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Personal growth: The power of transformative resilience January 31, 2018

Posted by Dennis Mellersh in Concept of personal growth.
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When a calamitous event knocks us down in life, the usual, and perhaps simplistic, advice is to simply get up and bounce back; however there may be a more effective and life-altering approach towards moving forward, a process described in the New York Times online edition as transformative resilience.

In an article titled The 6 Steps to Turning Setbacks into Advantages, the writer reports on recent research demonstrating how various people dealt with major and seemingly crippling life-setbacks through a six-stage process known as transformative resilience.

Essentially the process involves using a major setback as a foundation for significant personal growth and effectiveness.

The article highlights the story of a young woman, who although possessing a Master’s Degree, was unable to get a decent-paying job, and was burdened with almost $100,000 in student debt.

She went through various stages of despair, which included suicide ideation,  in her journey out of this difficult situation, started a blog detailing her progress, and eventually began counselling people in response to them writing to her for advice on their employment difficulties and student debt problems.

My takeaway from the article is that the process of transformative resilience is a practical working example of the old adage: If life hands us lemons, make lemonade.

Our problems can actually become the life-changing catalyst for their solutions – solutions that go beyond simple problem-solving, but rather transform our lives.

I could not get a link that worked to the article, so to read the full article, I would suggest you enter the following in a search engine like google:

New York Times The 6 Steps to Turning Setbacks into Advantages

— Dennis Mellersh

Personal growth: Choosing which values or virtues to develop November 19, 2017

Posted by Dennis Mellersh in Concept of personal growth.
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It is possible that many of us “…do not have a strategy to build character,” and without such a strategy both our inner life and our external life “will eventually fall to pieces.”

This is one of the bold predictions made by David Brooks in his book The Road to Character (1). Brooks suggests that one of the main reasons we are drifting in terms of developing our character is that as a society we tend to emphasize what Brooks calls the “résumé virtues” as opposed to the “eulogy virtues.”

Brooks writes that the résumé virtues or values (the ones we list on our CV’s) contribute to our external success, whereas the eulogy values are deeper; “They are the virtues that get talked about at your funeral, the ones that exist at the core of your being — [such as] whether you are kind, brave, honest, or faithful…”

Brooks suggests that the résumé virtues are based on “utilitarian logic” while the eulogy virtues are centred on “moral logic.”

He says that while most of us recognize that the eulogy virtues are more important that the résumé virtues, the majority of us nevertheless spend most of our time on the résumé virtues in constructing our value system.

In addition to explanatory passages, the bulk of the book consists of biographies of people whom Brooks believes exemplify choosing the path of the eulogy virtues.

I’ve just started with this book, and judging by the opening pages it should be rewarding.

(1) David Brooks, The Road to Character, Random House, New York, 2015

Update: I recently stumbled upon a detailed article in the Columbia Journalism Review discussing how David Brooks in recent years  began increasingly writing about moral considerations as opposed to writing almost exclusively about politics. The article is titled, The Transformation of David Brooks. Here’s the link to the article:

https://www.cjr.org/the_profile/the_transformation_of_david_brooks.php

—Dennis Mellersh