Hello, Adversity Weekly Roundup #13 - April 29, 2023
Hello, Adversity Weekly Roundup #13 - April 29, 2023
Super-Helper Syndrome, how to deal with difficult people, taking things less personally, and the unsung hero of Uconn women's basketball. Also parrots who use Zoom.
Happy Saturday!
Welcome to the 13th edition of the Hello, Adversity Weekly Roundup. I hope you had a great week.
I have a couple updates to report. First, I changed up the font. I didn’t hate the previous font but like this one better.
Second, I am going to be on vacation the week of May 8-12. The weekly roundups will continue uninterrupted, but the Wednesday post that was scheduled to go out May 10 will instead go out on May 17. I will resume a normal schedule afterwards.
This will allow me the opportunity to fully rest and recharge. I have been going nonstop since early January, and since I also work full-time, I figure if I am going to take a week off, then I should actually take a week off.
Otherwise I’d be going against my advice from two weeks ago:
My two cents: it is so important to fully unplug on vacation.
Without further ado, here are this week’s links:
We all know someone who puts the needs of others ahead of their own needs, to the detriment of their well-being. You might even be this type of person. Although serving others is admirable, as with anything in life, it can be taken to the extreme.
This article explores what is known as “Super-Helper Syndrome”, defined as “a term coined by psychologists Jess Baker and Rod Vincent to describe people who have a compulsion to help others while failing to meet their own needs.”
The article outlines four ways we can free ourselves from this compulsion. Again, it is wonderful to have a serving mentality, but we must look after our own needs too. Empathy has its place, but we must also have empathy for ourselves. Balance is key.
Besides, when we take care of ourselves, we can actually become more helpful to others in the long run.
I subscribe to Ryan Holiday’s Daily Stoic newsletter and enjoy the short, practical takeaways in my inbox every morning. Although Holiday writes about topics through the lens of Stoicism, the takeaways are just as useful to a lay audience.
His email from April 26 about dealing with difficult people was especially enlightening. We will always encounter people who have a problem with us - that is beyond our control - but how we deal with them is in our control.
Says Holiday:
Whatever you decide to do with your life, whatever path you decide to walk, people are going to stand in your way. They’re going to doubt you. They’re going to give you bad advice. They will do you wrong. On purpose and unintentionally. They’ll lie. They’ll undermine you. They may well actively take steps to stop you…….The important question is not if this is going to happen, at least according to the Stoics, it’s about how you’re going to respond to the challenge when it does.
It is easy to get wrapped up in every controversy, every bit of gossip, every grudge. But we can only control how we respond. We have the power to choose kindness, and not let difficult people affect us. Or, we can fan the flames of drama.
Learning how to let go is one of the most valuable skills we can learn. It is a reminder I need to hear over and over again.
I included this article - which admittedly is a bit of a long read - because it hits on an important problem that so many of us face: taking things personally. Sometimes, people are overtly hostile to us (the topic of the Daily Stoic email), and sometimes people are only hostile to us in our minds.
I am guilty of taking things too personally. When something bad happens, I always wonder if I did something wrong, or if someone hates me, even though deep down I know that is not the case.
The article does a good job analyzing why we assume the worst in ourselves. In short, it is caused by two biases: personalization and mind-reading. Here is how these biases are described:
The first is personalisation, which is believing that you’re the cause of a negative event, despite having little or no evidence to support the belief…The second is mind reading, which is believing that someone is making a critical judgment about you, especially in an ambiguous situation where you’ve received no direct feedback.
When we fall victim to these biases, many problems arise:
There are several problems with these errors in thinking. The first, of course, is that they’re inaccurate, driven more by feelings, personal histories, ambiguity and conspicuously negative information than by objectivity. Another is that, if you commit to these biased beliefs, you limit your emotional options to feeling sad about your perceived flaws, anxious about your ability to withstand upcoming social challenges, or angry at others for not being nicer. Finally, they limit your behavioural options.
The article then goes on to list numerous actions we can take to combat this tendency. If we can learn how to condition ourselves to see situations objectively and make room for the possibility that all social interactions contain a level of awkwardness and ambiguity, that will go a long way towards reigning in self-blame.
As a life-long Connecticut resident (minus the twelve years I lived in Boston), I am a huge fan of the Uconn men’s and women’s basketball teams. They are our equivalent of a professional sports team.
This year, the Uconn women’s team brought on a graduate transfer, Lou Lopez Sénéchal, who transferred in from nearby Fairfield University. It is not easy to play for head coach Geno Auriemma, who has a reputation for being incredibly demanding of his players. Lopez Sénéchal, however, thrives on this type of pressure. She ended up taking on a much larger role than was expected, due to injuries to other players, and proved that she could compete on the biggest stage.
This article traces her journey from humble beginnings to WNBA draft pick. Her success was not preordained by any means:
Two hundred and eighty.
That's the number of U.S. colleges a 19-year-old Lopez Sénéchal emailed asking for a shot to play basketball. Each time she hit the send button, she'd cross her fingers, hoping somebody -- anybody -- would take a look at the highlight video she had painstakingly put together. That they would care enough to skim through her carefully curated résumé. That they would take a minute to respond. Even a rejection would be something.
Although the article was written before the WNBA draft, Lopez Sénéchal ended up being the #5 pick. A remarkable rise for somoene who had to fax teams just to get a scholarship.
I always find these stories instructive. If you believe in yourself and know you are capable of achieving great things, don’t let a few rejections stand in your way. You might receive 100 no’s, but all that matters is one person saying yes.
Thank you to my friend Yoni for bringing this article to my attention.
This has nothing to do with adversity, but I love everything about this article! Apparently, we aren’t the only species that can make video calls.
Unclear if Zoom kicked out the parrots after 40 minutes for not having a premium account.
If you have a story you’d like me to include in a future newsletter, please email me at HelloAdversity@substack.com or drop a comment below.
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Great links, Chris - I’m looking forward to checking them out (in particular the taking-things-personally one!). 😀