everyone feeling pretty good about themselves. That was the only team we beat all year. During another game later in the season, our team was struggling, but being encouraged by our ever positive minded coach. The other team was dominating, but being berated by the ogre who stood behind their sidelines. The opposing coach yelled at the girls as they came off the field for the half. "I need soccer players out there, and all I’m getting is a bunch of princesses.” This made me laugh, particularly because I imagine that if the girls were given the choice, many of them WOULD be at a princess party instead of this soccer game. Soccer is great, but in the mind of many 8-year-old girls, Kara Lang doesn’t hold a candle to Elsa and Anna. This coach spent the second half yelling at “Amanda”. I’ll never forget a statement my 8-year-old daughter made that night after losing that game by a good margin. She walked off the field and said, “Boy I’m sure glad I’m not Amanda.” Remember that Amanda was on the winning team. The last time we won, winning equaled ice cream. Chocolate gold. Heaven in a cone. But all my daughter could think was that being yelled at, and told how poorly she was playing, was far worse punishment than defaulting on an ice cream reward.
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Being told that we “can’t”, or reminded that we’ve failed, is a pretty terrible experience. No one likes to hear that kind of criticism from someone else who has been watching their efforts. Yet there is a large percentage of our society who put themselves through this torture when they start to believe for themselves that they can’t, and give themselves this kind of demotivating negative self-talk. They tell themselves they’re not good enough, that they’re not smart enough, or that there is something about who they are, that will limit their ability to be successful. They see a task that many others seem able to complete, but they convince themselves that their own attempt would fail. Their logic is that some are able, and others are not. While it's true that there are some instances when one individual processes skills or abilities that their peer does not, this is a dangerous course of thought for anyone hoping to break through with resiliency. Kinesiology professor at Penn State, Vladimir Zatsiorsky, teaches that the general population of human beings use approximately 65% of their strength. Under acute stress or fear, our central nervous system can drastically increase the amount of cortisol (cortisol will increase our blood sugar level and limit the effects of our immune system) and adrenaline, allowing our bodies to accomplish feats we never could under regular circumstances. Zatsiorsky worked with body builders, and discovered that with extreme concentration, they were able to train their focus to an intensity level that mimicked some of the factors common to threatening situations like stress and fear, allowing them to achieve what he calls “maximal strength”4. Maximal strength allowed them to lift weights utilizing 80% of their absolute strength. He surmises that this is why many records are broken during Olympic games, where the pressure is the greatest, rather than at smaller meets, and in practice, where the factors required to achieve maximal strength aren’t present. While figuring out how to increase your max bench press may not be all that important for you, it’s the premise that is important. Our bodies are very capable of doing almost double of what they are currently doing, if we are able to convince ourselves that we need to do it. Even under extreme focus, there is still
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twenty percent more that we were able to achieve. Our cortisol levels limit a person such that we don’t over exert ourselves on a regular basis and create injuries. But the segment of people who seem to deliver the greatest results have discovered that amazing things happen when you focus in strongly, and truly believe that “yes they can”. The logic that some are able and others are not, is simply illogical. Sadly the converse is true for too many people. When they believe they can’t, every last bit of energy is sapped from their bodies. Think back to the last difficult task that you failed to complete. I’ll bet that it was the moment that you consciously decided that you were unable to keep going that you gave up. Doesn’t that seem backwards?
Shouldn’t it be in the moment after a failure that we realize we weren’t able rather than vice-versa? But the majority of us tell ourselves in our heads that this task is too hard, and that’s when our thoughts become reality. The TV show Survivor on CBS television is a master at creating immunity challenges where contestants are forced to test their personal limits of will and stamina. They have to balance in the hot sun for hours on a log, or body hug a pole with mere inchwide footrests as their only method to stabilize themselves. The one who holds on the longest has a better chance to win the million, because they will be immune from being voted off the show that week.
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Routinely, it’s not the one who is physically strongest who wins these challenges, but the one who demonstrates the great level of focus who is able to holds. As long as they tell themselves they are able, they are able. In season 30 of Survivor, there were two competitors that made it to the last few days. Mike was an oil worker from Texas. He was tall and strong, but didn’t have near the muscles of Rodney, the construction worker from Boston. Early in the game, Mike’s strong work ethic began to wear on people, and they got irritated with him. Mike became isolated from the other friendships, and eventually completely lost the trust of the other players with his gameplay, leading the group to decide that Mike would be the one to get voted out next. For more than 10 days they were waiting for a chance to vote Mike out, but every time there was a vote scheduled, Mike won the immunity challenge, and was prevented from being voted off. One specific challenge came down to Mike and Rodney holding their own body weight as they leaned back on a platform. Rodney had less weight to hold, and more muscle mass with which to hold it. It seemed like the perfect showdown for the stronger person to prevail. However Mike knew that if he dropped his rope, or slipped off the platform, his game was over. Just before the challenge ended, Rodney looked over at the host Jeff Probst and said, “I don’t got it no more.” (Poetic isn’t it?). Mike’s mind gave him the ability to win 5 of the last 6 challenges, and eventually win 1 million dollars as prize money. Mike won without physical superiority. Mike won with a resilient mind. Dr. Norman Vincent Peale started this journey for us in 1952 with his “Power of Positive Thinking”. Peale reminds us, “Our happiness depends on the habit of mind we cultivate.”5 If we believe that we are able to solve our problems, and find success, in the end, we have a happy experience. If we believe that many situations are out of our control, and therefore present constant threats for us, we live in a much more fearful place. And while there are many situations that are indeed beyond our control, focusing too much attention on these thoughts distracts us from seeing other positive outcomes or enjoyable experiences going on around us. Suppose, for example, you are out for a walk with someone you love in the middle of a sunny day, on a long weekend. Everything you are experiencing
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is helping to create rest and enjoyment. Suddenly a dangerous animal crosses your path, threatening you, and all the rest and enjoyment you’ve been experiencing. Our brains are hard wired to respond in fight or flight, moving blood from our extremities, and focusing solely on the threat. We experience a degree of tunnel vision, fixating on this threat, while the rest of the surroundings start to blur. We will not recover from this state until we have fought off the predator or escaped to safety. It no longer matters what kind of day it is, or whom you are with; all you experience is fear. Would the feelings you experience be different if the scary beast you encountered was not a coyote or a bear, but instead it was a spider? A spider is still a creature that is threatening to many people, yet one they can easily conquer. You’d courageously stomp on that little intruder, and continue to enjoy the beautiful day with your loved one. Our understanding of how much danger we were in completely changes our ability to enjoy our day. The important thing to realize is that neither the day, the beautiful surroundings nor the people involved changed. The only thing that changed was the perceived level of threat. Many of us walk around our dayto-day lives with an elevated level of perceived threat. We have tasks at work, or relationships in our lives, that appear threatening. We feel that these things have the potential to make our day very difficult. The level of threat that we perceive may be severely limiting our ability to enjoy the other parts of our day. How many times have we let one negative thing impact our enjoyment of multiple other things presently going on? B arbara Frederickson did a study to show how negative emotions limited our brain’s capacity. She split a test group into 5 groups, exposing each test group to different film clips. Group 1 saw films that helped them experience joy. Group 2 saw films that expressed contentment. Group 3 was neutral, Group 4 was shown films that made them fearful and group 5 saw films that made them angry. Following the films, all participants were given a piece of paper with 20 blanks lines and the heading at the top that said, “I would like to…”. The results revealed that the people who were exposed to the more positive feelings were able to come up with many more answers than those exposed to films that
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made them angry or afraid6. The mere exposure to fear and anger, even through movies that had no real potential threat to a person, significantly limited brain activity and creativity. Our brains just don’t work as well when we’re afraid. Waking up every day with an uncertainty of whether or not we are able to meet the challenges that our life will ask of us is definitely a fearinducing thought. And this is no film; this is your life. We’ve already seen how you have capabilities within in you that you are currently not using. What if you were able to access these capabilities in order to start to achieve things you never thought were possible? Every one of us will experience failure. Not every one of us will be defeated by this failure. Some use failure as their teacher for how to succeed next time; others use it as a reminder of why they will fail again. Lebron James and the Miami Heat made the NBA final in 2010. It was the first year that three superstars, James, Chris Bosh and Dwayne Wade played together. The now infamous television event on ESPN “The Decision” set James and his colleagues off to claim that they were going to win “Not 1, not 2, not 3 not 4, not 5, not 6, not 7” but even more NBA championships. Yet in that first championship experience, James and his team lost to the Dallas Mavericks, a team with fewer wins during the regular season, and fewer superstars on their roster. The basketball world laughed that Lebron was right. His team didn’t win 1,2,3,4,5,6 or 7 championships. They won none. James was deemed a turncoat for leaving his home state, and a failure for being unable to win the big game, even though he had recruited an All-Star team to join him in Miami. It was that summer following the loss that James worked harder than any summer previous to develop a new facet to his game, learning how to play close to the basket in the post rather than just out by the three-point line. He had previously done most of his work starting behind the three-point line, taking a jump shot, or driving to the basket. Now Lebron became efficient starting with the ball a mere 10 feet from the basket, increasing his shot efficiency. He increased his field goal percentage the following years from .510 to .531. The year after he shot .5657. In both of those years, James and the Heat won the NBA championship. He used his failure and perceived threats as opportunities to learn something that would give him success. The ability was always there
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within
within him; he just needed something to teach him how to access it. All of us have experienced failures over the course of our lives. We invest effort, energy, time and passion and we still seem to fall short. These are the crucial moments for building resiliency, we are down and quite possibly wounded (physically or emotionally). There isn’t a lot within us motivating us to get back up and try to do again the very thing that we just proved to the world we were unable to do. Failure is screaming at us from within, “See I told you that you couldn’t do it.” Or maybe it isn't. Maybe it has in the past, but what if you could train yourself to hear a different side of what failure is trying to say? Maybe failure is trying to say,” Thanks for coming to class today. I hope what we learned will be useful for you next time.” The ability to reframe a failure, from a threat to a lesson, is the difference between being resilient or not. Your worst days simply become your best teachers. People who bomb the big interview because they were nervous and unprepared can learn two lessons. They can learn that they choke under pressure, or they can learn that before the next interview they should get practice answering the kind of potential questions they might face from someone who could make them feel nervous. Doing it a few times in practice will give them the ability to perform well under pressure. People who selfdestruct in a relationship because they are afraid of commitment can come to one of two conclusions. 1 - they can determine that hey will always be fearful of commitment and are probably not cut out to be in a long term relationship or 2 they can discover that, before their next relationship, they should dig into the root of that fear, and become a healthy individual, before they try to become a healthy partner in a committed relationship. One is resilient; the other is not. The stories that we tell ourselves about why things are happening the way they are, become critically important. Failure that we reframe into a teacher helps us develop
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develop resiliency. All other failure is left as a threat, just like the wild animal spoiling our nice walk on the long weekend. Without trying to minimize the complexity of every issue we face, a lot of our success or failure comes down to whether or not we believe that we are able to do it. When we tell ourselves we can’t, we really can’t. When we tell ourselves we can, we at least have a fighting chance.
There is no great accomplishment that can’t be broken in to a continued series of small, much less impressive accomplishments.
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II. Believing in Small Successes
There is no great accomplishment that can’t be broken in to a continued series of small, much less impressive accomplishments. In the interest of full disclosure, I am a morning person. Ever since that magical wonderful day when I became a parent, sleeping past any time that doesn’t begin with a 5 or a 6 became a pipedream, and after a few years you just learn to embrace it. Now even as our daughter will sleep later, I’m up with the sun and out for a run, or curled up on the couch writing. Even when I’m on holidays, a 7:00 o’clock sleep in is a rare accomplishment for Pete’s sake. Something drives me to want to accomplish something for myself in my very first hours of the day. I know that sounds very unspiritual for a pastor because I think we are all supposed to read the Bible first thing in the morning. I have heard many people quote Psalm 5:3 and teach about how morning Bible reading is more spiritual than Bible reading at other times of the day. While I do understand the theory in part, as it frames your day with scripture, I have a slightly altered view of this. I do agree that we should try to accomplish “something” with our first moments of the day that will help frame the day for us. In fact your choices in the first 30-60 minutes of each day go a long way in writing the story you will tell yourself for the course of the rest of your waking hours. When I go for a run when I get up, I tell myself I am an athlete. I'm healthy. I move on to the next task feeling like I’m in shape and in control of my body. When I get up and write before doing anything else, I start to tell myself that I’m creative, funny, and maybe have a few nuggets of wisdom to pass on. Imagine how I conduct myself in my meetings and interactions with others throughout the day when I am telling myself I am in shape and smart. I have confidence and energy that I otherwise may not have. When we get up and tell ourselves we’re too tired and slow to get much done, we start to paint a different picture of who we believe we are. We tell ourselves we were up too late or partied really hard last night. We tell ourselves we don’t have the energy to do what
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what we would like to do. Compare that mindset for an important meeting at work, or an interaction with your family, to that of the person who believes that they are in control, in shape and smart. The first choices you make in your morning have the capability to empower you or derail the way you view every other interaction in your day. Not everyone will be up early, but regardless of when we start our day, those choices we make to kick it off are crucial decisions. (And yes, Pastor Rick does indeed read the Bible most days. It just seems to come after the time I run). If you can break life down into a series of small manageable successes, you have the ability to accomplish nearly anything you want. Not everyone can run a marathon, but almost everyone can run to the corner and back. Completing the marathon is the same distance as doing the corner and back… 12 000 times. I’m not a huge board game fan, but I will hover around others as they plan Settlers of Catan, distracting them intermittently with my witty insights and sparkling conversation. I’ve watched enough “Settlers” to know that where you initially put your settlements, and then the way you choose to continually develop them, is crucial to who will eventually win. Every small success we experience reminds us that we are able to take on another challenge. Though we have discussed that failure can be a teacher, it will always be a fight to remind ourselves to let failure teach rather than de-motivate us. Whenever we can create a success, we should go for it. Experience it. Allow it to inspire us to continue working towards more success. Why is it that you are so much more flexible at the end of a yoga session than you are at the beginning of the session? Our basic understanding is that once our muscles warm up, they become more elastic, thus we are able to touch our toes (or at least get a little closer). But research in human kinetics poses that our muscles are presently able to stretch almost 150% of their resting status before they will incur tear and injury, regardless of their temperature.9
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Your muscles are completely able to stretch as far at the beginning of a session as they can at the end. The difference is brain activity. Muscles work on the principle that when one contracts, the opposite group releases. Our muscles work in tandem in order to allow us to walk, run, bend, and balance.
Let’s imagine that a horrible tragedy is about to befall you; you drop your cell phone while walking on hard concrete. When you quickly react, bending sharply at the waist in a vain attempt to catch the phone before it smashes on the ground, you enact a stretch and release process for your lower back muscles. When you do this, the “stretch reflex” occurs quickly in your spinal cord causing the opposite group of muscles to react with an acute contraction. This stretch reflex naturally happens to prevent us from stretching too far and injuring ourselves. Quite ironically, when we do act quickly, we experience a great deal of pain from the mirrored contraction, which is that horrible stabbing pain you experience in your back as you miss the phone and grab your back frozen in place, in pain. Every abrupt muscle stretch is mirrored with a sharp reflex contraction. However if you were to slowly and continually lower yourself towards the ground, you would be able to get much further without injury. It’s not because you’re warm, it’s because your body is learning that it can go that far without injury. It doesn’t need the sharp contraction. Your muscles have been convinced that they can go that far and don’t need to slip into protective mode.
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Flexibility increases with a resilient mind, convincing itself that it can extend to its max capacity without injury. Even physiologically we build upon our small successes. Over the course of time, our starting point for flexibility is increased. We can go further right away because our muscles no longer need convincing. I guess they’ve embraced the concept of being life-long learners. More importantly, you don’t hurt your back, and you can reach as far down as you need to. Most of us don’t get stuck in a rut because we’re upset about low flexibility or lethargic morning routines. We lack resiliency in much more crucial areas of our lives. We feel like a failure at work or we feel like there is nothing we could ever do to make a relationship last, so we just give up trying to succeed. We acted, experienced that acute opposite reaction from life, felt the pain, and have now given up trying. All the advice of “put yourself back out there” is really not all that motivating. Your reality is that when you went “out there” it really hurt so why would you do that again? Well, maybe you would do it again if you were assured that it wouldn’t hurt this time like it did last time. When failure becomes a teacher instead of a bully, the next time you try is always a fresh chance to experience success rather than to repeat a mistake. Even just less of a mistake is better than repeating it the exact same way you did it last time. If each time there is less and less error, there will naturally be more and more success and your brain starts to learn that this experience that was once threatening is now a chance to show off how amazing you really are. I worked with a couple in counselling who felt that they could never trust each other again. Both partners had proven to the other time and again that they were unworthy of trust and thus it was probably time to end the relationship permanently. I gave them one last exercise in an attempt to salvage the marriage. I asked them if they would trust each other with one simple task this week. Would you trust him to pay the gas bill? The wife had a smart-alecky response about it being too simple, and probably trusting him with that little thing was even too much for her to realistically handle, but she agreed to at least give it a
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try. When they came back next week, low and behold the husband had paid the bill. He’d even paid it on time. By no means was she now ready to trust him with her feelings, and she started in with a list of “ya-but’s” for how this act was meaningless. But I asked the simple question, “Instead of telling me what you don’t trust him with, tell me what you will trust him with now?” He had earned her trust to pay bills. Over the course of the next few weeks of sessions, we found more ways in which these two could prove themselves trustworthy in small tangible ways. Doing jobs, making appointments, things that needed to be done but didn’t require emotional investment. The big moment finally came where I asked the husband, “Are you ready now to trust her to plan a date for the two of you?” Even to my amazement, he said yes. A short month ago he wasn’t willing to invest another day in his marriage, and now, because he had trusted his wife to make him a meal and get the kids to soccer, he was ready to invest his emotions in a one on one date alone with no buffer in between them, and no end planned. I’m not able to end this story by saying that this couple is now giving marriage seminars, and more in love than they ever were before, (not honestly anyway, although that would make a great stor yending for this book). But I can say that they stayed together, and don’t come to counselling anymore. They discovered the principle of creating success and building from there. Actually the greatest thrill for any therapist is when a client discovers a principle, and is able to apply it to situations for themselves going forward. It also frees up an hour in my week, so it’s win-win really. This couple had turned the corner and allowed failure to teach them how to succeed. As small as the successes were, it revolutionized their marriage. Momentum is a funny concept. An object in motion tends to want to stay in motion. Thank you Mr. Newton for this lesson. Our feelings are also governed by this principle of momentum. When we’re in the flow of good feelings, positively experiencing success, we tend to stay in this mindset. If in the past week, if from Monday - Thursday you left the house in the morning feeling like you were able to complete many of the tasks that were assigned to you, you’ll probably be able to repeat the process on Friday. This is true even if there were a number of tasks that
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you didn’t get done. If your focus is on the tasks you completed, you will enter Friday with a positive mindset. Even if your failures out number your successes, you can go in there with a positive mindset because you’ve trained yourself to start the day thinking positively, and focusing on what went well. Your boss may not share the same level of positivity, but you will honestly be in a better place focusing on the success rather than the failure. Even if you have been failing at work, which mindset will set you up better to succeed today? One that believes that you can have success, or one that is reminding yourself of all the shortcomings? Try it for a week, only allowing yourself to talk about or focus on the things that went well at work today. Make a habit to tell a friend about a success, or to write down in a journal, ways that you were proud of yourself. You may be amazed how different you feel by avoiding any talk of ways you messed up for an entire week. Remember that failure is only as great a teacher as we allow it to be from a growth mindset. Looking at our failures only works if it spurs us on to believe that we can be more successful. The moment our failures turn into finger pointing, the momentum starts to go the other way. If you stay in that place for too long, your psyche is in danger.
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III. Bruised Psyche
"It's nature or nurture, but it's mostly nurture." Some countries are currently discussing the idea of whether or not to continue assigning homework. At the very least, many nations have adopted a policy, as we have here in Canada, where teachers are not supposed to grade any assignment that was completed at home. That thought is terribly frustrating to thousands of parents who have spent far too many hours assembling dioramas or engaged in full out war with their child, in an attempt to get them to complete the chapter end questions in that stinking math textbook. But consider this comparison before passing judgement. Logan and Kyle are both given the same homework assignment. Logan goes to a home where his father welcomes him with a hug and a snack. Logan and his father do something socially together first and then attempt to complete the assignment together. Logan has a designated workspace at home, and completes the assignment on his personal computer. Logan finishes off his day with a hug goodnight and sleeps in his own bedroom, getting a good night’s rest to be ready for his day tomorrow. Kyle, on the other hand, does not go home after school because no one would be there. Both his parents are still working in the afternoons at parttime jobs, trying to make sure they have enough money to meet rent. Most months they do make rent, but their hours don’t get them home until later in the evening. Kyle does not have a computer, so he will do his assignment in the library sometime between when the school day ends and when he gets home to meet his parents at 7:30. He actually demonstrates a greater level of responsibility to go to the library on his own to complete this assignment than Logan who has his father available to remind him, but his work is of far poorer quality because Kyle receives no help and was rushed to finish before the library closed. When Kyle gets home he helps his family make a quick dinner and prepare lunches and backpacks for the next day. The family is stressed because of their rushed timeline that evening so there is no time for social interaction with a parent. Kyle goes to sleep a little too late because he shares a room with his older sibling, resulting in being tired the next
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his older sibling, resulting in being tired the next morning when he gets to school. Logan gets to school rested and ready for the day with an “A” quality assignment, but Kyle is lethargic, with a poor quality assignment. Their teacher (God love her) asserts that Logan has done well and Kyle obviously did something wrong. Logan gets a good mark and is praised for his efforts. Kyle gets a D and is reprimanded for not taking his time and for not being well prepared for his day. It’s completely unfair to grade work habits and intelligence with a social system that is massively unbalanced. In our communities we have parents who may or may not speak the same language that their child is taught in, so they may or may not be able to even understand what is assigned. We have parents who are home and can help, and others who for countless reasons work, separation, illness), are not able to do homework with their child. In extreme cases we have parents who simply do not even care to make the effort to do homework with their child. But schools cannot simply stop giving work to be done outside of class time. Working independently is a skill that children need to learn, so even though it is not graded for marks that count towards their report cards, they will still go through this exercise of handing in assignments, and receiving praise or shame for work that is affected by factors far beyond their control. What do you assume happens to the psyche of the kids who, year after year, hear that they were lazy, irresponsible or just not as bright as their peers?These messages start to become deeply rooted in their own sense of self worth, causing them to believe that they don’t possess the same abilities to achieve things that their peers can. We know that this experience is not limited to homework. Psychological abuse can be overt and direct, such as a parent berating their child in anger, or it can be subtler, like in the case of a teacher re-enforcing a limiting ideology such as in the previous example. It happens when peer groups leave out or tease on the playground. It can even happen when someone specifically targets and manipulates this child with fear tactics. It’s estimated that 3-4 children
in
every
1000
are
psychologically
abused
in
Canada.8 We know that many more are simply carrying around mental or emotional scars from experiences that have left them questioning their ability to succeed, based on something they can’t control. When a person matures into
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adulthood, they may still be functioning from this place of hurt, demonstrating
adulthood, they may still be functioning from this place of hurt, demonstrating the emotional maturity of the age at which we were hurt. Until we are able to go back and work through the misinformation we received about ourselves, our brains get stuck at that developmental stage. In light of everything we’ve just read about how failure and mindset can shape our outcomes, it’s no wonder that so many adults experience a lack of resiliency. Life has taught them to question themselves. The nature versus nurture debate argues over what aspects are defined in a person by his or her genetics and what things develop in us based on our upbringing and surroundings. For instance, as much as I love a person with red hair, I cannot love the red hair out of them. It’s going to grow that colour as long as they live. (Sorry for my contribution to the psychological abuse on red heads. The very least I could have done was to save this judgemental thought for a different chapter). Hair colour is definitely all nature. But something like resiliency is much more debatable. We used to think that our brain’s capacity and style of thinking was something that was set at birth. Our IQ was our IQ. Some people are smart, others… not so much. Some people can sing while others are better at working with their hands. Some people are tenacious with the ability to push through when they face difficulties, while others just seem to be hardwired to give up when the going gets tough. However we now understand that the brain, especially the prefrontal cortex, (the part of the brain that controls our emotions, our impulses and our logic) has the ability to grow, develop and change multiple times over the course of our lives. We refer to this concept as “plasticity”. Our experiences, our substance usages, our genes, and even our diet contribute to how we react to the world around us. There are definitely some key windows of time in our development that seem to have more influence than other times, including in utero, early life and adolescence. But truthfully we never become too old to learn new tricks. Yes, I just compared us to an aging pooch, but who doesn’t love a good dog. Everything we put into our bodies, every experience that goes on around our bodies
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bodies, even the voices we allow to speak to our bodies will influence how able we are to respond to challenges with resiliency. Nature might dictate that a person enters life with a deficit in their ability to rebound, but we are able to nurture that same person into a place where they are able to fall down and get back up and try again. We can retrain their brain to believe that they are able. Enough positive experiences, encouraging voices, and healthy choices will allow their brain to develop natural resiliency from within.
(Figure 1.1 CBT triangle - Image)
Cognitive behavioural therapy is based on the idea demonstrated in figure 1.1 Our thoughts influence our behaviours, which influence our feelings, which in turn start to re-influence those same thoughts. This process is repeated thousands of times and become ingrained into our lives. For example, many people are afraid of snakes. Their thought is: I hate that snake. As a result of their thought, their behaviour leads to avoidance of snakes, or maybe even running away from snakes. Behaving this way makes them upset or edgy. So the next time they encounter the snakes, they are already upset. They remember how they protected themselves last time, and they think, “I was safe when I ran away from that darn snake.” So they run away again, but this time more quickly. They start to feel that if they don’t protect themselves, the snake will get them. These thoughts and feelings build a trench in our neural pathways, and it becomes truth for them. Snakes quite literally become dangerous things to them. The funny
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funny thing is that this same snake might be someone else’s pet. They play with the snake, take it for walks (there is a man who walks his pet snake in a park close by where I live), and enjoys the company of the snake. The snake is not the problem. How we feel about the snake is the problem. It could very well be that the challenge you face is not your actual problem. It’s how you feel about the challenge that is causing you to remain defeated. If someone, or some life experience was able to break into your trench of fear and convince you that there is hope and a way to succeed, you might think differently, and as a result, behave, differently. In fact cognitive behavioural therapists have found that for many people, CBT is much more effective for treating and reversing the trend to think negatively than medicating, examining your past failures and other common forms of treatment.10 You weren’t created to think negatively. You were born with an innate ability to look at a person and expect them to take care of you. You couldn’t feed yourself and you didn’t know when to sleep. You weren’t able to wrap up in a blanket if you were cold. But every baby understands that if they yell loud enough and long enough, their caregiver will come and save the day. I was at a friend’s house one day when her 3 year old seemed to be having a particularly sad day. She couldn’t go more than 10 minutes without getting upset; she was frustrated with her toys, mad at the dog, cold and then hot, hungry then needing to pee. She just was miserable. As the afternoon progressed, my friend was starting to get desperate. In a moment of despair she blurted out, “Just tell me what you need”. The little girl yelled back, “I don’t know why I’m upset, but I need you to make it better.” In this case, a hug and a cookie seemed to do the trick. If only our adult sized issues were resolved so quickly and easily. But this was a great reminder of how we’re born with the confidence that our parents, and the people that we love can make it all better. Unfortunately somewhere along the way, life teaches some of us that there are certain challenges that no one can make better, and we lose the innocence of a child who believes that no matter what we face, it can get better. The world is not a scary place; it is a magical place of adventures to be explored and challenges to conquer. For years our mom had to spoon feed us, and do the little
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little game of “here comes the airplane” as the pureed bananas and peas zoomed towards us and popped into our mouths. But after a while, it was time to learn to feed ourselves. It was very messy at first. We often missed, we often spilled, but eventually we developed the hand eye coordination to get that food in the centre of our mouths, rather than on the sides of our faces. Thank goodness that we persevered, because I’m not sure how it would look if Mom had to come to the employee break room to feed me at lunch with the “here comes the airplane” game. In our politically correct and tolerant society, I’m sure this is an accommodation that would have to be tolerated, but I’m not sure it would do much for one’s self esteem. It was better that we learned how to feed ourselves regardless of our desire to have Mom keep feeding us. We also had to learn how to walk. It meant many falls, and it stretched our leg muscles to do things they never had been able to do previously. We pushed through, bounced back from failure and became fully mobile human beings. We learned how to speak, jump a rope, bounce a ball, play the recorder, and twirl noodles with chopsticks or on a spoon. Our daughter is currently in the midst of learning this skill. She is not allowed to date a boy unless she can properly twirl spaghetti because he might ask her out to a noodle place. We did all these things because we were born ready to take on challenges. Stop reading for a moment and think back to one of the first challenges you couldn’t win. Was it a job you really wanted but never got? A relationship that didn’t work out? This was a crucial junction in your journey towards being resilient or not. We created a pattern for how we would respond to adversity. You either gave yourself a message that this challenge was just something that you were not born to do, or you gave yourself the message that some things are harder than others and might take longer to learn how to do well. You either gave up, or decided that you, under the right time and circumstance, could be resilient. A healthy mindset either acknowledges the failure or mourns the loss. But it never stays in the loss. We learn from what happened, reflect on things for awhile and then move on again. Resiliency isn’t a matter of having rose coloured glasses that can’t see difficulty. Life is both happy and sad, full of difficulties and successes. To live out of balance either way is error.
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Resiliency is a mindset that allows a person to think and act, as though they can and will one day “get it”, whatever “it” is for them. Even our very definition of success might start to change. If you prepared well and executed to the best of your ability, isn’t that a success regardless of the outcome? Through my own journey of resiliency I’ve become satisfied with good preparation and good effort regardless of how it all turns out in the end. We’re training our daughter to focus less on the percentage on her report card, and look more into the comments. An 80% grade she got, with less than best effort, is not as impressive to us as parents, as a grade of 70% that was achieved with great study habits. Different teachers mark easier than others, and some subjects come more easily for her than others. Success can often look more like hard work than gold medals. Even though you can’t win them all, you can prepare in a way that would allow you to win when the situation allows for it. Growth mindset was a phrase coined by Carol Dweck of Stanford University that characterizes people who believe that with hard work and perseverance they can continually improve their basic abilities. Take a few moments to break from reading and pause to reflect on the way you naturally react to failure. When you do fail, what kinds of stories do you start to tell yourself? Is there any thought process that might be limiting the amazing things you might be able to do? How could you start to utilize a growth mindset to allow for a different kind of success in your life?
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“One time I took half a Tylenol, and even then I don’t think I really needed it." Sue Carrol.
Section 2 - Resiliency of the Body I. The Over Medicated Society We’re all drugs addicts. Even those of us who consider ourselves healthy… drug addicts. Before 7:00 AM, most of us have had over 200 mg of caffeine (more so if you prefer Starbucks to Tim’s). Caffeine is addictive. It’s not recommended for children. It helps to prevent headaches, but also is a diuretic that causes fluid loss and restricts many important bodily functions. We’ve decided that as a society, we’re OK with 300 - 400 mg of caffeine for an adult every day. Besides, it helps keeps us focused and awake right? All we NEED is one or two cups in the morning, and then maybe a warm up in the mid afternoon. If you do that math, those 2-3 cups is beyond the recommended dosage and the term “need” completely describes an addiction. Addicts I tells ya.
So maybe you’ve given up on coffee and feel that green tea gives you everything you need to cleanse your body and mind. Green tea also gives you 100 mg of caffeine. More if you leave the bag in. We take Tylenol for headaches, steroids for allergies, “Lactaid” pills to help with digestion and a melatonin to fall asleep. This isn’t even counting the aforementioned 15 prescriptions the average Canadian senior citizen takes. Maybe you’re only currently on one or two, but you’ve already set in motion a pattern for a lack of resiliency in your body that waits for pharmacological intervention when something isn’t working right, rather than training your immune system to fight back and recover for itself. Pain is a wonderful gift given to us to help us know when something isn’t working right. When my daughter gets sick, we stop her regular physical activity, send her to bed earlier, give her Tylenol (I'm not a hippie tree hugger who never uses
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uses medications, I just carefully consider which ones and how much we rely on) and then we turn out the lights. Just before saying goodnight we will pray together and I’ll pray that she feels better soon, and I thank God for pain because it reminds us to slow down when we’ve gone too hard or come into contact with sickness. My daughter squirms when we get to this part and gets mad that God would allow such craziness as pain. One night when she was feeling particularly low, she turned her frustrations towards Adam and Eve. She said, “Why did Adam and Eve have to sin any way? Now we all have to get sick because of it”. This is deep theology for a small mind. But she’s right - this world is not perfect, and we all experience pain and sickness when we over exert ourselves or come into close contact with a virus. The pain we experience was designed as a gift to give us a warning signal. From somewhere deep within, your immune system is shouting out, “Hey you! Ya you. The one who does all the walking, talking and getting hurt. Something’s not right. Can you please slow it down and take it easy for the next 5-7 days. We’ll heal up just nicely if you give us time to recover. Maybe as a reminder I’ll give you a little pain so you don’t forget how hard we’re all working inside of you right now to make things better.” Our bodies were designed in such a way that more often than not, we will actually recover, if we’re given the proper amount of time. But what do we do when we get sick? We take Tylenol Cold and Flu so that we won’t feel the effect of the virus going on inside our bodies. We take Cold FX so that our immune system is strengthened. I’ve even discovered a wonderful trick from a few friends and family members in the medical field that ibuprofen and acetaminophen, which both help with pain associated from sickness, work independently from each other and can be in your system at the same time. So when I’m sick, I can constantly have something in my system masking the discomfort associated with my illness. Within a few days I’m back to normal routines, feeling good as new. Well, maybe not good as new, but I’ll be feeling good and drugged. What I’ve actually done is train my body to rely on an external pain masker to recover instead of finding a way to recover naturally. We’re not good as new. What we are is a little less resilient. Healthy again, but less able to fight it off the next time. This change obviously doesn’t take place with the first pill we pop, but continued usage of any kind of medication can develop a
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greater
greater tolerance to the drug, and even create a physical dependence on the drug, for what was once normal bodily function. Part of this stems from thefact that we have a skewed understanding of pain. Pain is a teacher just as much as failure is. It’s trying to help us learn a lesson for success in the future. Since we’ve learned how to mask our pain, we are able to ignore it, and we end up missing the lessons we should learn from it. Emotional pain wants to protect your brain. Physical pain wants to protect your body. Again - let me state that I’m not a hippie. My medicine cabinet is full of antibiotics and painkillers. We have alfalfa pills in the cupboard next to the vitamin pills, next to the immunity boosters. Everything in moderation. There is no reason to abandon all medication. My mother claims to have only ever taken one half of a Tylenol. It must have been in a weak moment in fear of the swine flu or SARS or something like that. I’m a regular med user, but I’m now committed to considering whether or not every instance where there is a legitimate opportunity to take medication is a good opportunity to medicate. As a pastor, if I wake up on a Sunday morning with a fever, most times, medicating my way through our Sunday services is a good idea. No one wants to watch a speaker cold sweat his way through a service, when a Tylenol or two would allow me to function more normally. And a church service without a speaker seems a bit empty. However when services end, I am then off work for the next day and a half. Continuing to medicate would allow me to finish household jobs, stay up late and feel “normal”. After all, what’s the big deal? The bottle says I can safely take up to 8 pills daily. And it sure beats feeling achy and needing to go to bed at 7:30 pm right? Part of how acetaminophen works is to inhibit the part of the brain that registers pain.11 Without the acknowledgment of pain, your body drastically slows down its recovery process. That temporary calm you feel has just slowed down how quickly you will rebound. What’s more, acetaminophen is the leading cause for liver failure worldwide. Your liver will typically bounce back… until it doesn’t. Your body will keep recovering, until it almost requires a constant dosage of acetaminophen to feel normal. So take your pain meds when pain becomes unbearable, or when you need to accomplish something in the next few hours, but
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but then have some OJ or chicken soup and go to bed. We survived as a people for thousands of years without this stuff. I think I can make it until Tuesday morning with a bit of headache. What’s more, I will be allowing my body to recover the way it was designed to do. If I may address the coffee drinkers for a moment… I regularly worship at the church of the green lady (Starbucks in laymen’s terms). I have Starbucks beans in my espresso machine at home, and the baristas know my order at two local Starbucks locations. So, not to be redundant, and keeping in mind this is not a lecture on why caffeine is evil, the question is: why do we drink it? Humanity is governed by a 24-hour clock called our circadian rhythm. It’s why we get sleepy mid afternoon and start to tire out after the sun goes down. Cortisol is the steroid hormone responsible for our metabolism and immune system, and controls our blood sugars. Basically it’s our natural caffeine. Your circadian rhythm will naturally produce a large amount of cortisol for the first hour or so after you wake up, which is the typical time that millions of us are downing a cup of joe (or two or three or four). By combining caffeine in coffee form and cortisol that should naturally get produced when we first wake up, we are building a greater tolerance, lessening the effect of both processes. We get impatient waiting for the body to do what it was designed to do naturally, so we highjack the process with coffee or tea. This is the reason why a regular coffee drinkers can have 7 cups a day and not be affected the way another non-caffeine drinker might feel shaky after one caffeinated beverage. Sounds like an addict of any other sort doesn’t it? Many nutritionists recommend not having that first cup of coffee until you feel fully awake and alert, so you aren’t training yourself to need caffeine to wake up. Our normalized use of all kinds of drugs has impacted the natural processes going on inside our bodies, to the point that we are sicker, over tired, and unable to be the kind of person we were designed to be. In the name of better health, we’ve lost natural resiliency. Do a little self-check and see if there is any medication that you’ve told yourself you NEED? This is probably the best way to
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dis
discover an imbalance or addiction. Except in extraordinary circumstances, we were all born without the need for a drug to fall asleep, wake up, or function in our daily duties. Anytime we have introduced a drug into our system that is required to carry out these functions, something is wrong. Something in our bodies or in our lives is screaming at us to try to make a change in how we’re living, so that we can get off the drug and get back to being resilient for ourselves. It might take time. It might require small incremental steps. It might even be a little uncomfortable. But with intentional decision you can train your body to be resilient again.
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II. Japanese Pitching Coaches
“Just rub some dirt on it” I was a baseball player for nearly 30 years of my life. For the first 15, I caught. For the last 12 years, I pitched. These two positions are probably the hardest on the body of any baseball position. Catchers do 200 deep squats a game. Pitchers can throw anywhere from 30-40 pitches to well over 100 if you count their bullpen time, warm-ups and game thrown pitches. In North America, we treat a pitcher’s postgame arm pain like potentially injured muscles. We wrap them in ice and don’t use them for a while. As a pitcher you wouldn’t even attempt to throw a ball for two days following a start. As a rec league pitcher, I would pitch a game on a Tuesday, and walk around with my right shoulder hanging about 2 inches lower than my left on Wednesday. I didn’t like using the big heavy pen that morning at work because it hurt to lift it. I ate with my left hand, drove with my left hand and winced whenever I needed to use my right arm that day. I made sure to ice that shoulder down after each start to reduce swelling and allow for healing. As the global community emerged, and easy access to different cultural ideologies became readily available to everyone, I started to read how Japanese pitching coaches were quite perplexed with the American style of pitcher healthcare. They couldn’t comprehend why over here we limited the number of pitches a player would throw, and were completely flummoxed as to why we iced down our shoulders after throwing. In 2013, Tomohiro Anraku threw 232 pitches in one game that went 13 innings. The next game he threw 159 pitches. In the same week, the Toronto Blue Jays used 6 pitchers in a game against the Cleveland Indians... 5 of them threw under 16 pitches. When Anraku finishes his games, he runs laps of the field to sweat it out. When Esmil Rogers threw his 9 pitches, he would have iced his arm to make sure he would heal for the next day. One of the trends North American coaches have noticed is that Japanese pitchers have come to the American game as more durable players. They seem
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to be able to pitch more, and they seem to get injured less. Data and opinion on dealing with significant arm injuries. However regardless of truth, there is a large group of well- educated and experienced trainers and athletes, who believe that treating a player’s body as though it will heal itself and as though it has resiliency, is a better way of maintaining health than treating it as if it’s injured and requiring external help for recovery. It is interesting to note that the Japanese teams use an extra pitcher in their rotation. They typically have 6 pitchers, meaning that their players only need to pitch once a week. Their arms are left to heal naturally for 5 days, while American pitchers are iced down and forced to throw again after only 4 days rest… 2 or 3 days if they threw fewer pitches. Eastern medicine has always allowed for a more natural approach to healing than western medicine has. Sometimes just saying something out loud helps to highlight the absurdity in it. In an attempt to avoid a trauma in the shoulder, the western philosophy of care heats up the shoulder, then immediately freezes it, then doesn’t use it at all for 48 hours, then attempts to use it again. This process works against two natural processes the body is trying to go through. An injured muscle swells up like a water balloon.
It’s a natural response from the body to help to immobilize the joint, preventing further injury. It also makes it really hard and painful to walk on. So the pain you experience, if allowing for recovery (This didn’t make sense to me). Complete recovery from a sprain is 4-6 weeks, but once the swelling goes away you will be able to use it again. A typical response is to freeze it to reduce the swelling, giving
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giving us no idea when the body feels ready to re-engage in usage. Then we wrap or support the weak muscle with a brace, ensuring that if we had any sense of recovery we have now lost it. Mix in our over- reliance on painkillers and we forget that the injury ever happened. That sounds like a fairly traumatic way to approach recovery. The Eastern method is based on the principle that if it’s injured it’s not used. Directly after the pitcher finishes, they go for a long run and work up a sweat. The sweat achieved during the run flushes the body of toxins, activates endorphins, which are our body’s natural painkiller, and allows the entire body to cool down together. In 2012, the average MLB team had 2.3 pitchers require Tommy John surgery, which is a replacement of the ulnar collateral ligament in the elbow. It was becoming so prevalent that some high school pitchers, who hoped to one-day play in the MLB, opted for preventative Tommy John surgery in order to avoid requiring this surgery when they could be getting paid. The procedure requires over a year of rehab, not to mention that they are choosing to have surgery they have no proof that they will ever require. That same year, teams in the Nippon Professional Baseball (Japanese league) averaged less than 1 surgery per team12. NPB pitchers threw more pitches and inning per pitching appearances, and never iced their “wounded” shoulders. With the ice, the message we give our bodies is, “Don’t worry body, we’ve got this recovery thing covered for you. Just trust us.” It’s no wonder that the shoulder or elbow protests the next time the player goes to use it every once in a while and just won’t work. We’ve trained it to look for an external support. Sadly my rec league baseball days have come to an end after I was given the option of surgery/rehab or retirement. However for my last few years I didn’t ice. I embraced my inner-Asian and sweated out a post pitching work out. Amazingly I experienced less pain the following day. I could even write with the heavy pen. Throwing a baseball is a very unnatural motion on any arm, and doing it for 20+ years will always lead to injuries, but letting the body work it sresiliency magic is an approach that appears to give a player a better chance at longevity. As shocking as this might be, I recognize that the majority of readers are
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are not baseball players, but there’s a lesson in resiliency, by taking a moment to rethink the common knowledge for treating injuries you’ve received over the years. All of us will experience a sprained knee or twisted ankle from time to time. We will go to the doctor and she/he will recommend that we stay off it. Good advice. The problem is that you and I have jobs to go to and our bosses would not be impressed if we said we’d be back in 4-6 weeks once our ankle properly heals. So we take a couple days off, do the RICE routine (Rest, Ice, Elevate, and Compression) and then make use of an ankle sleeve or ankle brace. We allow an external device to provide the support that our muscles normally would. Sounds like a win-win right ou have less pain and you get back to work quickly. Thanks doc With the assistance of the brace, the muscle isn’t forced to repair itself to the same degree of strength it was pre-injury. Soon we find ourselves using that brace for any time we are going to be more physically active than usual. Better safe than sorry right Then we’re using it when it’s damp or cold out, because our muscles just don’t feel right in November. We’ve taken the resiliency right out of them. What was designed to be a temporary aid became a constant crutch. ou never achieve resiliency without enduring some pain and stretching yourself to fight past a threshold of discomfort, for the purpose of becoming stronger on the other side. This is true of both our emotions and our bodies. The brace works directly against this principle.. ou are not forced to put weight or pressure on the injury, because the brace bears the brunt of it. One of my favourite sports methodologies is when the coach looks at a player on the ground, assesses his injury, helps him to his feet and then says, “Rub some dirt on it.” I had a few coaches over the years that would pull out that nugget of wisdom. Rub a little dirt on it, everything will be fine. More often than not, for the minor injuries sustained in kid’s sports, this is the best treatment the child could receive. They learn that sometimes the best thing we can do is keep going even though it hurts a little bit. I’m not convinced that my coach was medically knowledgeable enough to diagnose whether or not I should have come off the field, but I seemed to survive, and I did indeed learn that lesson. There is a difference between being hurt and being injured. When we’re injured, get off the field. Call into work sick. Make a significant change to what you were planning on doing. But if you’re just hurt, rub some dirt on it and get back out there champ.
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“Get back on that horse… just don’t tell her you called her a horse”.
Section 3 - Relational Resiliency I. What Happens When we Date, Break-Up, and Repeat I met my wife when I was 11 years old. My best friend Jonathan lived just around the corner from my house. He used to live across the park, but I can remember the excitement I felt the day his family moved within eyesight of my house. I slept over the first night they moved in. Jonathan and I played Sega Genesis hockey and shot dart guns at each other in his personalized man cave of a basement. We made a wall of coke cans, which looking back now, I’m sure was an ant- infested bacteria factory with all the little bits of leftover syrup in the cans. But God bless Mrs. Lambert and her tolerance of the Coke wall. There was a freezer in the room that was always stocked with Candy Cane ice cream that we helped ourselves to quite liberally. There were couches for lounging and enough stuff to make awesome forts. We would only emerge for bathroom breaks, or to check on the wonderful smells that were emanating from the kitchen. In fact there was only one thing that could ruin a perfectly good afternoon at Jon’s house. Company. It turns out that the Lamberts were not only great hosts to me, they had the nerve to host other friends over to their home as well. I met and befriended many of Jon’s other friends, if they were male and similar aged. However there was this one family that had a boy who was 4 years younger than us (we were OK to involve him in our game of guns), but they also had a daughter who was our age. She wasn’t super interested in Sega hockey. She was far too mature for dart guns, and come to think of it, I’m not sure I ever saw her drink a coke, let alone add to our wall. Being 11-years-old, I definitely acknowledged the existence of girls, and I quite enjoyed their company at school dances or when we were going to the movies. Sometimes I even tolerated them hanging around our pickup hockey game, as long as they waited until the game was over to make themselves noticed. However when they got in the way of sports and guns, I was not impressed. I can recall many a Sunday afternoon where
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where our game was usurped by the requirement of entertaining Amanda Moores for the afternoon. A funny thing happened over the years though. As our middle school years gave way to our high school years, I seemed less annoyed when the Moores were around. I was fine to put down the game controller and just talk about… anything… as long as it was with her. The Moores and Lamberts would often travel together and I would regularly make myself available to tag along with Jon and his family on ski trips or cottage weeks. As time passed, Amanda and I started a teenaged dating relationship, and I became close with both families. I can still remember a specific trip to a hotel when we were all in grade 11. The two families had a ski weekend planned, but this time I was invited to go along with the Moores, not the Lamberts. As any good-hearted, yet redblooded teenager would do, I dropped my allegiance to Jon like a sack of bricks, and whole-heartedly drove up and roomed with the Moores family. My life had come full circle, from being upset when she was around, to becoming the one I would turn my back on a friend for. We dated 4 years of high school, 4 years of university, and were married the very week that Amanda graduated. As of this writing we’ve been married 13 years, together for over 20. We’ve had 4 homes, 1 dog, 1 child and 3 fish. We’ve survived sickness, tragedy, injury, -40 degree weather and even colder feelings towards each other in the midst of an argument. For a brief moment in high school we separated from each other because the distance between us (we lived in different towns 15 minutes apart) felt too great to overcome. In high school, dating is often much more a relationship of convenience than compatibility. We pair off with the people we see everyday rather than a person who we match well with. It’s even hard for some kids to maintain a relationship when they have different lunch periods or science teachers. To live “that far away” and have no ability to drive to see each other felt like a game changer. But there was something inside of us that felt that this relationship was worth fighting for. Breaking up hurt. Even though it was a high school thing, it hurt. We broke each other’s trust. And even though there was no guarantee that the future of the relationship would be any easier than the past was, as kids we decided to make another go of it. We were resilient.
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Relationships are supposed to be a fun thing, adding value to our lives. We feel attracted to another individual, so we start up a relationship. We go places together and share fun experiences. We look our best and smell our best every time we see them. We make sure we are extra polite and always accommodating when it comes to choosing an activity, doing something they would prefer to do. Throughout this initial stage of the relationship we are falling in love with a front that the other person is allowing us to see. We have no clue how they react when they’re mad, how they look without showering, or how they react when things don’t go their way. As the comfort builds in the relationship, we stop trying so hard to impress the other person, and allow them to see a more natural side of us. Sometimes, this goes well. Other times, that level of “realness” is scary, and our partner doesn’t like it. This person whom we once thought was always polite, always put together and always wanted to please us is clearly not who we thought they were, and who they made themselves out to be when the relationship started. If we see enough of what we don’t like, we start to question whether or not this relationship is something we want to continue on with. Didn’t we get into this relationship because we wanted to feel good? If it no longer feels good, then there really isn’t a reason continue on with it. So we break up, and start the pattern all over again until we find “The One”. The concept of “The One” is fantastically humorous to me. We tell people that when they meet that “One”, they will just “know”. Could we possibly be more ambiguous than that? “Oh you’ll know… deep down inside it will just feel right.” So we have thousands of young people trying to differentiate between the feeling of knowing it’s "The One” and indigestion from under-cooked chicken at lunch. “I feel something going on inside. Maybe she’s the one. Sure does feel a lot like gas though. Is it love or a fart? Why won’t anybody be more specific?” We are so in love with the romanticized idea of fairy tale love that we are afraid to level with young people and tell them the truth, that every relationship has moments when you are madly in love with someone, which is followed by moment when you don’t even want to speak to them. What makes it last is our
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ability to forgive each other and our ability to fight for what’s best for our partner, rather than selfishly fighting for what’s best for us. We are with the right person when we’re able to say, no matter what, I want to give you what you need, and trust that you can give me what I need. Our western society has mistakenly developed the mindset that relationships are supposed to make it better for me. That’s backwards. Relationships are designed for you to make it better for someone else. So when the relationship inevitably comes to a place where the couple is mad at each on a regular basis, because both individuals are being selfish, they will split up. Many times this separation is unnecessary, and could be fixed by simply allowing the couple to contend for their partner rather than contending for themselves. Instead they break up, and keep looking for that one person who will make them feel good constantly, and will never require them to love a fault, or forgive a hurt. This model doesn’t exist within the human race. What they’re looking for is a pet. Consider then, how many divorces we see in our world, and question whether or not the practice of dating and breaking up so easily in conflict might have something to do with why we are not relationally resilient. We might think that being relationally resilient is being able to try again after a failure with a new partner. But what if we transitioned to working on trying again with that same partner after a failure. Resiliency is the ability to go again when things are difficult. Starting a new relationship is fun and easy, because we’re back in that phase where our partner is only exposing the good side of themselves. That’s not really all that resilient; it’s kind of just giving into what feels better at the time. We’ve traded in a tired old relationship for one that is shiny, new and full of unexpected discoveries around the next corner. The person you’ve been with, that you may be fighting with, that you may even be planning on breaking up has become old news to you. They’re mad at you, and you really don’t have much patience left for them. Resiliency is finding a way to make that relationship as exciting and dynamic as it felt when it was new. Although it may not feel like it at the moment, it is possible to regain that kind fulfillment again; it’s a matter of training yourself to become relationally resilient.
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In the first section of this book, we looked at how it’s important to tell yourself you are indeed able, how we need to build upon small successes, and remember that your brain is never too old to be trained. All this can apply to how you approach relationships as well. The moment you tell yourself that a relationship can’t be fixed, it’sprobably not going to work out. There comes that breaking point where we have decided that the person we are with is no longer going to meet our needs, or we don’t care to try to meet theirs anymore. We might say that we just don’t feel in love, but this is not a matter of chicken and egg. You stop feeling love the moment you decide to stop acting in love. It has nothing to do with whether or not this couple is incompatible; this couple has changed their mind to give up working on compatibility. Compatibility isn’t the issue, it’s the mindset that’s broken. Far too many couples split up believing that compatibility is a concept that exists rather than a state that can be achieved when two people mutually choose to sacrifice selfishness, and work for the good of another person. A couple looking to create an atmosphere of resiliency in their relationship needs to start creating small relational successes where they put selfish desires aside and serve each other. Leaving a love note. Doing the laundry. Compliments. It’s nothing that’s necessarily “The Notebook” worthy, but enough of a gesture that it begins to convince us that there is indeed compatibility to be had between us. The final step of remembering that the brain is plastic and ever changing will allow us to understand that we can regain the strong feelings of love that were there when we started the relationship. You can completely reframe the concept of divorce. Western society looks at divorce as a viable relationship option for two people who have discovered that the choice they made to get married, to join their lives together, was not a good one. I’m not naïve enough to suggest that any and every relationship will last forever, but I can say with conviction that there are many relationships that end in separation that shouldn’t. If two people got together, there had to be something that drew them to each other or mutual attraction. When they invested in the relationship, the relationship worked. In many cases, separation is a direct result of one or both partners just giving up.
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So how have you been training your brain when it comes to relationships? What story do you tell yourself at the first sign of trouble or conflict with your partner? Too many of us start to find similarities with past failures, with former partners, and permission ourselves to consider breaking up. “She always wants to know exactly where I am… just like Jen did. It was going so well with Jen, and it’s going fairly well now, but why do I always seem to pick girls who don’t respect my personal space?” In this example, a more helpful narrative might go something like this. “Boy it really seems like I have difficulty letting my partner know where I am all the time. I wonder why that’s so important to her? I wonder if we could figure out a compromise that would satisfy her, but not make me feel trapped.” That train of thought allows for reflection, growth and brings resiliency to this relationship to help it extend past a silly little issue like letting each other know where you’ll be. Sadly, that very issue is the source of countless relational breakdowns. The solution obviously isn’t to stay together forever with the next person you go on a date with (I myself had six or seven grade 9 relationships that I dumped in order to eventually choose the lovely Amanda). However it’s important to consider whether or not we’re entertaining the idea that a relationship can withstand trouble, and wasn’t meant to be sunshine and lollipops every day of its existence. A relationship was designed to bounce back too.
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II. Teaching Your Kids Resiliency
“Some of the most effective parenting strategies my mom and dad used with me to teach me independence, strength and resiliency are the very things that would make them bad parents today.” I grew up in a home that backed onto a schoolyard. From the raised deck in the backyard my parents could see most of what was going on at the playground, and at the very least see enough to know where I was and that I was safe. Well… mostly safe. From the age of 7, nearly every evening I would be in the park playing pick up hockey or tennis court baseball which is a wonderful game with its own set of rules, record books, and nuances. Send me an email and I can explain the rules to you. (rcarrol29@gmail.com) Now I say I was there everyday, and that does stretch the truth to some degree. There was the one day when my friend and I discovered that there was an unsupervised home construction site on the other side of the schoolyard. The basements had been excavated but not finished, leaving them absolutely perfect for climbing down and exploring. This home had an easy descent, with a not so easy ascent. We ended up stuck in the basement for over an hour until some other neighbourhood kids found us, collected pieces of wood we could pile up, and grab onto their hands to pull us out of the ditch. Exciting and formative times for a 7 year old. Then there was the time that we found a couple of discarded “Zippo” lighters on the school property and built a small bonfire on the hill. It was so much fun that once we had burned through those lighters, we lied to our parents about going to the store to buy slurpies and tried to buy new lighters. Two kids who end up at 7-11 asking to buy fire should trigger some kind of response from the store clerk. By the time we got back to the park behind my house, our parents were there waiting for us and the fun had clearly ended. In that day and age, local store clerks knew whose kids belonged to whose parents and he made a quick phone call home to inquire about why we had just been to Macs Milk store on a mission to
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to buy lights for “our Dads”. I was spanked with a wooden spoon so hard that it broke on one impact on my butt. Just part of the downside of growing up in a town and era when local store workers working whose kids belong to whose parents I suppose. You put this stuff on paper and it sounds like I was grossly under supervised and abused, however it’s just that it all happened in 1985 instead of 2015. Kids went outside and played without leashes or fear of air born peanut allergies. We got into trouble, and learned how to solve trouble. When news of the trouble made its way back home, we were punished. Punishments were not time-outs or a long drawn out debate. We were spanked or grounded. We had a healthy fear of angering our parents and knew that there were serious repercussions for disobeying. I have grown into adulthood with the knowledge that if I worked hard and relied on my peers, I could succeed. I could climb out of large open pits, both literal and figurative. I didn’t always need Mommy or Daddy to step in and save me. I entered the work force understanding something of authority, and that it would be painful for me if I miss-stepped against an established authority figure. This healthy fear has helped me stay in the good books with my supervisors, rather than feeling the need to test out the limits of what was acceptable at work. Of course there was good and bad from this era of parenting, just as there was positive and negatives with the eras of parenting styles that preceded it. Hitting kids, even in a controlled environment accompanied by an explanation, can be very damaging. It’s something I’ve never done as a parent. But I have been forced to figure out new methods of teaching my child the same kind of healthy fear that has served me so well. Conversely, I was also afforded probably too much freedom at too young an age. While nothing traumatic happened to me, there was a ton of opportunity for something to happen. Yet it was the very risk of danger and the experience of minor calamity that build resiliency within me. Because there was real danger that at times we experienced, we built real resiliency. Parents today are obviously not going to flip back to the style of
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parenting
parenting from the 80’s where the boundaries were overly loose, but we’d better get creative in finding ways to have our kids build self-reliance. Back in 1971, 78% of Canadian men and an astounding 89% of women were out living on their own. Fast forward ahead to the 2006 and even by the age of 30, 41% are still at home. Either Mom needs to stop cooking with cheese, or something else more systemic is at work. This concept that has come to be described as “snow-plough parenting”. Snowplough parents take it upon themselves to push any challenge out of the paths of their child like a snowplough after a heavy winter storm, with the hopes that their kids will only know success. Dr. Zentman is the director of the Adelphi Program with a postdoctoral study in couples therapy. He has witnessed this change in parenting styles over the years as snow plough parents have even become more hands on with their kids than the helicopter parents at the turn of the century who constantly hovered around their kids in their everyday activities. Dr. Zentman has found that what many parents fail to realize is that when they constantly intervene in their child’s life, they impede their ability to develop and mature in the natural way. In the end, our kids become far less self-sufficient as adults. This is a struggle that begins for parents the moment they become one: how quickly do we bail our kids out when they are struggling, when part of our role as parents is to help them develop self coping skills? It’s the roots of resiliency. Both rescue and abandonment are needed. No one becomes resilient by being left to fend for themselves all the time in childhood struggles, but kids who are over-coddled never even consider resiliency important enough to develop. Some parents swear by the strategy of attending to their child the moment their baby starts to cry. By limiting the time between the cry for help and the comfort of the parent, they believe that they are building a foundation for their child's future that whenever they experience fear, sadness or physical need, they can trust that Mom or Dad will be there to fulfill that need. As the child grows older and the issues get larger and more serious, their instinct will be to trust that Mom and Dad can help just as they always have since infancy. All too often a parent's experience is a feeling of becoming an enemy in the child's way, ra
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rather than the support system. Yet this, of course, is only a theory. Some people believe it to be true, yet others would totally discount. There is a great deal of advocacy for a parenting style that allows for children to “cry it out”. This strategy encourages parents who have properly fed and given attention to their child prior to putting them down for a nap, to allow the baby learn to soothe himself. If the child’s tears aren’t based in physical need, there is benefit in allowing the child to learn this kind of resiliency in infancy. In not responding to every cry, we provide a balance of focused love and care, when there is a legitimate need, but as well we provide the opportunity for the infant to learn that not every problem is solved by screaming for help. They learn that they have the ability to overcome their issues in infancy, and the hope is that this skill will translate to their later years, and that a child raised in this kind of balanced environment will more quickly and easily be able to solve problems for himself as he ages and his problems become more serious. Since this isn’t a baby book, I won’t offer my two cents as to which strategy I believe to be more effective in infancy, but I will agree that at some point in a child’s life the parent has to shift from problem solver to supporter. As parents we are the external voice that says we believe in you, and your abilities. Then we allow the child to try, and quite possibly fail, and then try again. Failure is not always a loss. Now this sounds great in a book, but it sure is hard to let play out when we see our kids struggling with a bully, or when they get turned down for a job. Part of us wants to step in and make it all better, and part of us knows that there is something valuable gained from letting them struggle through for themselves, finding solutions on their own. I dread the soccer games where my daughter is playing net. Every time the other team runs down the field towards her, I pray that the defense stops them well before the net, or that the shot will go wide. It’s not that I don’t trust her skills as a goalie, I just never want to watch her experience hurt, even if it’s just the small shame she’d feel after letting her team down as the ball goes into the net. When we allow our kids to fail, we feel like
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we are letting them down, and allowing them to hurt more than what is probably necessary. Yet some of the greatest lessons I have learned from life have come in moments that someone probably could have helped me avoid making the mistake I made. They are lessons that I needed to learn, and lessons that I was better served learning when I was younger, and more open to changing my mindset, rather than waiting until I was older, and less willing/able to change the way I think. All these things sound good but they don’t always feel good in the immediate.
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III. The Goalie Pads When I was 10 years old I started to play net in the CBHL. Our regular goalie was crying because he no longer wanted to get hit with pucks, which is really one of the critical skills to master if you want to be a hockey goalie. As you can tell, it was a very intense league full of tough kids who only cried when things got really scary. I had played catcher in baseball so I was used to the abuse of having objects hurled my way, so when the coached called me and offered me my big break to become the starting goalie, I didn’t hesitate for even a moment. Our coach had a set of goalie equipment that he said I could use. The pads were the old leather kind, two sizes too big with a few rips in them. When I went to the ground, the water on the ice absorbed into the pads and made them weigh close to 40 pounds. I can’t remember what the final score of the game was, but I do remember that we won, and I fell in love with a new position. I became the regular keeper for the rest of the season and played goalie every year from then until my untimely retirement from rec hockey due to the fact that I got older and needed to work rather than play. I hate it when work gets in the way of following a calling like rec league hockey goalie superhero. A few years into my goaltending career, I switched leagues to a higher calibre league with better competition, but I still managed to play well. I was recruited for the travel team and was so excited or my opportunity. During the very first practice, a few of the other players laughed at my borrowed, oversized, ugly, ripped goalie pads. Like any twelve year old, I became self-conscious and was convinced that the other kids were correct in their assessment that my pads were terrible and that I needed new equipment. My parents were already unimpressed that my hockey was now going to cost more with the expenses of the travel team, so purchasing new pads was not even in the discussion. Yet in my world, showing up to the next practice with those ancient artifacts on my legs that deserved to be destroyed, not used in travel team games, was not in the question either. What to do, what to do, what to do? It’s not that my parents couldn't bail me out, it's that they wouldn't. They could have found a way to pay for new equipment, but
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they
they were consistent in how they never just gave me the easy way out. They wouldn’t step in and teach me that when kids make fun of you, it’s best just to go along and do what the group thinks is right. They wouldn’t teach me the financial lesson that whatever you feel like you need the most at any given moment is worth buying. They wouldn’t cave into my desperate pleas for help from the mean old BCHL travel team bullies. I was definitely mad at them in the moment, but I can look back now and be thankful for what I learned. That year I saved up my newspaper route money until I had a $400 down payment on new goalie pads. One of the local sports stores was moving locations and selling off inventory. During their final few weeks of sales, my Dad brought me over and made me a deal. If I paid $400, he would pay the balance and allow me to work off the rest until my debt was paid. By allowing me to go through some small locker room humiliation, the resiliency lessons I was taught were irreplaceable. I learned that I could manage even when others made fun of me. I learned that it’s more cost effective to wait for sales. I learned delay of gratification, and that the waiting period between when I realised I wanted them and when I actually got them was not all that horrible. I learned how to save and how to pay off debt. I learned that sports is not always about having the best equipment; it’s about playing your best with the equipment you have. That following year I wasn’t allowed to blow money on candy and toys, all my extra money went to paying back my Dad. As a 12 year old, this was a torturous experience. One I probably complained loudly about and announced to the world the injustices of making a child pay for his own sports equipment at the expense of candy. Yet it was wonderful life experience when it came time for university and I was forced to go into debt. My wife and I were married the year we graduated school. We were carrying close to $20 000 debt in total. That year we decided to live off one salary, and pay back debt with the other. We had to choose to limit our expenses for fun and entertainment in order to pay off debt. Before even 10 months had even passed, we were debt free and ready to start saving for a house. This was a financially resilient choice I started to learn how to make because my parents wouldn’t bail me out. At different times in my life I’ve had to stand up for I believed to be reight for me and my family, even though friends were telling me d
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differently. Thank-you Mom and Dad for allowing me to endure a little peer pressure when I was young, so I could stand up for what mattered when I was old.
In my work at the church and as a counsellor, I have come across many young adults who feel stuck in life because they have been to school, but don’t feel ready or able to jump into a career that will be fulfilling. They start to place blame on a system that hasn’t set them up for success, or a world that doesn’t have a place for them to fit in. I often begin to wonder if it’s more a case of a generation of young adults who have had too many experiences where the world shifted for them when it got hard. They were never forced to persevere through a tough year at school, or forced to wait big chunks of time before they got what they wanted as they grew up, so naturally it’s very difficult for them to react any differently as a young adult. They’re very correct in their assessment that their that world does not have a perfect job waiting for them the moment they graduate. They’ll probably be forced to volunteer, or take an entry level job in a field in which they have interest in, so they can gain experience, contacts and knowledge in their field. New graduates rarely offer an employer all the necessary experience to be successful in their field. They have a few years of book knowledge and institutional training, but that’s about it. It’s not their fault, nor should it be held against them; they’re just a few years away from being qualified to earn what an experienced employee would be paid for that role. Their volunteer time or entry level desk job will make it so that when a desired job opens up for them, they would be in the right place, at the right time, with the right training to be a legitimate candidate for that job. Too many young adults can’t endure the thought that this phase might be 2 years, 5 years, even 7 or 8 years before they get that role. In fact since it feels so far away, they give up and search for something that feels more attainable. Really what has happened is that they fail this resiliency test. They go off and settle for something easier but less fulfilling. Something that perhaps a friend or family member can make happen right away, but will not ultimately allow them to attain their desired role.
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Is this the fault of a group of short-sighted young adults, or the result of a generation of helicoptering, snow ploughing parents who made sure their kids experienced success time and time again by asking the world to make it easier on them? Sadly, rather than asking for perseverance, the world has co-operated. No one loses the soccer game anymore. The kids all know what the score is, but we pretend that everyone has won and hand out orange slices. The entire class passes grade 7, even though there are clearly kids who everyone knows have no business moving on to grade 8.
In our fear of creating losers, we haven’t allowed anyone to discover what it takes to win. As tough as it might be, some of the greatest lessons we can help our kids learn are failing an assignment, working through disagreements between friends, or sticking out a sport or activity that has become difficult. There have been nights where our daughter is sitting at the table with a sheet of math questions in front of her, in tears because they are too hard for her to complete. In fact they are not too hard for her; she is really asking for me to solve a problem that she has all the skills and knowledge necessary to solve. It’s those nights when I go over and give her hug and a kiss, tell her that I know she can do it and remind her that I love her enough not to solve every one of her difficult problems. And if it’s been half an hour of sincere effort and she still can’t get it… we close the textbook, go for ice cream and talk about why you don’t need math to be a counsellor, pastor or author anyway.
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“Let me get something straight, okay. Your mother and I are rich. You have NOTHING!" 14 (Bill Cosby, The Cosby Show)
Section 4 - Financial Resiliency Young Adults - You Weren't Rich...Your Parents Were As a teenager, our family never had tons of extra money or new toys, but we always had more than enough to make life comfortable. We would take a family vacation or two each year. We had two cars, two TV’s, an Atari, and still had enough money left over to register three kids for baseball, dance and hockey. That landed us squarely in the 70-80 percent of Canadian families who fall within the middle or working class with enough cash flow to participate in mainstream Canadian culture. Kids from these families fill our community centres, city run sports programs and attend the local fair. Their families have enough disposable income to involve them in camps and programs, but they aren’t going to be able to afford higher end privatized programs. These families can afford to give their kids personal comforts, that aren’t necessary, but always nice to have. Their children will grow up with regular access to computers, personal devices, sports equipment and things like that. They grow up being used to the idea that whenever there is a new gadget or toy that they want, there is enough disposable income for the family to go out and meet that “want”. Now if a parent wants to spoil their kids every now and then it’s totally fine. The issue comes when thechildren develop a mindset of self-indulgence that they will not be able to maintain over the entire course of their adult lives. Children from middle class or working class families are not gifted significant sums of money once they move out of their parents’ homes. They finish post secondary school with debt, and enter a workforce that will not pay them want they want or maybe even what they are qualified to earn. If their experience has taught them that it’s OK to stay up to date with the latest and greatest gadgets and comforts that are available to them, we end up with” twenty-somethings” with mass amounts of school debt while still finding the space in their budget to buy $600 phones with $100 monthly plans. We see them driving vehicles worth more than their boss's vehicle
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is worth, because they have decided that the smaller monthly payments are doable (especially on credit) so why not bump up and purchase the car they really want instead of the car they can afford. It doesn’t require that a person live this way for very long before they will have acquired significant credit card debt, run through any savings that might have been there, and established an extremely unhealthy basis of how to go about dealing with their money. It’s not that having nice things is wrong by any means. It’s that we have people living upper class lives on working class salaries. Financial resiliency is critically important for us in our development as an adult. The minute you move out of your parents’ home, you’re bound to drop down the social risk index scale. Your parents may not have lived in Rosedale and driven a Lexus, but they probably had more disposable income and more savings than you. We have already agreed that we can’t keep living the life we were accustomed to, or we’ll be in debt very quickly, so we need to develop a resilient mindset to gradually improve our financial situation. For most people, personal wealth is built upon a series of small good decisions, that remind us that the patterns we behave in today will define the reality we experience in the future. Winning lottery tickets and overnight internet business success stories are not the norm. They’re the exception. They require impeccable timing and a degree of luck. A resilient mindset understands that, though it may take time, financial health can be established through self- discipline. My in laws own a home, a condo week in Florida, and a cottage in Muskoka and have money left to spare. My father- in- law was a high school teacher and my mother- in- law worked part-time as an elementary teacher throughout her career. Both came from humble homes and families that worked hard to just meet family expenses. Neither inherited wealth. I’ve often heard the story of how when they were newly weds, Grandpa came over to visit and was hungry. He went to the cupboard, but the only thing in there was a jar of mustard. He left the house without saying a word and returned with a grocery bag containing some meat, milk and eggs. He said no words, shook his head at these two young,
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broke lovebirds, and left. The story seems surreal now because much of this book was edited sitting in a Muskoka chair overlooking their private beach watching the sunset through their 50-foot high “cottage” windows. These two understood that just because they were broke when they started, it didn’t mean they would always be broke. They gave themselves theright message. They built their life upon the pattern of saving rather than spending, no matter how small the savings were. They recognized that short-term pain could mean a significant difference in their future. Even today, when they stop for coffee, they share one instead of getting two. When we order a meal in a restaurant we get water. Financial resilience is no different than resilience in any other area of life.
If you made a list of things that you really “need” to live, your list would be very short. Food. Shelter. Water. Air. Maybe a hug every third or fourth day. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs taught us these lessons. Yet the typical Canadian has so much more in his or her life that feels like a “need”. We’ve given ourselves a bad message that is limiting our ability to stay financially resilient. We need our Skinny Vanilla Latte in the morning or we just don't function right. We need to watch “Game of Thrones” or stay up to date with who was kicked off the “The Amazing Race”. We need a car because the bus stop is a 15-minute walk from our
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home, and the ride to work would be over an hour. None of these things are actual needs; we’ve just turned them into needs because we’ve become accustomed to life with all these extras. Financial ruin comes when we give ourselves
the
message
that
we
actually
cannot
live
without
the
“nice to haves” instead of just the “need to haves”. We lose the ability to see how we could ever create a bank account with enough wiggle room to take a vacation or cover the cost of a home repair, because everyday we tell ourselves we can’t live without many things that are quite frivolous, so we lose hope that we’ll ever save anything. “Nice-to-haves” are all those things that have been mentioned previously in this chapter that added comfort to our lives, but are clearly not essential. Stop reading for a moment and do a check list of all the things you’ve been telling yourself are really important (needs), but might be better suited for a list of added extras.
_____________________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________________ My list would include cable sports channels, dessert coffees and a good Wi-Fi plan. Everyday I check the sports to see who was traded, who was injured, and which team won to stay in first place. It’s my break away from the stress of a fast paced pressured life. It’s entertainment and enjoyment wrapped in together. I’m not sure I would keep my sanity if I didn’t have this escape. This is exactly the type of message that limits my ability to be financially resilient. It’s a lucky individual who never faces a time in life when finances are not tight. There are only ever two solutions to getting to a better financial state. We either spend less or make more.
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Simple concept, but your level of resiliency controls your ability to do either. It takes an extreme amount of resiliency to decide to deny yourself and save money. The best jobs that pay us the kind of salaries we know we deserve don’t just fall into our laps. They only become available to us after years of putting in time, building up a resume and finding favour with our superiors. It’s only the resilient person who perseveres to a place where he or she can maintain financial comfort. This is how social scientists can justify the statement that resiliency is the key factor in our success and development. Without a mindset and a pattern of being able to recover from challenges, it’s even limiting our ability to become independent adults. The principles of resiliency apply to any facet of our lives. Learn to give yourself the right messages, and how to ignore the ones that would become detrimental. Learn to build upon successful behaviours, regardless of how small they may be, and things will begin to turn the corner. And always remember that we’re never too old to learn any of these principles. If we stay open to constantly evolving and allowing for a change in the way we’ve trained ourselves to think, there is no limit to when and how we can produce change in our lives.
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"A person standing alone can be attacked and defeated, but two can stand back-to-back and conquer. Three are even better, for a triple-braided cord is not easily broken." Ecclesiastes 4:12
Section 5 - Conclusion Don't Do It Alone When I was 15 and a-half years old, Ontario brought in the practice of graduated licensing. It meant that for all of us who had dreamed of getting our drivers licenses the day we turned 16,we were now going have to wait a minimum of 10 months post our sixteenth birthday to get our licenses. And even that was based on the completion of extra testing and training. It was quite the thing to drop on all of us who were expecting freedom and wheels in the coming months, but somehow we all managed to make it through. I had an early morning paper route that required me to deliver newspapers to a senior citizens residence before 6:30 each morning. My Mom had been driving me faithfully each morning at 6:00 to collect the paper bundles, then over to the building to complete the delivery which only took 10-15 minutes, and then back home, where I would try to sleep another hour or so before school. The fact that she had to continue this routine was probably more devastating to her than me, but God bless her for doing this for so many years, so I could have a little extra spending money. Just days before I turned 17, I had a final driving test to receive my G2 licence allowing me to drive without adult supervision. I passed with ease (of course) and was ready to get up the next morning and do the paper route alone, but I can remember that my Mom still got up to see me goodbye and greet my return. It seemed silly to me, but I guess that’s what Moms do. She didn’t see me off the second day, but sleepily came to the door when I returned. I thanked her, but mentioned that maybe she could just stay in bed and catch up on the sleep she had been sacrificing for years. She agreed that tomorrow she would just sleep through, since it would be Friday morning and she could use the extra sleep heading into a busy weekend.
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I can still remember unimportant details about that Friday. I collected my newspaper bundles at 6:08 am. The Cardigan’s song “Love Fool” was playing on the radio when I shut off the van and attempted to unload the papers on the loading dock of the building. I heard voices shouting, “Put the stuff down, put the stuff down!” I wondered who on earth was up and that active at this hour, and why were they so concerned about me and my “stuff”? I figured I might be in for a fight and reluctantly turned around to see what all the fuss was about. Yet when I turned, I saw two masked men running at me with guns. I dropped my newspaper bundles in shock and threw my hands in the air. When they reached me they put a gun to my head and told me to stay quiet. They proceeded to blindfold and handcuff me, and put me in the back of the van under a blanket. We sped away and no one said a word.
At this point I was quite convinced that we were on our way to Mexico. I’m not sure why I came to that conclusion; I guess I had just seen enough of Hollywood to conclude that Mexico is where kidnappers take people. We slowed down after about 20 minutes of driving, and while I was only a teenager, even I knew that the time to get from Brantford, (located an hour outside of Toronto), all the way to Mexico was longer than 20 minutes. Throughout the course of the next few hours the two men who abducted me picked up two other companions, and went on to rob a convenience store warehouse holding hundreds of thousands of dollars in cigarettes, lottery tickets and other merchandise. One man stayed with me during the robbery while the other three entered the building. When they came back, we sped away and I started to realize that I was not really necessary to their missions. I was much more of a nuisance to their mobility, as well as a witness to their crime. I had seen and heard the first two men, and had overheard conversations as to what was happening over the next few hours. At this point my delusions of a Mexican kidnapping had dissipated, and I now wondered if they would kill me. I was in the back seat of the van, lying down under blankets. I rolled to face backwards assuming that a gunshot entering from the back would hurt less or do less damage than one that entered from the front. A science major I was not, but I figured that the important stuff in the body was closer to the front
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than the back. I made sure I was good with God, and just prayed for peace during whatever was about to happen because that seemed like the most spiritual thing to do. Then I waited. We drove for a short time and then the van shutoff. I felt a hand reach back and grab my shoulder. Now obviously I didn’t die because I lived to tell this story, but in that moment, I considered it to be one of my last. The voice said to me, “It’s OK”. Seriously? It’s OK? I’ve had a gun to my head, been kidnapped and cuffed for a few hours and am wondering if I’m now done for, and you are saying it’s OK? No sir, it’s really not OK. Thankfully I didn’t actually say any of that, I just whimpered a little and listened to his instructions. He unclipped my cuffs and told me to count to 100 after I heard the van doors close. Then I was free to go. Part of me considered asking him to leave a twenty on the dashboard for gas, but again, a whimper was all I could muster. I heard the men get out and enter another vehicle. I counted to 100. Then I did it again to be sure. In my head I started to picture one man just waiting there for me to move and if I did he would then shoot me. The waiting was almost more torturous than the past few hours had been. I couldn’t see how counting to 100 again would do any good, so I took a deep breath and slowly rolled back the blanket from over my head. I was alone. I drove home, shaking, sullen. When I pulled into the driveway it was 8:30, more than two hours after I should have been back. My parents were both now fully up and awake and very nervous. I couldn’t speak, but just held up the handcuffs and blindfold to explain where I had been. I cried and hugged them and attempted to recount the details about what had happened. I wanted to tell them that my confidence was shaken, that I was scared and that I wasn’t sure what I was going to do, but I couldn’t get more than a few words out of my mouth when the police showed up. The van that had been spotted at the crime scene an hour earlier had been spotted pulling into our house driven by a scared looking teenager. I spent the next hour convincing them that I was a victim and not part of the robbery crew. After my tears and complete lack of knowledge of what had happened convinced the police, the newspaper people showed up, along with the local
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the local radio people. I couldn’t stay there and talk anymore so I told my parents I was going to school. For some reason they thought this was an OK idea just to head to class so off I went. When I got there, my friends bugged me about missing first period. I wasn’t quite sure what to tell them, so I just quite frankly explained that I was kidnapped and didn’t get back until after the bell rang so I had to miss class. This was a new one to add to the list of excuses of why a student was late for school, and it took me showing the evidence of the red scars on my wrists from the handcuffs before I convinced them. We all decided that this was far too wild of an event to just go about our school day as usual, so we went to one of their houses and organized a video game hockey tournament. My friends called their parents and said that they would be skipping school that afternoon in order to support Rick with his kidnapping, and if they didn’t believe them they could listen to the news to hear all the details. That whole day… that entire experience… is still just so surreal when I think about it. Nothing seems to feel real or logical… it just was what it was. Your story is probably different than mine, but many of us could write out a crazy experience that left us feeling hurt, damaged, exposed or scared. It was something that changed the way we viewed life and the way we react to adversity. I couldn’t drive that van for quite some time after that day. I tried to keep the paper route going, but after a week away from the job, the morning I got into the car and arrived at the apartment building, it was 6:08, and (I kid you not) “Love Fool” was back on the radio. I didn’t even get out of the car. I turned away from the building, went home and never did that job again. I convinced my guidance counsellor that I was too emotionally scarred to write exams, so I finished the year with my grades, as they were at mid-term. I convinced my third period teacher that I had counselling sessions over lunch on Fridays, so my friends and I would go out for lunch and return late without penalty. I discovered that I could use my pain to gain sympathy from others, so I just dropped my school responsibility, my job, and really my motivation to move forward in life. In the coming months I experienced some really low moments where fear gripped me so badly that I wondered if I really wanted to keep on living. I had moments that I figured my new lot in life was just to make people feel sad for me. After all, it seemed like I could just
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blame my lack of desire to do
blame my lack of desire to do things on what had happened to me and I could get by. This was a life defining moment for me, because although I tried to play it cool, things were not cool. I was shaken and unmotivated. Things that used to be easy for me were now scary and stressful. I was a 17 year old that should have been excited about graduation, driving cars, girls, independence and all the things that come with transitioning from high school to young adult hood, but I wasn’t. I was down and I felt out. I had failed to rebound. And the thing is that no one really blamed me for being down, after all, I had just been abducted at gunpoint.
Though none of us can control what life does to us, all of us can control what we do with what life gives us. So much of our energy is focused on worrying about things that other people do, or circumstances beyond our control. We lament over people who have wronged us. We become depressed over sicknesses or calamity. We carry the weight of regret over missed opportunities or decisions that should have been made differently. Yet those are things that we have no ability to change. But we always have the ability to control our response to the situation once it happens. The lie we tell ourselves is that we can’t control he way we feel or react. It’s just who we are. You and your plastic brain really do have the ability to emotionally and physiologically respond differently. I made two important decisions. The first was that I learned that stubborn self-reliance was detrimental to my overall mental health. I’m a middle child who learned how to take care of himself very early in life. I was making meals and doing laundry before I left elementary school. All throughout my life it’s been hard for me to readily accept help and care. I get caught telling myself a story that when I accept help from someone, it means that both myself and someone else has realized that I’m not capable and require assistance. Leaning on your loved ones for support is not a sign of weakness
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weakness. It’s a sign that we’re human, and that there are people that love us. We’re not much good alone. There are just sometimes when you won’t be able to get up without the support of people around you. When a basketball player falls to the floor, they are coached to stay down until their teammates come over to pick them up. Staying down isn’t a sign of weakness; it’s a sign of being connected to a group. Picking up their fallen teammate reminds them all that when one falls, we all get back up together. During the months following my kidnapping, I experienced bad days and good days. The bad days were more often than not the days when I decided I didn’t need people around me. The good days were when I let the people I loved get me back on my feet. They reminded me to laugh, reminded me that I was loved, and reminded me of the things I wanted to live for. Sadly it’s often in the moments that we are the lowest, when we need the most help, that we push people away. We do it out of pride. We do it out of depression. We do it because our first instinct is “just leave me alone”. Sometimes resiliency is a group effort. You were not designed to do life alone. The second decision I made was to re-center my faith. I went to a church service one Friday night late that summer. A family friend had been praying for me and felt that I needed to be in that particular service. I had become a Christian a few years previous to this experience, but I wouldn’t say this was a high moment for me and God. Church had become a place where I could go and have a good cry, and wonder why this terrible thing had happened to me, but I wasn’t feeling all that particularly cared for by God. But since this friend promised to buy us dinner, and drive us to this cool youth service in Toronto, I agreed to go. That night I can’t remember the music; I can’t remember what the speaker said, but I can definitely remember what I heard God say to me. The first was a clear question. He said, “Do you trust Me?” It wasn’t an audible voice, but it was one of those moments where those words felt like they resonated all throughout my body. "Do you trust Me?" was an interesting question, because if He was asking did I trust Him to keep bad things from happening, I believe exhibit "A", the gunpoint abduction, speaks to a resounding "No" for an answer. But His question
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went deeper than that. The memory of my prayer for peace in the midst of the craziness on that day was brought back to my memory. That night, in that church service, I experienced peace. Reflecting back on the entire ordeal, although I had fear of what the end of it all might be, I never really lost my cool. No hyperventilating. No crying. I had clarity of thought through it all, even to the point where I could consider cracking a joke about leaving gas money. I had peace. I was reminded of that peace in the service that Friday evening. It’s a peace that has really never left me. Since that night I’ve entered into dark alleys with armed people, I’ve participated in disarming violent criminals while they were high on drugs, I’ve had to pray for my wife as she was stuck in a Costa Rican rainforest with no food and no help available to come for rescue because of torrential rains. I can honestly say that in each of those situations, while I have sensed fear, I have also known peace. Peace that in spite of craziness, it’s going to work out. Just as much as we weren’t designed to journey this world alone, we weren’t designed with enough internal fortitude to rebound consistently. Life takes a kick at us sometimes, and it legitimately is too much for us to handle with our own resources. The Bible promises that it’s in these moments when we feel our weakest, that God becomes strong in us (2 Cor 12:10). His Joy can become our strength (Nehemiah 8:10). Sometimes resiliency is not even a group effort…it’s supernatural. Flat basketballs don’t bounce back until they get a new breath of fresh air. A twisted slinky never makes it all the way down the stairs. A car on the side of the road with a broken belt will not start up again. You and I are not basketballs, Slinkys or cars. We are so much more complex, with so many more levels of complexity to what we are able to accomplish. You were designed with love and care and the ability to rebound, to untwist, and to heal. Some days it’s a matter of reframing a situation for ourselves. Some days our loved ones pick us. At the very darkest of moments when all feels lost, God still does miracles and helps us get off the mat and go again.
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About the Author Rick Carrol is the Senior Pastor for PORTICO Community Church based in the GTA. He is a licenced CBT therapist and has worked with kids, youth and families for over 10 years. Rick maintains a regular blog, sharing teaching and insights on issues related to family, health, relationships and faith. (rickcarrol.blogspot.com). Rick is a regular motivational speaker and stand up comedian in schools, churches and other community events. For booking please contact him via email (rcarrol29@gmail.com)
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