There are so many examples of well-known people who have gone through hardship and yet emerged victorious. In this lesson I tell you a bit of backstory of some of them so you can recognize that many household names have overcome very hard things.

This is a story of a friend of mine who suffered a serious bicycle accident and was not sure he would overcome his paralysis. In this lesson I tell the story of his accident and in the next lesson I talk about his recovery.

I shared the story of Jim Arbuckle's accident. Now I'll talk about his recovery. I invite my students to pay attention to what factors contributed to his recovery.

Lucy Hone tells an amazing story of her and her husbands recovery from the grief of losing their twelve-year-old daughter. She offers three powerful lessons that enabled them to recover and move on with life.

Chris has been in a care-giving role for most of her adult life. Not only did she and her husband raise a large family but her husband has a 30+ year history of heart attacks and strokes and so has been unable to work during large parts of their marriage. On top of this, recent strokes have left him quite cognitively disabled. In addition, Chris and Jim have a 26-year-old son, Ammon, with spinal bifida and confined to a wheelchair. Although bright and pleasant, Ammon is totally dependent on his parents to meet his physical needs. Needless to say, the demands on Chris are continuous. She rarely gets a break from caring for others.

I want to invite you to consider what you know about resilience from observing the real people in your life as well as from your own life experience. From your experience, what would you say promotes resilience? What is the mindset of people who exhibit resilience? In what ways do you already exhibit resilience?

By managing stress I’m talking about handling something that is going on now, real time. It could be small. You realize you just locked your keys in the car. Or it could be big. You just heard that you’re about to be laid off. How do you deal with something that’s happening now?

Building resilience, on the other hand, is like weight training. It’s developing the inner strength and resourcefulness that will make you better at handling stress not only now but well into the future. It’s learning practices or habits that will protect you against stress or make you more stress tolerant in the future.

In order to understand stress, it’s helpful to know something about how the brain works. The brain is made up of three main systems: The brain stem, the limbic system, and the cerebral cortex which we'll discuss in this lesson.

The goal of stress management is to put yourself into optimal arousal which I think of as a calm, resourceful, and empowered state of mind from which to respond rather than simply react to the stressor. You want to be able to act from your “wise mind,” or I like to think of it as inner wisdom rather than being either over or under aroused.

The response triangle consists of your thoughts, feelings and behavior. In this lesson you'll learn how you can put yourself into a different emotional state by interrupting negative patterns of thinking, feeling, and behaving and replacing them with positive or empowering thoughts, emotions, and behavior.

There are so many things you can do to interrupt your stress response and put yourself into a more calm or empowered state. Going back to the stress triangle, you might alter the flow of your negative thinking. You might do something to change your mood or feelings. You might alter your behavior. What is important is to experiment and, through trial and error, find different strategies that will work for you as you notice your stress increasing to unproductive levels. The goal is to do something (even anything) that diminishes your stress response.

The acronym TIPP comes from Dialectical Behavior Therapy and consists of a variety of techniques that you can use to help you quickly calm yourself. It involves action as a way to self-regulate. Each of the letters of the acronym stand for a different action.

Another powerful practice in managing stress is to tune into your five senses. We spend so much time in our heads and yet we experience the world through our senses of seeing, hearing, touching, tasting and smelling. So tuning into your senses is helpful at any time but also in the middle of stress, as strong emotions are arising.

In this lesson, I present a generic, three-step model for handling stress. This process is based on the stress response triangle that I introduced earlier and is something you can use for a particular, situation-specific trigger (an acute stressor) and also something you can use when your stress is more generalized and there are a number of causes or contributors (chronic stress).

This lesson is a personal story, from early in my career, that illustrates the three step process for handling stress.

From my personal experience and academic research, I’ve come up with four core themes which I think capture the road path to becoming more resilient. Think of the themes as like the legs of a table. Each leg is important to the stability of the table. The purpose of this lesson is to present an overview and rationale for the four pillars.

A lot of the literature on trauma uses the words trauma-informed care. Trauma informed care is providing a certain quality of care to be people who have been through traumatic experiences (acute or chronic) that is both informed and sensitive or compassionate.  And yet equally important is an emerging concept called healing-centered care. which moves beyond “what happened to you” to “what’s right with you” and views those exposed to trauma as agents in the creation of their own well-being rather than victims of traumatic events.

This lesson is an overview of pillar one, honor your feelings. We know we're experiencing stress or adversity because of what we feel and understanding your feelings is a key to emotional self-regulation and critical factor in building resilience.

In this lesson, I’m offer you a generic four-step process to honor and regulate your feelings. Following the steps will help you grow in emotional intelligence and resilience. And as you get better at the steps, you’re learning to act on your emotions rather than act them out.

Breathing is something we take for granted and yet depend on it for life. Something powerful occurs as we become conscious of our breathing. It is a way to pause and disconnect, briefly, from what is going on within or around us and connect with our body, mind and spirit.

Being present is a state of “wakefulness” in which you are aware and engaged in this moment, just one thing at a time. As you learn to be present, you start to notice the simple pleasures that emerge from your moment-by-moment experience that you miss when you’re unconscious or distracted. You also become more effective at dealing with life. You face it squarely. You step up to situations and, by so doing, tap into your inner resourcefulness.

Mindfulness is at the heart of learning to honor your feelings. It is paying attention to your moment-by-moment experience in a compassionate and non-judgmental way. In this lesson, I not only teach you the benefits of mindfulness but several ways of putting yourself into a mindful state.

People who meditate become less reactive and more grounded. Their moods become more stable and they respond from a quieter place inside. I'll talk about several different methods of meditating and give you a handout and exercise to bring a mantra meditation into your daily life.

In this lesson, I teach you several methods of soothing your emotions by calming and relaxing your body.

Writing out your thoughts and feelings is a powerful way of working through troubling and even unresolved emotions. In this lesson, I teach you not only the value of journaling but offer you guidelines for making journaling meaningful.

Self-care is engaging in any activity that 1. soothes you, 2. meets your deeper needs, or 3. lifts your mood. In this lesson, I do an overview of self-care and encourage you to create a routine that includes doing things that are enjoyable and self-nurturing daily. 

Although we generally think about compassion in our relationships with others, it also applies to ourselves. How do you treat yourself when you make mistakes, fail to meet an expectation, experience criticism, or recognize your imperfections and weaknesses? Self-compassion is learning to treat yourself with kindness, especially when things are hard.

I’ve offered you a number of practices, in this section of the program, to better understand and manage your emotional state. And now the purpose of this lesson is to take a few minutes of time to consider these strategies and then create a plan for how you’ll incorporate them into your life.

In this lesson, I present an overview of pillar two: empower your thinking. People who become masters at managing stress and building resilience adopt an empowering mindset when it comes to facing adversity. They decide, consciously, what they believe and think and how they will respond to life including its hardships.

One aspect of empowering your thinking is having a flexible and adaptable mindset. Flexibility and adaptability allow you to face life’s challenges with grace. It is the capability to change direction and methods as needed. Both qualities help us to remain open-minded and respond to changes quickly and effectively.

In this lesson, I teach you the “Empowerment Model.” A circumstance triggers thoughts which cause our feelings which drive our behavior and eventually produce our results. Most important in this chain-reaction is understanding the powerful role that thoughts play in determining our experience and outcomes.

I define a key moment as an emotionally challenging situation, circumstance or event. When you respond poorly to your key moments, you put yourself on a downward emotional spiral in which you can end up feeling like a pawn or victim of life. On the other hand, as you learn to respond positively to your key moments, you put yourself on an upward trajectory in which you become a more emotionally mature, resilient, confident and capable person.

In this lesson, I offer you several examples of using the empowerment model to resolve key moments. By understanding these examples, you'll be able to apply the concept in your own life.

Most of the thoughts that cause emotional pain are not true. Just because a thought causes a feeling doesn’t make the thoughts driving the feeling are true. In this lesson, I share several common distortions in our thinking. Seeing these distortions will enable you to interrupt negative thoughts and create more empowering thoughts.

In this lesson, we discuss the mindsets of scarcity and abundance. Resilience has a lot to do with which of these two places you are going to call home. Will you live, primarily, from scarcity or from abundance? Moment by moment you make this choice.

The impulse to complain or criticize means that something undesirable is going on in your life and it can be helpful to be aware of this so you can, when possible, convert your complaints and criticisms into positive action.

In this lesson, we talk about three critical differences (or attributions) in how people experience setbacks, frustrations and failures. Changing your attributions will change your experience of the world and help you become more resilient.

According to science, gratitude is more highly linked with mental health and well-being than any other character trait or practice. The purpose of this lesson is to offer you a number of practices to increase your gratitude.

We continue exploring different strategies to feel more gratitude in your life to help you adopt an overall abundance rather than scarcity mentality.

This is an opportunity to reflect on what you have learned from Pillar Two and then consider how you might use these strategies and practices to grow your resilience. As I’ve said before, it’s not enough to know the strategies, you have to use them.

The purpose of this lecture is to do an overview of the research regarding the importance of our relationships in our overall well-being, happiness and resilience. The happiest people have the best social relationships. The happier and mentally healthy a person, the more likely they are to have a large circle of friends, good work relationships, and a satisfying family life.

We have a tendency to isolate, emotionally, when we are going through trials and problems. This is not healthy. A way to counter this is to recognize our common humanity. I give you some ways to do this in this lesson.

Friendships matter and in this lesson, I talk about several strategies to grow your friendships. Increasing the quantity and, particularly, quality of your friendships will help protect you from the hardships of life.

This lesson goes beyond the previous lesson by giving you ideas about how to deepen your friendships and relationships.  We feel more resilient as our relationships become deeper and more meaningful. Not only does this give us people to turn to when we need help but we find gratification from being able to connect at a deeper and less superficial way.

The research suggests that reaching out to others in difficult times helps us make it through. It’s okay to be vulnerable enough to let others see into our lives and then offer us their support and wisdom.

Unfortunately, we're becoming more isolated and lonely as a society. An antidote is to belonging to groups, which not only bring social connection but a way influence others and accomplish a meaningful purpose. In this lesson, I talk about different types of groups you can belong to and invite you to consider whether or not your needs for affiliation are currently being met and, if not, what you can do about it.

Acts of kindness humanize us. They lift us emotionally and spiritually. They are good for our mental and emotional health and unleash our energy and release serotonin and oxytocin, chemicals which makes us feel high or give us a spike in happiness. Furthermore, the body responds to this “high” produced by the brain by increasing nitric oxide which expands the vessels of heart to improve heart rate, circulation and reduce blood pressure. Acts of kindness lower stress, physical ailments and even inflammation in the body and thereby delay aging.

Not only do good relationships require empathy and caring for others but also taking care of ourselves or even sometimes protecting ourselves from others. I don’t mean protecting ourselves because others are mean and hurtful, although that is certainly sometimes the case, but because we need to make room for ourselves and our needs which don’t always sync up with those of others. That is what setting boundaries is all about.

How often do people make requests of you and, out of duty or love, you say yes and yet in your heart you know that this is not something you want or something that is good for you? It's sometimes hard to say no because you may face rejection or disapproval or sometimes even push back. Some people try to make us feel guilty if we don’t give them what they want. But saying yes to please others, if it is compromising yourself, is not a healthy way to live. It has to be okay to say no. I offer guidelines for doing so in this lesson.

This lesson is an opportunity to apply what you've learned in this section of the program to your life. You'll come up with your plan to nurture your relationships.

This lesson is an overview of pillar four. I define and talk about the importance of a strong sense of self and how it protects us from adversity and stress.

A strong sense of self means that you know yourself—what you think, feel, believe, need, want, value, and stand for. In other words, you have a clear sense of your own identity and a strong inner core. In this lesson, we take a deeper dive into the meaning of sense of self and the benefits that accrue to those who develop a strong sense of self.

In this lesson, I differentiate between an internal vs. external locus of control. An internal locus of control refers to your belief that your actions and decisions directly affect the outcomes of your life. If you have a strong internal locus of control then you’re likely to be self-motivated and set and achieve goals. On the other hand, an external locus of control means that you believe that what happens to you is the result of circumstances, luck or fate, or other people rather than your own actions or decisions.

One of the greatest casualties of trauma and chronic stress is discouragement and the loss of the ability to dream and imagine a better future. But when you set goals, you raise your sight to new possibilities. You begin to experience a shift of mental and emotional energy from what is wrong about your life to who you want to become and what you want to accomplish.

Another way to enlarge your sense of self is to define your purpose. A purpose is a why behind what you do, a reason that motivates and inspires you and brings you meaning and fulfillment. In fact, it is a sense of purpose that allows us to rise above the difficulties of the path. Purpose is an enormous protection against the devastating effects of trauma and adversity.

Although there are different ways of defining values, I’m referring to your principles or standards of behavior, how you want to conduct yourself as you go through life. Values include such things as spirituality, honesty, loyalty, kindness, generosity, courage, determination, equanimity, and self-reliance. The list of potential values is long. They define how we want to live, how we show up in our relationships.

Although most everyone can identify goals they’d like to accomplish. But not everyone has the inner resourcefulness, drive or confidence to persist. People who persist believe in their ability to succeed; develop a deeper interest in the activities in which they participate; form a stronger sense of commitment to their interests and activities; recover quickly from setbacks and disappointments; and view challenging problems as tasks to be mastered.

Bringing structure and routine into your life offers you a sense of predictability and control. It also helps increase your ability to focus and organize your day-to-day life in ways that enable you to take better care of yourself and improve your personal organization so you can get more done. So, making conscious decisions around this will help you manage your stress and build your resilience.

Most worry happens when you are focused on your circle of concern rather than your circle of control. You might be worried about climate, or world economy or when another pandemic will strike. These are factors within your circle of concern but not control. Perhaps you’re worried about what your boss thinks about you or how your son is doing in high school. These are factors you can influence but not control. But these are the sources of most of our worry and anxiety. You enlarge your sense of self when you are aware of the difference between circle of concern, influence and control and keep your focus on your circle of control.

A healthy sense of self means that you’re clear about the boundaries between you and other people. You know how to stay in your lane. You know what you are responsible for—your own thoughts, feelings and actions and what you are not responsible for—others thoughts, feelings and actions. You enlarge and strengthen yourself as you internalize and live this principle.

You’ve now finished all four pillars and are almost at the end of the program. However, before we move on to the conclusion, I want to invite you to consider your plan for enlarging your sense of self. I'll have you ponder what you have just learned and apply it to your own life.

In this concluding lesson, I'll offer you a brief review of the four pillars of resilience and offer a handout that summarizes all of the strategies and practices you've learned in this course. I'll also share some parting thoughts to help you continue progressing in development of resilience.