Inside front cover The good news is that resilience isn't a genetic gift for a lucky few
- it's an easily understood skill that anyone can practice and master.
x Understanding that the future isn't something that happens to you, but something that you
create is the key to surviving and thriving in changing times. That's what this book is all about.
xii My purpose in writing this book is to help you overcome fear; stress less; and learn how resilient,
creative people think and act.
p.4-5 This bouncing back from stress is called resilience. It's a graceful way
of flowing through life, adapting to different circumstances with the ease of water assuming the shape of whatever it's poured
into.
p.5 Let's take a closer look at how stress and resilience work. Think of a rubber band: When it's stretched
out, there's stress on the rubber, but when you release that stress, it snaps back into shape. That's the most basic kind
of resilience. But if the rubber band is stretched for a long time, it eventually begins to fatigue and is more likely to
give out.
The same is true for the human body and mind: we tend to give out when we're stressed for long periods.
p.6 When an emergency calls for sudden "stretching," most healthy people can rise to the challenge... When
the emergency is over, your "rubber band" relaxes, and you return to a resting state of balance and ease.
p.11 Dean Becker, the president and CEO of a company called Adaptiv Learning Systems that
teaches resilience... said, "More than education, more than experience, more than training, a person's level of resilience
will determine who succeeds and who fails. That's true in the cancer ward, it's true in the Olympics, and it's true
in the boardroom."
p.11 [Diane] Coutu [a writer for the Harvard Business Review] identified [in a 2002 article] three
traits of resilient thinking... "Resilience is a reflex, a way of facing and understanding the world, that is deeply etched
into a person's mind and soul. Resilient people and companies face reality with staunchness, make meaning of hardship instead
of crying out for despair, and improvise solutions from thin air. Others do not."
p.14 resilience requires you to look your diagnosis straight in the eye and make appropriate
plans for treatment... In other words, given the reality of whatever your situations is, what's needed to manage it?
p.19 Resilient thinkers face difficult situations head-on. Then they do whatever it takes
to survive. How about you? Do you accept your situation realistically, or are you more prone to denial, rationalization, or
wishful thinking?
p.30 Without awareness of your thinking style, it's impossible to make better decisions. Awareness
and choice are the building blocks of adapting creatively to change.
p.41 The belief that change is a challenge rather than a threat is an invitation to the improvisational
skill of bricolage, the creative mind-set central to resilience.
p.56,58 Here's a bare bones fact of life: If you argue with reality, you will always lose... Accepting
your circumstances realistically is the foundation for making positive, healthy changes.
p.70-71 [best-selling author and journalist Daniel] Pink's premise is that information used to be the
currency that bought success, but with the advent of the Internet, acquiring a lot of data is less of a claim to fame than
it once was... The skill most needed for our postmodern times is synthesis, the combination of existing components
into something completely new.
p.119 Exploring your values and letting them guide your vision builds a bridge between where you are now
and a future that can be even more rewarding than your past. The whole enterprise of envisioning what may come hinges
on what my husband, Gordon, calls double vision - the capacity to see surface reality... and the drive to explore
the hidden treasures that lie beneath. Gordon loves to quote the late psychologist Erich Fromm who said, "The present
is pregnant with the possible."
p.129 "Discipline is remembering what you want." -David Campbell
