(My name is Denise) Saunders. I'm one of our career counselors at the OITE, at the Office of Intramural Training and Education. I,
prior to the pandemic, was mostly responsible for
providing service to trainees in North Carolina at the NIHS and
have enjoyed learning to know many of you who are elsewhere in the Baltimore, Bethesda, and DC area
since the pandemic.
So, let's go ahead and get started. I think that
because of -
Alright, Lori, I'm not moving.
(Lori Conlan:) You need to click on your slides. Click on, click on the slide deck. (Denise Saunders:) Okay. Okay, there. I got this. Okay. There we go.
I think it would, it's important that we recognize,
even as we're talking about resilience today, that we need to understand that there are significant things that are happening to us.
These are all within the normal range of events, emotional experience, given what is currently going
on in the world around us, in our own personal lives, in
our communities, and also
across the globe,
but having an awareness of that is really important as we're talking about these resilience issues, and
some of these emotions are things that you may be experiencing, feelings of loss for all of the events that aren't taking place.
It's hard. There aren't things to
mark the passage of time, and, and I, I find that that's something that I'm really
kind of trying to get used to. All of those markers of time passage have been eliminated for us in, in many respects.
Loss leads to feelings of grief.
Some of you may have been experiencing some aspects of the pandemic as feeling a bit more traumatic, or it might be
reminding you of other very difficult experiences that you've had in the past:
sadness, loneliness,
certainly disappointment for those things that
didn't happen as we planned, which is really how our resilience, we need to draw on a resilience in those times.
There's a tremendous amount of uncertainty about what will happen going forward, and
we need to recognize that. We need to be aware of it and give ourselves permission to know
that that's in fact a part of the emotional experience of all of this.
Sometimes, that uncertainty can lead to worry or anxiety, and
maybe even some of you are getting kind of frustrated and a little angry about our circumstances. I
share this just to provide a little bit of a context for the information that we're going to talk about today in terms of resilience.
This is a
wonderful time to be
working at maintaining the resilience that you have now or working to enhance it,
so a few questions to ask yourself as you're reflecting on this idea of resilience. You know, think about it:
How do you deal with challenges in your life? What are things that have been difficult for you,
and how have you handled those in the past?
What do you do when things don't go as planned? I mean, we are all
experiencing in a very large way
circumstances, experiences, and situations that really aren't going at all the way that we had planned them,
and then finally, you know,
when you look around you
even in this pandemic, are there some people who
still find things to be
laughing about and happy and grateful for, and are there those that are really feeling kind of lonely and sad and
thinking more pessimistically about the future,
really feeling overwhelmed, and what are the things that you observe that distinguishes those two,
with those two kinds of categories of people?
We'll talk a little bit about that today,
but maybe that gives you a little bit of a grounding in terms of where you're at with this notion of resilience,
so when we speak of resilience, what are we talking about?
It's really the ability to bounce back from adversity to face adversity,
whether it's a threat, whether it's a fear, whether it's a trauma-related sort of situation, a disappointment, or a setback,
but to face it head-on and to find a way to work through those challenges,
accepting them and kind of working through them and
overcoming the obstacles that may be placed before us.
There are
numerous stressors that we're all dealing with currently. COVID-19 has presented a unique set of
circumstances for us, and none of us are immune to the stress of that, and I suspect that
we're all feeling stress of that in different ways, but we can all probably be,
you know, kind of joined together and saying the future uncertainty is particularly stressful, because we can't plan for things.
Many of you are really good at planning.
You've been very successful and you're quite accomplished. You approach your research and your academic work in those, in those capacities,
and not knowing what the future holds makes it really hard to plan,
so we're having to be more flexible and adaptable and find ways to plan but flexibly plan,
so the uncertainties of the current pandemic are certainly
significant stressors that we face.
Those of you who may be in the midst of a job search or preparing to engage in a job search
sometime in the near future,
a number of stresses related to that. Perhaps you're not really quite sure what it is that you want to do or that the
circumstances in terms of the economy and
employment opportunities have you questioning now or thinking differently about what you might want to be pursuing.
Some of you may have had the benefit of having had a few interviews, but not so many or maybe offers that haven't come,
haven't yet been passed on. We know there are hiring freezes and
fewer positions open, but we also know we're hearing from many trainees that they are being interviewed.
We've heard of numerous virtual interviews occurring, even academic, on-site virtual interviews, two-day interviews that are
occurring, so we know that,
despite some of the limitations, there are opportunities out there, and
being resilient and thinking positively and optimistically about where you might find yourself in the midst of that will help in
terms of the success and the effectiveness of your own job searches, and
certainly there are challenges at home,
lots of demands on our time,
different demands on our time. Those of you, we're all teleworking, and that's presented a whole host of new challenges
to Internet bandwidth and multiple computers going in homes to loneliness and isolation,
for those of you who are living by yourselves,
and for those of you who have
partners and spouses, significant others, and young children or children in the home, the parenting and the combination of teleworking
has in fact presented
a new
band of stress. I was just reading on an APA,
they, they do surveys from stress in America, and the most recent one, they're going to be doing monthly surveys on the
impact, the psychological impact and related to stress of COVID-19,
and this one that they just did said that 74% of families with children felt like that was a
significant stress,
far higher than had been pre-pandemic,
and then there are stresses of relationships and family.
Living with those in closer proximity has presented some unique stresses, some pros and cons.
Maybe trying to keep up with family and, and be more vigilant about that can, can present its own
stress as
well. If we look at lab or bench, workplace stress,
there may be slow or no progress at all. Many of you had to leave your labs mid-March.
It's been 10-plus weeks, 11 weeks now, and
we're not exactly sure how that's gonna look as we're returning to
the Institute and getting back to our research, and I know some of you have been,
particularly those who have been working on COVID-19 have been in the labs,
maybe not every day all day,
but the research may be going a little bit slower, or if you're doing research, doing a little work at home,
it may feel like the pace of that is a little bit slower.
There, there has been, prior to the pandemic and, and now as well, I think that it's even
more heightened, this pressure to produce, to excel, and to compete that's always an important thing in the job market.
How can you remain competitive
with your peers who are also applying for similar jobs?
Sometimes in the workplace or in our labs, there can be
communication challenges that we might face with coworkers or with our mentors or PIs.
It may be that you've dealt with
situations where you had
unsupportive mentors or supervisors or employers and
found it kind of difficult to talk about the things that you needed to talk about or to gain the kind of support that you
needed in order to be successful in your future.
It's possible that some of you find yourselves in a mismatch between research interests and the projects that you're currently working on.
I sometimes hear trainees who,
during their interviews, they talk about some of the things that they want to be involved in and get excited about that, and
a year or two later into it,
they find that it's, it's not exactly aligned with what they thought it was going to be,
so that presents some stress, too, and finding ways to navigate that successfully can be challenging.
Certainly in the past,
there have been experiences of limited funding that impacts research, and that may be something that we see in the future as well. In
terms of our own life or personal stressors,
currently we are under lots of limitations on the way in which we can live our lives. Stay-at-home orders and
limited access of things that were familiar to us in the past have created stress for us.
There may be other family or personal challenges that we're faced with.
Some of us may be finding that it's hard to relax or find
something that feels pleasurable, relaxing, and leisurely for us,
even in the midst of all of this, and others of you may be challenged to
really build in and establish a daily routine
if you find you got too much downtime on your hands, so that can go both ends of the spectrum.
There may be health concerns or we're all concerned about our health and wanting to remain well and
thinking about safety issues related to the virus,
all very stressful. There may be financial concerns. Our economic
situation in our country and across the globe is
in question now,
and there's a lot of uncertainty about how that's going to look in the future, and it may be that you're just
finding that you don't have time for significant others, or
the time that you have doesn't feel like good quality time, so those are a little bit about some of the stresses that we
may find ourselves under, and
because of all that stress, we need to be focused on how do we stay resilient in the midst of all of this.
Here are some factors that influence our resilience.
The first one, the capacity to make realistic plans and carry them through. As I said earlier,
I know you all are very high-achieving individuals.
You've had a lot of success as you've accomplished a lot, and it's really important that you don't set expectations
that set you up for disappointment, that you're asking yourself,
Is this realistic now? Can I accomplish this now, given the current
circumstances? And you can evaluate that at any time in your life, but it's important to do that also now, while we're in
these sort of unique and difficult times.
Have a positive view of yourself. A view of yourself that it suits confidence,
happiness, satisfaction, and positive self-esteem is
important and helps to enhance and influence our sense of resilience.
Strong skills in communication.
Being assertive, asking for what you need and for what you want and also
may allow you to
problem-solve more effectively, being able to communicate when you see a problem posed, or working with others to solve problems
This next bullet point, the capacity to manage strong feelings and impulses, is really about our
kind of self-awareness and knowing when we might have a strong emotional
feeling about something,
we have a strong feeling about something or an impulse to respond maybe in a more negative way,
that we can sort of control and monitor that so that it doesn't interfere in our relationships or our productivity and effectiveness,
but kind of keeping that in check, so being able to manage that, to tolerate that, and then to monitor that and hopefully have it
evolve to more effective ways of responding to
some of our difficult challenges and
disappointments.
Having empathy for ourselves and for others and also a sense of compassion. You know, part of our human experience,
and as we think about this even in the midst of this pandemic, is that we need to show ourselves
compassion, because we are all struggling. Where I'm struggling, you're struggling. We all have a struggle.
It may not look exactly the same, but we all have a struggle that we're dealing with or multiple struggles.
so having compassion for those struggles, empathy for ourselves, and being able to show that for others'
struggle and recognizing that that's a part of our human connection is really important now, too,
and then this last one, kind of thinking about how do you respond to a challenge. Do you ask,
Why did this happen to me? Why is this going on?
You know, why is this? Why-why-why?, and feeling like it's unfair, it's unjust, it shouldn't be.
Instead, work at asking yourself, What? What is happening now? What can I do about this?
It's a much more pre-act-,
proactive way of responding to a difficult situation,
so focus on
shifting the why and the questioning to what, maybe, and how.
One way to think about, when we think about resilience, a, a big part of this is what our cognitive,
cognitive processes are, how we're thinking about our
experiences and interpreting them, and we can look at that from one of two ways.
It's, we're either, probably have more of a bent to an optimistic perspective of things or a
pessimistic perspective. When we look at optimism versus,
versus pessimism,
optimism exudes a sense of confidence,
satisfaction not only in ourselves
but in our experiences. It shows that we have that resilience and resolve to deal with
some difficult stuff, that we have hoped that there, that things will change.
and it also has a suggestion that a failure is an isolated event.
In
contrast to that, when we adopt a perspective that is more pessimistic in nature,
we're probably drawing on a lot of self-criticism,
maybe some judgment,
anger, frustration,
feelings of guilt,
maybe shame, feelings of despair, and over-generalizing these difficult
experiences, disappointments, or setbacks,
so here's a grid that breaks that down a bit further.
Remember, optimism, an event is temporary. It's not gonna happen like this all the time. We know it's temporary. It's gonna go away,
versus a more pessimistic
perspective. This is permanent. It's gonna always happen this way. It's going to go on forever. It's never going to go away.
I can't trust it will ever be different.
When we look at specific
isolation, in isolation events under the optim-, optimistic perspective,
those are specific to particular events,
versus a more pessimistic
perspective that sees them as happening all the time. It's universal,
so specific-versus-universal, and the last one has to do with who's in control of this event.
Optimistic people tend to view things as being due to outside factors. You know, I couldn't control that.
They hired a different candidate not because I wasn't a good, strong candidate, because they were a better fit for this particular position,
whereas an internal, more pessimistic
perspective on that same scenario might be, There was something flawed about me.
I had a weakness. They could see a weakness on my resume or my CV. It was my fault,
so we want to think more from an optimism,
optimistic mindset and try to enhance our optimism and
minimize that more pessimistic, negative thinking. An
optimistic approach
works at finding value in our failures and our mistakes and really sees these as
opportunities for new learning. You know, anytime something doesn't go as planned,
there's an opportunity to look around you and say, Okay, what can I learn from this?
It's maybe opportunity for professional growth.
It could be opportunity for personal growth.
We find ourselves now with this virus in
situations where we certainly hadn't planned for any of this. It has been a
significant disruption in all of our lives,
but there is opportunity there to engage in some learning. If you're preparing for a job search,
for example, you can use this time to be enhancing your skill set, maybe learning something new that you could be
indicating on a CV or a resume that might make you a bit more competitive in the search
to think differently about your skill set and those transferable skills, so there's lots of opportunity there that can help you think more
future-oriented and use that in a proactive way. An
optimistic approach works at failing better. In other words, what am I learning from this experience that might help me in the future?
Are there situations occurring now where you're saying, "Okay, we're not going to do that again"?
You know, "I'm, I'm learning from this experience. I need to do this for myself." Those are all ways of
taking something from a difficult experience,
learning something new, both about yourself, about your experiences, and the world around you, and
working then to be proactive and applying that in the future, and an optimistic approach also
recognizes that there's a lot of value in having flexible optimism, even
right now.
We're wanting to be optimistic about the future, but it's fraught with a lot of uncertainty, so
flexible optimism is appropriate. We're remaining optimistic.
We want to be flexible and adaptable as change comes our way, but we still want to be thinking optimistically,
so here's some things that we'll go over and
I want to spend a little time on talking about that can help us to enhance both our optimism and also our resilience.
Challenging negative thinking, and there are some ways that we can do that, but just being mindful and aware.
Are you being more critical of yourself?
Are you thinking more negatively and pessimistically about your experiences, about others, about your work, and
starting to challenge and reframe some of that thinking,
focusing on, you know,
we talked a lot about the cognitive piece of that and, and the, the thinking aspect,
but it's also important to focus on your overall well-being,
which includes a focus on how you're taking care of yourself physically, how are you handling your emotional self,
and what are you doing for your mental well-being so that you can achieve. Look at your holist-, more holistically,
wellness and preparation for what you're going to be engaging in, both today, tomorrow,  and into the future.
Be present in the moment, and we're going to talk about ways to be more mindful and aware in the moment. Mindfulness is a
practice that allows us to do that, and I'll share an exercise with you in a few minutes.
There are lots of positive psychology exercises out there, and positive psychology was one of the
first areas to be researched within the field of psychology, my background is in counseling psychology,
that really
introduced this notion of resilience, and it's, there's a tremendous amount of research out there about that now, and we can see that that's being
researched and investigated in lots of different environments,
including science training,
but this first, some of the first research that emerged was by Martin Seligman, who is sort of a pioneer in the positive
psychology field, and his research group at the University of Pennsylvania.
One of their seminal studies looked at investigation of
resilience and optimism,
but utilizing three specific exercizes, and I want to share those. One was the gratitude visit and letter,
the three good things in life, and signature strengths, so I'll go into more detail about those in the next few slides, and
always, always work hard to reward yourself when things go well and when you meet your goals.
Work really hard not to minimize that, especially now. When you've met your goals, give yourself a pat on the back,
acknowledge that you've worked hard to get where you are.
Some of you may have recently graduated,
congratulations, or finished up a really important manuscript and submitted it for review. Good for you. Give yourself,
acknowledge that you have had that success. That helps boost you for those things that you'll be working on in the future. I
mentioned that there's a lot of research out there that really works on
shifting our mindset to engage in more positive, optimistic thinking and
decreasing lower mood, increasing our happiness levels, and these are just a few of them.
I mentioned resilience studies being done in education
for military combat, for,
globally for trauma survivors who've been in war-torn
countries and
circumstances, for
organizational development and leadership and, and even in science training.
We're focusing a whole lot more on wellness and resilience and helping those in the science-training community
to enhance their resilience and think about wellness as an important component to their overall health and well-being,
so I mentioned that there was this research study, and I want to share a couple of activities
with you, and then I'll present a challenge at the end of our presentation today of some things that you might consider doing
going forward, and this first one was a gratitude visit, and it encourages you to think about
someone that you really appreciate who did something that was very kind to you and thoughtful and that you've really
appreciated over the years but maybe not properly thanked,
and you want to write a letter to them. You, you know, we can get creative now.
You can't deliver it in person
probably. Maybe you set up a Zoom chat with them or you record a Zoom greeting and you share it with them.
My siblings and I had an opportunity
just last week to share a birthday greeting of a very close family friend who turned ninety today, and
we were able to share in that how much we really appreciated their
experiences and support and guidance over the years. They've really been like a second family to us,
he and his, his wife and their kids, and we wanted him to know how much we appreciated him,
so in some respects, I guess that was like our gratitude visit, and hopefully he's getting to look at our Zoom greeting card today,
so think about that. That's something that you can do now if you have some downtime.
Reflect on who he might send that kind of gratitude
expression to.
Three good things in life. There are lots of versions of this out there.
I like the research version, and I'll explain a little bit why that is. I think Oprah has one,
gratitude, you know, gratitude journals and that sort of thing. That's a little bit different. You're looking at things as more of a gratefulness.
This particular exercise
was defined as look, writing down three things every day that went well for you.
so you're looking for good things in your environment,
in your relationships with others and your experiences and in your environment. What are you witnessing
that's good,
and you want to log those. Perhaps you have a journal or a notebook lying around
unused in your home. We happen to have lots in my home.
I don't know, we're lovers of journals and not always filling them up,
so maybe find one that hasn't yet been used or you started using and didn't get finished. It doesn't have to be big.
It doesn't have to be small. Make it something that is aesthetically pleasing for you, that you
enjoy going to, that feels nice, that you can, that you can feel comfortable
going to maybe at the end of each day, and sometime during the day I often encourage people to think about that
before they go to bed.
Pull out your journal. If you want to do that on your phone, sometimes I have clients
I'm working with that will do that on their phones, but you want to be able to refer back to it and
list what those good things are. You can add in, What was the cause of that? On, the other day,
I was walking in my neighborhood and I happened to come across
a mother and daughter who's the same age as some of my kids, and we, I hadn't talked with them in years.
Our kids are grown, out of the house now,
but they were walking, and so we had a chance to catch up. That day,
that probably would have been one of my good things.
That was one of my good things, and if I think about what was the cause of that or what would be an explanation
for having been able to have that experience,
it was a nice sunny day, I had enough time to go on a walk,
I have a neighborhood here that affords me lots of walking trails right here in the community in which I live,
and I have friends that I was able to meet on the trail and
socially distance and talk to and catch up,
so there are lots of good things even in the one good thing that I recognized, and that's kind of the point of this exercise.
Start by identifying
three things and then build in what was their cause or what's an explanation for them, and you'll begin to see that
in fact there's probably a lot of good things that are happening around you, even in the midst of difficult challenging and uncertain times.
That's something that you can start today.
Another exercise that they used in this particular study was identifying signature strengths and encouraging people,
those participants, those subjects in the study, to engage in those signature strengths, to utilize them in different ways.
You can go to a website out of the University of Pennsylvania.
It's called authentic happiness,
and the website is on here, authentichappiness.sas.upenn.edu,
and there's a whole series of instruments and inventories that you can take.
Much of their study is about positive psychology, about resilience optimism,
grit. Angela Duckworth is also a part or was a part of that research group,
so I think you can take the grit survey as well.
That's kind of a component to resilience and, you know, hardiness and that sort of thing, but authentic happiness
has on, on that website, one of the inventories is called
character strengths or signature strengths. The
signature strengths, I think, is what the inventory is called, and you can take that for free. You set up an account.
It allows you to set up an account, and you're just simply agreeing to have your data used in aggregate for their research study,
so you're not being identified in any way, and then if you have an account,
you can go back,
you can take more than one inventory, and the signature strengths is one that I would encourage you to take a look at.
It's not looking at skills, and it's not looking at
personality characteristics like we might see in a personality inventory
or
like a personality preference-style indicator, like our type, like an MBTI, the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator.
It's looking at your character strengths, so things like altruism,
kindness,
so you might want to do that.
I found that actually
that can be helpful for folks in the midst of a job search and might give you a different way of understanding
who you are and what value you might add to an employer.
You know, a lot about the job search and the interview process is the value-add. How am I a good fit, but what value
would my hire add to your organization or institution?, and
exploring your signature strengths might be a way to expand on that. For this particular study,
they encouraged people to identify the five highest strengths and then to challenge themselves to use them more often during the week,
so
you might do that, another
kind of exercise that you might be able to take advantage of while, if you're finding some free time during your days and as
preparation for when you're going back to work or an upcoming
anticipated job search.
Other things to think about while we're enhancing and maintaining our resilience is just overall wellness.
Consider how it is that you're feeling your body. Are you trying to continue to eat nutritiously and
engage in a nutrition diet, a nutritious diet? Watch how you feel in your body.
Well, if you're exercising, do you need to increase it or do you need to incorporate more exercise?
Consistently, research shows us that that boosts our mood. That helps us physically feel better and also
enhances our thought process, enhances optimism, positive thinking, and
ultimately our resilience to deal with those challenges that we may face.
Pre-pandemic, we might have found ourselves with a lot on our plates. Maybe we do now, too.
Learn to say no,
to delegate. If you're someone in the home who kind of takes on everything,
maybe you need to delegate. Have, you know, if you've got folks in the house that aren't normally there, how can we all divvy up
responsibilities?, and
if you're, when, as you return to
lab and research and work at the Institute, how will you think about not taking on too much too quickly?
We're going to need to kind of return in a slow capacity, but in the future, when you find yourself
presented with lots of great options, and I suspect you do get lots of great options,
I know sometimes I do, but I can't say yes to everything. I have to know myself well enough and know my capacity
for how much I can manage, and sometimes I have to say no to things that are actually good things or
try to negotiate them in a way that I can do them,
be a part of them, or do them in a fashion that fits better with my current
circumstances.
We talked about setting realistic expectations. By no means am I suggesting that you
relax your standards for yourself,
but because I want you to continue to do the hard work and the good, quality work that you do, but ensure that you're being
realistic in what you're expecting of yourself. Especially during this time,
none of us are likely feeling as productive and working as efficiently as maybe we did when we were on-site,
so we do need to kind of think about that more realistically and give ourselves permission to
adapt that some.
Ensure that you're getting sufficient sleep and then focusing on quality versus quantity,
both in time that we might spend in relationships, but also in terms of the time that we put toward
activities that we're engaged in and the work and research that we're doing.
Present-moment awareness is a really great idea.
It's not an idea, but it's part of mindfulness. It helps us to refocus our attention
if we're feeling distracted.
If it's hard to focus, it can refocus us. It leads to increased awareness of ourselves, both our thoughts and our feelings
and our physical sense of self, and
enhances our concentration. It can reduce
distraction and
will help us to reduce worry or excessive thinking. Being
present in the moment sort of helps us to resist the urge of going back,
backward, which can generate a lot of worried thinking; replaying and trying to
sort through and process over and over again; over-analyze situations,
experiences, or things that have happened to us, which probably generate worried thinking or have us thinking too far into the future
about things that we don't yet know,
sometimes with an idea that we're planning for things, and there may be some things that we can plan for,
but if we do too much of that, often that planning and that thinking and more worried
cognitive thought process leads to a lot of excess thinking for stuff that actually never comes to pass,
particularly if it's on the more worried end,
so being more aware in the moment, having that present-moment focus, helps us to reduce some of that excessive thinking.
Mindfulness is a tool that we are hearing a lot more about, and again, a
tremendous amount of research that has been done on this used for stress, for chronic illness, for chronic pain,
for
enhancing resilience, for helping people think more positively, for enhancing mood,
so we can, we can, there's a lot that's being done, used, and explored
with mindfulness, and these are just, I share this slide just to share some basic skills of mindfulness.
The first one is being able to observe
from a non-judgmental perspective, so when we check in with ourselves and we have that present-moment awareness, we're just observing,
we're not judging.
Maybe I observed that I am feeling a little bit of stress and tension. Okay,
I'm observing that I don't need to judge that. It just kind of is, so that's what we mean by
non-judgmental observation is that you're observing and you have that level of awareness,
but you do so from a non-judgmental
perspective. That you show self-compassion for yourself, again referring back to what I had shared earlier,
it's a recognition that there's some things probably that we are each individually struggling with, that we can observe that,
recognize it, not judge it, but have compassion for it.
The beginner's mind is this sense of observation
with, with wonder and curiosity, much like you might see a young toddler.
I'm having the, I'm enjoying being out on a lot of walks in my community,
I shared that earlier, and a lot of young families out with little tiny tots, and they just stop and, you know, the
walk, they don't get very far and there's always something new to explore, and when we talk about beginner's mind,
that's really what we're referring to is having that sense of openness to what's happ-,
being curious about what's in the world around us and really working to accept things as they are.
When we fight all that's happening to us, the disappointment, the frustration, the loss, the sadness,
the, the challenge, we end up staying more stuck,
so when we can accept things, it allows us, it presents an openness to being able to move on.
One easy mindfulness exercise is called mindful breathing, and we can do this fairly quickly. If
you have ever learned the strategy of deep breathing, it's being able to take a deep breath,
inhale breath through your nose, and
exhaling, long exhale through your mouth,
so if you want to try that with me a few breaths, breathe in through your nose and
exhale through your mouth.
When you inhale, you can feel your diaphragm lifting, and as you exhale,
you can feel the diaphragm, all of the air kind of leaving, and as it leaves,
maybe you feel some stress and tension, you might feel calmer. You might feel more
relaxed, and
while you do that, the mindful part of that is to be having your thoughts
focused on your breath while you're doing that,
so let's try it for a few breaths,
if you want to just kind of get comfortable where you're seating or if you're standing. Just get in a comfortable position.
If you want to, you can close your eyes. Sometimes, that helps to center your focus and your awareness, and
let's engage in some mindful breathing, so I want you to take a big breath in,
feel your diaphragm lift, exhale through your mouth,
and again, breathing in and
exhaling.
As you're doing that,
you want your thoughts to be focused on your breath,
so you're thinking about the breath going in, big exhale in, and
exhaling, long, slow exhale.
One more time,
focusing on your breath as you breathe in and your lungs expand and
exhaling,
feeling some of that tension leaving your body as the breath leaves your body.
One more breath,
and when you're ready, you can open your eyes and join us again.
We did that for a very short period of time due to time today.
We don't have a lot of time today together, but you can start practicing that.
Mindfulness means that your mind is going to wander
a hundred times, and you bring it back to your awareness and attention and focus
a hundred and one, so be, be kind and gentle with yourself as you're learning to do this. I don't know,
normally, if I were seeing you face-to-face, I would say, "How did that go? What did you experience?" Often,
people will say that was kind of hard. I know the first time that I started doing some of the mindfulness exercises,
it was really hard for me. My mind was racing and thinking about all kinds of things I needed to do.
That's okay. You're aware of what your mind's doing. Just when you recognize it's drifted off, bring it back,
and to challenge yourself and to engage in this mindful breathing and have a mindful practice,
you can do that mindful breathing exercise twice a day for, start out by doing it one to two minutes and
see if you don't, if that doesn't allow you to maybe think about deep breathing as a tool to use when you're feeling a bit
more stressed or tense.
I want to say just a few words about writing and journaling as an exercise to also enhance resilience, resilience.
Expressive writing is a way of writing about something maybe that was really difficult for you or maybe even traumatic, and
if you write about it and you write about it over time,
there's a study there in the late eighties that showed that that actually helps to change the narrative,
not that you place any less significance on what happened,
but you change the way that you interpret the event and how you understand yourself in that
context. It enhanced, their study found that it enhanced physical and mental well-being and
also reduced the impact of traumatic events, so you can write in a more expressive way,
thinking about something that was really hard for you, and just
pick it up, write about it
one day. Pick it up a few days later. Write about it again
maybe a week or so later, and see if you don't change the way that you're understanding that
situation or experience.
Writing and journaling,
there's no right or wrong about how to do this. Just sit down, again, one of those unused or half-used notebooks or journals,
clarify, it can help to clarify your thoughts and feelings.
You can write about anything you want:
some of the challenges that you're faced with now, some of the things that you think may be difficult in the future, or something from
the past that you want to write about. It really doesn't matter.
Choose what you, what's important to you and what you feel is important to be focusing on and reflecting on.
It helps to clarify thoughts and feelings. It also helps us to know ourselves better and to solve problems more effectively.
So, developing a more optimistic approach, you want to work on further developing your resilience,
developing an awareness of your own
beliefs about yourself and the world around you, and that happens when we can check in
periodically and say, "Hmmm, how am I feeling about this?," or "What are my thoughts about this particular situation?"
That takes some practice. Our default probably isn't there just yet, and that's okay.
You can practice and get better at that. Challenge
negative, more pessimistic thoughts.
Some easy, simple things that you can do if you notice that you're engaging in more negative, pessimistic thinking is to
out loud, verbally say to yourself, "Stop!," or
mentally, if you're in a room with some other people or you
don't want to shout to yourself or say it loudly, you can mentally say to yourself, Stop, and it does in fact
shift the firing of the neurons and will distract the brain so that it will focus differently.
You can engage in an argument with yourself. What's the rationale for this way that I'm thinking? How do I know this to be true?
I know many of you are very good, have very strong analytic skills.
You can challenge your intellect to say, "Wait a minute. Where's the proof for this?
How can I say that
this is in fact true?" Be easy on yourself. Be kind and gentle and ensure that you are
taking some down-time for yourself, too,
especially when you are faced with lots of challenge. We certainly are now,
but even as you might encounter some difficult things in the future returning to work setting, and that's going to present a whole
new set of challenges
and changes for us, so we want to get better at adapting to that and feeling comfortable in the midst of change.
What things can you do to
continue to foster and enhance your resilience? Well, first and foremost,
working to accept
setbacks,
disappointment, and change. I mean, to, to be
brutally honest, those are a fact of life. We're getting that in a huge dose right now.
There's so much that we cannot control around us. We can, we can, though,
focus on what we can control,
so if we, if we sort of rein in our thinking to say,
"Okay, right around me and what I have right in front of me, what can I focus on?
What can I control?," and let go of some of that that's farther out there that feels more uncertain and potentially more worrisome.
Employers have said consistently for the last decade or so that among the top skills
they're looking for in candidates is
flexibility and adaptability.
You can continue to practice that during this pandemic, and as we continue to face change and
transition over the coming weeks and months,
getting good at being able to respond, adapt, and be flexible to change will serve you well for the long haul.
Think about making connections. I know many of you are doing that now
to your social support, drawing on your social support, maybe
significant others in your lives, and it may also be helpful to reach out a little bit farther to help others in
potentially a volunteer capacity.
Work at keeping things in perspective.
You know,
even when you have a particular setback or a
disappointment, it's not going to last forever.
Things will look differently in the future, and
keeping it, keeping perspective on that helps you get through the short term that feels a little bit more painful and, and
harder to work through.
Look for opportunities, as we discussed earlier, for new learning, both about yourself as,
in terms of professional growth and also in terms of maybe some personal growth.
Be mindful of all the good things in your life ,the strong relationships you have,
the things that are, that are good in your life, that you are
continuing to work, maybe not in the same fashion that you were, that
financially things may be good, that your health is good, that those around you are remaining stable and safe.
Those are all good things to remind yourself of, and as you look forward to
returning to the bench and
research, whether that's more analytic work and computational work or wet lab work,
think about when you're faced with a challenge, an
experiment with results that didn't go well or an analysis that you just can't figure out how to solve,
what is going well and "Boy,
it's great that I have this challenge in front of me" and all the good things that got you to that point.
Maintain a hopeful, optimistic outlook, and don't be hesitant to reach out when you need help.
Sometimes, that means just calling a friend or drawing on your support network.
It might mean talking to a partner or spouse about something.
It could mean checking in with your PIs or your mentors or your co-workers, your lab mates.
It could mean that you need to access some professional assistance, and that's okay, too.
We're available at the OITE.
I'm one of the career counselors, and we have appointments open all the time if you need some help sorting that out.
We also have wellness advisors who can help and
resilience discussions that you can join, all mechanisms to get support and encouragement for whatever
challenges you may face,
so just before I open it up to some questions, I think we're going to have a few minutes to do that,
I wanted to share a few resources. Know that there are numerous resources out there, lots of books on this topic,
some a little better than others.
I've tried to share with you some things that have a more scientific bent to them and a psychological component.
That's my bias, because that's where I come from,
but there are, these are just a few of the resources that are out there. Rick Hansen is a
neuroscientist who does a really nice job of talking about the science of happiness
and resilience, and in fact in his "Hardwiring Happiness," his TED talk dated now back in
2013,
he Illustrated and talked about what happens in the brain with the neurons when you even engage in the Three Good Things
activity, so it might be an interesting look.
Brene Brown is out there doing a lot of talking. She has a piece on a program on Netflix
I think currently, and
she has a couple of different books out there. "Rising Strong" is one that goes over a lot of what we've discussed today, as
does the first resource that I listed there, the, "Resilience of, Science of Mastering Life's Challenges," which is in its second edition,
meaning it was a pretty popular
resource,
also kind of covers a lot of what we've talked about in terms of
dealing with emotions, accepting the setbacks and challenging, and reframing some of our more negative or pessimistic
thinking, and then I listed a couple of Martin Seligman's
books as well. "Flourish" is a more recent
book that he's done. If you've never seen the documentary "Happy," I'm not aware of some that are out there currently.
I'm sure that there are. I just am not aware of them.
This one was done by a group of social psychologists back in 2010.
They set out to do a research study to determine who was happy, how could we measure happiness,
and who are the happiness, happiest people in the world all over the globe, and
it's currently playing, I think, on Amazon Prime, if you have Prime. You might find that an
interesting watch. It's only an hour and
kind of interesting. Might, you might be surprised who in the world is the happiest among us,
so that's kind of what I wanted to share today. I would challenge each of you to identify
one, two, three of the activities that we talked about today and really challenge yourself to begin some of those practices
even today. Grab a notebook. Start logging those three good things.
Challenge yourself to work at engaging in
mindful breathing, or think about somebody that you want to share how grateful you are for them or something  in particular
that they did for you,
so, Lori, if we have some questions, I think we have a few minutes left. We can open it up for questions.
(Lori Conlan:) Yep. I'm just waiting to see if anybody types any in.
(Denise Saunders:) Okay. (Lori Conlan:) I do know one of the questions I'm sure I'll get is, "San we share your slides?," and I'm sure you'll send them to
me and we'll get them to everybody
within a couple of hours.
(Denise Saunders:) Yes, we will make sure that that gets done.
(Lori Conlan:) So,
this is always the hard part, right? Typing It takes forever.
The Prime video, what was the Prime video again? Was it "Happy"? (Denise Saunders:) It's called "Happy,"
yes, and I think when I did a search, I think it's currently available on
Amazon or yeah, right? That would be Amazon. I don't have prime, but that's Amazon Video Prime, right?, or Prime Video.
(Lori Conlan:) Yep, it sure is. It sure is, yeah. Sure.
Well, fantastic, Denise. I don't see that has any, nothing has really come in.
Those of you who know us, you're welcome to drop us a line. Don't forget to follow us on Twitter. This week's
challenge is go outside, so maybe, Denise, when you go outside next, you can take a picture and upload it to Twitter with us. (Denise Saunders:) Okay.
(Lori Conlan:) Right? (Denise Saunders:) Great challenge.
We, I've been reading more and more research about what nature does for us,
not only boosts our mood but resets our brain,
so if you're getting stuck in the middle of the day, just look outside the window or step outside if you can.
(Lori Conlan:) Yeah. (Denise Saunders:) Nature really has that kind of impact on our brains. (Lori Conlan:) Yeah,
REI has definitely been doing that recently, too, and boy, do I love their pictures! Okay, great, everybody!
Thank you so much for you guys to, for everyone for joining us today,
and
we will see you for the next OITE event. I don't know what that is.
We haven't planned next week out yet, but we will soon. Denise, thanks so much.
(Denise Saunders:) Thank you all. Thank You, Lori. (Lori Conlan:) Bye.
I'm gonna hang it up on everyone now, including you, Denise.
