73 Resilience is a must-have skill no one teaches you
No. 73 – 28 Apr 2024
Welcome to the 73rd edition of the True Progress Newsletter, a weekly newsletter on mastering fear and anxiety for optimal performance.
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This week's newsletter is getting a bit of a facelift. Reply to this email and share your thoughts.
Insights to Reflect On
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Not having resilience affects your attention and learning, decision-making, and creativity.
When you're anxious, your focus narrows and learning is impaired. When you don't know how to manage emotions and failure, it causes you to overthink and stagnate. And, when you can't think outside the box, you can't make those seemingly unrelated connections.
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Having low expectations prepares you for inevitable failure so that you can bounce back and try again.
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“Greatness comes from character and character isn’t formed out of smart people—it’s formed out of people who suffered."
— Jensen Huang, CEO of NVIDIA
Emotion to Meet
Neuroscience and brain-imaging research shows that properly naming an emotion is critical to managing and taming it.
Here's 1 to explore:
Disheartened
Definition | Having lost confidence, hope, and energy.
Example | After failing multiple times, it's hard not to grow disheartened.
Origin | "Discourage, deject, depress the spirits of," 1590s (in "Henry V"), from dis- "the opposite of" + hearten.
Challenge to Grow
When was the last time you experienced a big setback? What emotions did you feel?
Think about 3 ways you can reframe that setback into opportunities.
⌾ Reply to this email and let us know how it went.
Win to Share
K was fearful of conflict and difficult conversations. Underpaid in her job, she finally had a breakthrough when she brought up the courage to ask for a promotion and got it.
Here's how we did it:
We gave her increasingly stressful challenges that mimicked conflict, rejection, and rudeness.
We gave her battle-tested emotion regulation protocols to use before, during, and after each challenge.
We taught her practical assertive communication techniques.
Till next week,
— Carlos & Stef
