Transcript

MARGIE WARRELL:

Dr. Martin Seligman was the founder of, really, the positive psychology movement. And he said you can tell how successful someone will be based on how they explain failure, what they call their explanatory style. How do you explain adversity and difficulty and setbacks and failures and mistakes?

And when we really take them really internally and go it's because I'm hopeless, or it's because I can't change, or I'm destined for bad luck, bad things always happen to me, things will never get better, I can't make them better, that we set ourselves up for more misery. And we really become complicit in our own suffering.

But when we interpret things as these things happen, what is there for me to learn from this, how can I grow from this, that it sets us up to ultimately be more successful in the future. If only everyone should would do what they were supposed to do, and the world would conform to our idea of how it's supposed to go. Reality will never conform to your expectations and plans of it. So how do you respond to it?

And resilience is ultimately the name of the game. If you think about a rubber band, you stretch it and bend it in all sorts of shapes. It bounces back. So what does it take for you to bounce back into your best possible shape when things don't go the way you want so that you can then respond to them in a more effective way.