How Resilience Breaks Us Out of Our Vulnerability Cage | Taryn Stejskal | TEDxValparaisoUniversity

so we all have an imaginary piece of paper that we carry in our pockets and this piece of paper says: people would think I was crazy if they knew how we answer this question is our story of

resilience

each of us has at least one story of

resilience

is A story about an experience, something that happened to us, is the story that most needs to be told, but the story we most don't want to tell, when we share our story of resilience with others, two important things are launched first, we expand ours. resilience by demonstrating how others can learn from our experiences when we share generously and allow others to learn vicariously.

The second is that we are a role model of resilience and

vulnerability

. We pave the way for others to face their fear of

vulnerability

first, modeling our own now. Many of us think that we have to look for resilience, but in reality resilience comes and finds us; It is the moments when we face challenges, changes and complexity that teach us the most about resilience and who we really are. Resilience first found me on a cold October morning. In Ann Arbor Michigan I was 14 getting ready for school in my downstairs room and when I went to turn off the stereo, see me later if you don't know what a stereo is, I saw a face at the bottom of my window and As I looked at that face that was peering through a couple of inch crack of the opening window, my 14 year old mind was already whirring trying to figure out what in my set of experience would explain what was happening right now, then I remembered a time when my dad was outside playing a prank on my brother and me and I said dad and he said take off your clothes you are beautiful no dad I ran out of my room I was terrified I called my parents and we did a police report. and after writing down all the information, the police officer concluded that this was really nothing to worry about, just that someone was passing through the neighborhood by chance, well, 10 months later, in June of the following year, my parents were out of school. the city, I always kept that window where I had seen his face tightly closed but there was another window in my room that faced the back of the house and I had that window open for ventilation and while I was changing and getting ready for bed I I stopped and heard his voice again this time.

I said I had been waiting for this for a long time and in that moment three important things in my life changed forever the first was that I was naked in front of a man for the first time the second was that my childhood bedroom, which should have been for For me and for all of us, one of the safest places became deeply unsafe and the third was that this was not just someone passing through the neighborhood, this was not a coincidence, well, when we think about our stories of resilience, This became one of mine, resilience found me.

A couple of years later, when my mom called me to college, a neighbor who lived a couple of houses away had raped and brutally attacked another woman and we thought that it could be the same man who had come to our house whose behavior escalated over time, the judge ruled this. person to 20 years in prison and I also spent time in captivity the bars I lived behind were a diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder I looked behind those bars for two decades with insomnia and hypervigilance and anxiety and when I received that disorder diagnosis of post-traumatic stress I thought to myself that this is a story that you cannot tell anyone, you must keep this a secret, fold it, put it in your pocket and not let it out many years later.

I did a neuropsychology fellowship and something interesting happened as I was sitting in our outpatient clinic watching our patients come in who had suffered brain injuries and spinal cord injuries, sometimes many years before, what I discovered was that people often found themselves whether it was going better than his forecast or not. as well as we had thought, but we were rarely right and as I looked at each of these people I thought that what was happening was either allowing people to do better than we expected or detracting from their rehabilitation after a brain injury. or a spinal cord injury.

What that led us to do was participate in the first study on resilience. We looked at the factors that enhanced or detracted from rehabilitation, and what we found was surprisingly simple and surprisingly basic. We found that people who had access to reliable transportation benefited the most. people who beat their prognosis, these were the people who lived independently instead of living in an assisted care facility and we all know how important our independence is to us when I came out of my fellowship in neuropsychology I was still thinking about that study and I thought you knew that not all of us are going to experience brain injuries or spinal cord injuries, but we will all face our own moments of challenge, change and complexity and in those moments when resilience finds us, what will be the things that we will do, how we will respond. .

What will be the behaviors that will be taken advantage of in those moments? What are the things we can do to create a more positive and productive outcome? In short, what would be our version of reliable transportation when I entered the corporate world and became a management consultant? I would study this a decade and a half ago. I asked people a simple question and you can think about this for yourself. What did you do to effectively address the change and complexity of the challenge? And now, after having interviewed hundreds of people and collected thousands of data, what?

What we have been taught is that we have a choice when we face our moments of challenge rather than believing we can fight flight or freeze. We actually have five better options. Look, what I learned from asking that question is the five practices of particularly resilient people now, the five practices of particularly resilient people start with vulnerability, the ability we have to allow our inner self, our inner self, our thoughts, feelings and experiences, we share them as much as possible with the outside world, as vulnerability turns out to be rather than being the The opposite of resilience is the cornerstone of resilience and also the basis of authenticity and empathy.

The second practice of particularly resilient people is the practice of productive perseverance, knowing when to stay on mission and when to pivot in a new direction in the face of diminishing returns. The third practice of particularly resilient people is the practice of connection. This may seem the simplest, but I invite you to try it. It is one of the most difficult. It's about knowing ourselves deeply, being connected to our intuition, trusting our gut, knowing our value, and then navigating the connection. that we have with ourselves along with the connection we have with others, family, friends, coworkers, the fourth practice of particularly resilient people is the practice of gratitude, if you have not heard that word before, it is okay because the I invented, don't feel it.

The bad is a combination of gratitude, firstly, being able to take on a challenge after a while and see the good in it and secondly, being able to share our challenges generously with others so that others can indirectly learn from our experience and, last but not least, the practice of being able to navigate the paradox of risk and opportunity and recognize that we will never be able to fully mitigate risk, but rather manage the inherent risk that emerges. So how does resilience allow us to break out of our

cage

of vulnerability? I'm glad you did it because it's about telling our stories of resilience.

You see, I also found a little thing called vulnerability bias and what vulnerability bias tells us is flawed, it's wrong, it's insidious, but it insists that if we tell our story of resilience, others will think less of it. we, the three l, could occur. People won't like us, they might leave us, and in those moments they might leave to get out of our

cage

of vulnerability. We have the opportunity to tell our stories of resilience. Now he knew what he had to do. Would I become my best case study at conferences where I shared resilience concepts from the five practices of particularly resilient people?

He would also go on stage and tell the story. I would take that imagination out of my pocket. a piece of paper that said people would think I was crazy if they knew and instead of hiding it I would share it with the world. Well, what I found when I presented it when I shared the story that most needed to be told about my stalker PTSD but what I didn't want to tell the most is that not only did people stop loving me or stop liking me or leave everything On the contrary, I was closer to people, I had greater opportunities and what I want to invite each of you to do today is to tell your story of resilience to allow someone to see you, know you and connect with you to a greater extent because When we tell our story of resilience we take the things that we thought were so scary, the things that scared us, and we made them our most sacred. development opportunity and by doing this we not only heal ourselves, we recognize that even if you are going through something right now, one day, when you tell your story of resilience, what you have overcome, what you have faced, you will become part of someone else's story. survival guide thanks