A Little Spring Cleaning

Sharing my favorite links from the past month

Mar 20, 2024

body of water beside cherry blossom trees — Photo by Mark Tegethoff on Unsplash

Yesterday was the first day of spring here in the Northern Hemisphere. Spring is my favorite season of the year, but if there’s one downside, it’s the allergies. Almost on cue, I am being attacked by every form of plant life short of a Venus flytrap. But it’s a small price to pay for the opportunity to spend time outside and feel the warm sun on my face.

This week, in the spirit of spring cleaning, I’d like to share a few assorted links, resources, and announcements that I’ve been saving over the last few months:

1. The Hello, Adversity Resource Guide

If you look on the Hello, Adversity homepage today, you’ll see that I’ve created a new resource guide where readers can access all my previous articles, organized by topic for easy searching.

My hope is that you will reference this page any time you are dealing with a specific challenge. For example, if you are struggling with confidence, you can go to the Building Confidence section and find articles on escaping the comparison trap, taming impostor syndrome, etc. In the Mental Health section, you can read about decluttering your mind, learning to slow down, and other articles to help manage stress and anxiety.

My goal with Hello, Adversity is to create as much free content as possible in order to share what I’ve learned far and wide. That said, if you are so inclined and would like to support my efforts, you can do so here:

Anytime I write a new article, I’ll add it to the resource page. The more I write, the more useful it’ll become over time. (At least, that’s how I drew it up in my mind.) It’s also a great way to give new life to old content that’s been buried in the archive.

Let me know if you find the resource page useful or if there’s anything I should improve! I’m still working on the formatting to optimize readability.

2. The Three Secrets of Resilient People

Last week,

Victoria

Carer Mentor: Empathy & Inspiration

sent me an insightful TED Talk by Dr. Lucy Hone, titled “The Three Secrets of Resilient People”. Lucy is an expert in the field of resilience psychology who’s had a distinguished career as a researcher, speaker and writer.

In 2014, Lucy and her family experienced the devastating loss of her twelve-year-old daughter, Abi, in a car accident. Suddenly, Lucy was on the receiving end of resilience advice as she sought to process her family’s grief.

What she heard shocked her.

Lucy was told that her family was now a prime candidate for estrangement, divorce, and mental illness. Victim support arrived at her door and told her that they could expect to write off the next five years to grief.

She knew that her situation was devastating, but felt there had to be another way to handle her grief. “What I needed most was hope,” Lucy says in her talk. “I needed a journey through all that anguish, pain and longing. Most of all, I wanted to be an active participant in my grief process.”

She decided to conduct a self-experiment using the research and tools she learned as a resilience expert. She didn’t know what to expect going in, but found that three strategies in particular helped her piece her life back together:

Resilient people get that s*** happens. Suffering and terrible things happen to everyone. This doesn’t make the loss and pain we experience “easier”, but it helps to know that we aren’t alone. No one is living a perfect life, no matter what they post on social media.
Resilient people are really good at choosing carefully where they select their attention. In other words, focusing on the things we can change and accepting what’s out of our control. So much of our attention is focused on the negatives in life, which is understandable considering that we’re constantly bombarded by threats every day. The problem is, this ratchets up our stress and anxiety to unhealthy levels.
As Lucy puts it, “Negative emotions stick to us like velcro, while positive emotions and experiences bounce off us like teflon.” The more we’re able to recognize positive moments and operate within our circle of control, the more resilient we’ll become.
Resilient people ask, “Is what I’m doing helping or harming me?” This is something Lucy asked constantly in the months and years after her daughter’s death. Certain actions can make grieving easier — or more difficult. For example, when considering whether to attend the trial of the driver who killed her daughter, she asked, “Would it help me or harm me to go?” She realized it would make things worse for her, so she didn’t go.
The helping/harming framework allows us to seize control over our negative thoughts and actions. It’s similar to asking “Is this useful?” when our mind goes haywire, something I wrote about last year.

I highly recommend listening to this talk!

3. Grand Canyon’s Tyon Grant-Foster is thriving despite a pair of near-death experiences

March Madness has arrived here in the United States. The NCAA basketball tournament begins this week with my beloved Uconn Huskies the favorite to cut down the nets in Phoenix.

One non-Uconn player I’ll be rooting for is Tyon Grant-Foster, star of the Grand Canyon University Lopes. In 2020, while playing for DePaul University, Tyon went into cardiac arrest at halftime of a game before being resuscitated. A few months later, he had another heart attack, which made him wonder if he’d ever be able to play again.

Sixteen months later, Tyon was medically cleared and entered the transfer portal. Most teams were reluctant to take him given his history, but he’s found a home at Grand Canyon, where he’s thrived ever since.

Tyon recounts his inspiring journey in this short video:

4. Finished reading: Master of Change, by Brad Stulberg

I really enjoyed this book. It came at the perfect time for me — I have been scuffling recently with all the different changes taking place in my life. There are days when my circumstances feel overwhelming.

What I liked about Master of Change is that it provides a roadmap for dealing with uncertainty, centered on the concept of rugged flexibility. Here’s how Stulberg defines the term:

To be rugged is to be tough, determined, and durable. To be flexible is to consciously respond to altered circumstances or conditions, to adapt and bend easily without breaking. Put those together and the result is a gritty endurance, an anti-fragility that not only withstands change, but thrives in its midst.

In other words, instead of resisting change and denying its existence, or giving up and becoming a passive observer of life, we should strive for a middle ground — embracing the inevitability of change and using it as a tool to adapt and grow.

Stulberg provides several practical steps we can take to achieve a rugged and flexible mindset. I’ve found myself referring back to this book constantly as I deal with my own changes. Admittedly, I still have a lot of work to do on the flexibility side of the equation.