As life gets more complicated, you need to be able to move beyond the mistakes of past events, prevent worry and anxiety from holding you back, and spend more time in the present working on your future. You definitely can’t change the past. You can’t always predict the future. That leaves you with now. Right…
The Myths First Before we can talk about what resilience actually is, we need to clear out what it isn’t. Because most people are carrying at least one belief about resilience that’s actively getting in their way. Myth one: resilient people don’t struggle. They do. Every single one of them. The difference isn’t that they’re…
The Thing You’re Sacrificing First Let me tell you what happens when you don’t sleep. After seventeen hours without sleep, your cognitive performance is equivalent to a blood alcohol level of 0.05 per cent. After twenty-four hours, it’s equivalent to 0.10 per cent, comfortably over the drink-drive limit in most countries. You wouldn’t drive drunk….
What This Is Really About Resilience gets talked about a lot. It’s one of those words that gets thrown around in self-help books, corporate training programmes, and motivational speeches until it loses all meaning. You’re supposed to be resilient. You’re supposed to bounce back. You’re supposed to take the hits and keep going. Nobody tells…
There’s a version of persistence that looks like strength but is actually stubbornness wearing a good suit. You’ve probably met people who embody it. They set a goal, they commit to a plan, and then when circumstances change, when the evidence suggests something isn’t working, when a better path emerges right in front of them,…
I’m going to share a mnemonic with you, and before I do, I want to acknowledge something. I generally can’t stand tick-box coaches whose entire technique consists of working through questions one by one using a handy acronym, as if the complexity of a human life can be diagnosed and resolved with four letters on…
Recency bias is where a person chooses or remembers something new or more recent than a choice or memory that happened some time before. More recent things stay fresher in your mind, and because these memories are more easily recalled, this can really affect your decision-making. In the stock market, economists know that people are…
When something goes wrong, we can be prone to hindsight bias, which leads us to think that something could have been predicted beforehand. It’s that ‘I told you so’ reaction from another person who gathers evidence to try and show you how, for example, a mistake or an untoward event could have been avoided. The…
I think of a patient, a composite drawn from several people I’ve seen with this presentation. The air seemed to tighten when she walked into the room; her breathing was faster than it should have been, not laboured but fast, and as she sat, I could see a fine tremor in her hands whilst her…
Letting go of stress is something we all need to do from time to time. Some people seem to be able to let go of stress effortlessly. It drops away from them like water off a duck’s back. For others, stress clings to them like tar, sticky and suffocating, impossible to shake. You’re probably in…