It’s 9/11 and I’m sitting in the foyer of the Marriott in San Jose.

It’s 6-45 in the morning and the Starbucks is doing a brisk trade. I’m sitting here with a large Americano with an extra shot I really don’t need. The sky is grey, as it has been every morning. The sun will soon rise high enough to burn the grey away, ushering in another beautiful Californian day.

I’ve been watching the 9/11 ceremony from New York with my fellow foyer dwellers and I am struck by the amazing resilience of this country. The amazing ability to recover, not just endure. To recover and thrive. Unbowed.

What does it take to be so resilient?

Identity

It takes identity. A positive view of who we think we are. The label we place on ourselves. This label can have many authors: parents, peers, authority figures and, most importantly, us. But I’m afraid the other authors are not always entirely helpful. But we don’t have to let them write their bit on our label. We can and must define ourselves. This is the first part.

Interpretation of Events

Resilience requires us to interpret events in ways that help us, not hinder us. Information comes into our brains; we interpret it and decide what it means to us. This then defines our intentions and consequently the actions we take.

And there are two extremes to our interpretation –

a)      We set our goal; we didn’t get the result we wanted; we are a failure; there’s no point in trying again; we won’t try again.

b)      We set our goal; we didn’t get the result we wanted; we will try harder next time as we know we will get better; we want another chance; we go out and find that chance, now.

Same information. Different results. This is the second part.

Optimism

Resilience requires optimism. Optimism comes from sifting through our pasts for the good stuff and accepting the bad stuff as simply being “life”. Optimism comes from looking at the here and now and asking ourselves “what do we have to be grateful for?” Optimism comes from looking at the future and being exciting about our possibilities.

And if there are any pessimists in our lives…we need to be careful here because they are toxic. There. I said it.

Self-Efficacy

Resilience requires self-efficacy. We dealt with self-efficacy recently – here. Basically self-efficacy is our belief that we can control an outcome or event. A lot of people lose their self-efficacy between the ages of 16 and 26 when they realise they aren’t going to be a rock star etc etc. Self-efficacy is a real differentiator. If we don’t have self-efficacy…we’re f*cked. End of.

These four factors are the foundation stones of our resilience.

Each of them is a practice. They are not absolute. They are mental constructs. We construct what we want –

• We can contribute to our identity along with others or we can claim it all to ourselves.
• We can interpret events in any way we want (really).
• We can be optimistic or pessimistic; glass half-full or half empty.
• We can believe we have control or we can believe we have no control – whichever we believe will be our reality.

Our choices on these four factors are major contributors to our resilience.

I’m not going to score the USA on the four elements of resilience. The USA is self-evidently resilient because it chooses to be.

OK, so what about us humans, rather than nations?

We are getting closer to the core here. The nub. The heart of the matter.

When we wrap it all up – identity, interpretation, optimism, self-efficacy and resilience – we find that this defines what is currently understood by psychologists to be our psychology. Our psychology. Definition – the study of our mind and its functions.

So maybe we should look at ourselves and ask “what’s our psychology?”

Well that’s a big issue for a blog post, but let’s start with IDENTITY.

Here’s something to think about -

List the five most irritating “ingredients” that have been scrawled on your identity label. You may not think they are big issues, and they may not be. But if they happened years ago and they are still popping into your brain, they are still with you. And although they may not be doing you much harm it is unlikely they are doing you much good. And your identity is supposed to be for your good. So it’s time for action.

Again, list the five most irritating “ingredients” that have been scrawled on your identity label. By your parents (even although they loved you), your peers (even although they were kidding) and the authority figures you met when you were young and sensitive.

Look at the list. Does it describe you? If not, let it go.  We are our own architects. We design ourselves. The people that said this stuff about us, they meant no harm. And if they did, even more reason to let it go.

The sun’s coming out. There’s 350 million people here, and not one of them knows me…my identity is what I choose it to be. Now, where’s the keys to the Aston.

I’ve been re-reading Putting Out of Your Mind by Bob Rotella. He’s a sports psychologist for golfers. A head doctor if you will. He recently walked the Open Course with Darren Clarke and is seen as a contributor to Clark’s Open victory.

In this book he suggests that, when lining up a put, we believe with all our being that the put will drop into the hole. We visualise it. We tell ourselves it will happen. We see it so clearly it is as if it has already happened. AND, we don’t care if we miss.

It’s basically about what psychologists call self-efficacy. Very crudely, self-efficacy is our belief about how effective we are at doing something. How skilled we are. How competent.

The key word is belief. Our belief about how effective we are, or could be.

Many studies have shown that it is better to have an inflated belief of your abilities than a deflated one. Yes indeed, confidence, even over-confidence is good, if annoying for those around you.

Self-efficacy is important because it affects almost everything we do. The more self-efficacy we feel about a task or challenge, the harder we work at it. That’s another wee quirk of the human mind. We work harder at the stuff we think we can do.

Critically, I think the better we think we could be in the future, if we apply ourselves, is also a part of self-efficacy. The acceptance that we might be a bit rubbish at the start but having a belief, from self-knowledge, that we could get better in the future – that’s also self-efficacy. The books don’t mention this “self-efficacy orientation”, and I just made it up, but it rings true to me.

Taken to extremes in the other direction, the poorer we think we are at something, the less hard we try, until we give up entirely. Psychologists have a name for this too. It’s called learned helplessness. Isn’t that dreadful – learned helplessness? Ugh.

There are two staircases here.

On the first staircase we take action. We improve. We gain competence and hence confidence and so we take more action and so it goes on. It’s an upwards staircase to the top floor where there is a glass ceiling below an azure blue sky. This is self-efficacy. Psychologists actually say that this is the route to a happy and productive life. They really do. I have the book in front of me (Understand Psychology – Nicky Hayes).

On the second staircase, we seldom take action and when we do take action we are hesitant. Failure or poor results are immediately seen as evidence of our lack of competence. We pull back, do not improve and our competence and hence confidence does not rise. Eventually we stop. Further attempts at action become less and less frequent. We have attained learned helplessness. This is the staircase down into the basement. Where there is no light. We are doomed. Death soon follows.

OK. OK. I’m joking about the death bit.

I had a brush with self-efficacy recently (actually all the time but this is a neat wee example). You may have had a look at my new website for my programme Leading for Growth. I put this website up in about two weeks. It was a lot of work. Most of it outside of my competence. I had so much to learn. I had to do some videoing of me, of all people. Here’s me not yet with the physique of the Tour de France rider and some say a face for radio. Then I had to deal with masses of technology – editing, screen recording…and then the wonder of third party video hosting in the cloud (wot?). It was quite stressful at times and the children were shouted at on more than one occasion (poor self-control). And there were times when I put my foot on the first step of the staircase to the basement…

For example when after two days of video editing I discovered that all my videos were stuttering like Max Headroom (remember him?). But I knew I was going to sink the put. I knew I could do it because, hey, if it can be done by anyone I can do it too. That’s my self-efficacy orientation kicking in. I knew that we as humans have this really funny characteristic where when we do things we seem to get better at them! And in fact, to turn it around, if we don’t do things we CANNOT get better. And the converse of getting better is that in the past we were less good, or rubbish. (I used to have a boss once in my early career who at annual appraisal time would look at my improvement over the year and criticise me for being more rubbish at the start! The only way to avoid this criticism would be to never improve! I guess management just isn’t for some people.)

So where am I now? Well, the video website is up and running and a critical skill set I need for the future has been developed (first steps at least).

What seemed like a huge black hole of zero competence now holds no fear for me. I have improved my self-efficacy massively in an important area and I look forward to my next video/web project not with helplessness but with enthusiasm. I am on the right staircase.