Fortitude: The Myth of Resilience, and the Secrets of Inner Strength: A Sunday Times Bestseller

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The inference is that resilience is something individual, that some of us are blessed with and that others need to be schooled in. I was particularly interested in the section which looks at the influence of control, having a sense that someone is in control of their own lives and decisions can make it easier to deal with adversity. Whereas having actions dictated to you or feeling that options have been limited by forces outwith your control disempowers people and makes it harder to access inner strength. But such is the easy appeal of resilience, it has become our hopeful expectation for victims of misfortune. I was doing some walk-and-talks with our team this week, and I always ask everything, "What are you enjoying most at the moment; what gives you the most energy?" and it was interesting that the first thing everyone in the team talked about was how they work, rather than what they work on; so, this sense of, "I feel like I have choice and control over how I work, and if that means I want to volunteer for my kid's swimming, I just make that happen", and how much they appreciated almost not feeling like they had to tell us, or hopefully not having that micromanagement. Sarah Ellis: So, Bruce, thank you. It's been a fascinating conversation today, as I knew it would be, and a challenging one, as we also knew it would be. But we always finish these conversations with the same question, which we're really interested to know, what's the most useful piece of career advice that you would like to share with our listeners and leave our listeners with? This could be a useful piece of career advice that you've been given and that you want to pass on and share what you know, so that we can all succeed; or perhaps just some words of wisdom for you.

Bruce Daisley on misplaced notions of Fortitude Bloomfest 2022: Bruce Daisley on misplaced notions of Fortitude

You may change or cancel your subscription or trial at any time online. Simply log into Settings & Account and select "Cancel" on the right-hand side. But the actual experience of a trauma, an adversity, is an incredibly harmful one. And through those two things, I think you can see a path to understanding where our response to adversity comes from. For me, all of that is about identity, because all of that -- if you hear Kelly Holmes, Kelly Holmes will say, "Sport became my identity". She was adopted, she had parental abandonment, she was very severely bullied at school, I think latterly we clearly learned that she's been wrestling with issues with her own sexual identity and feeling ashamed about that. And so, you look at all of those things and you go, "Well actually, her then channelling all of her interest into sporting excellence, now you recognise that redemptive power of that power of identity, I think".

Helen Tupper: So, foundations of fortitude then, in the book you talk about the importance of control, identity and community as being the three things that I think you would say count the most towards fortitude. Could we explore each of them in turn, starting with control, which again when I was reading that, I consider one of my primary values to be freedom, and I was like, "Well, is it freedom, Helen; or is it actually a need for control, based on what you talk about in the chapter about it?" Can you talk to us a little bit more about why control is so important in the context of fortitude?

Fortitude: The Myth of Resilience, and the Secrets of Inner Fortitude: The Myth of Resilience, and the Secrets of Inner

Bruce Daisley: It might make our skin feel better and look better, but there is nothing whatsoever that reverses the impact of aging. In a very similar way, marketing as an industry has responded to a need, and tried to synthesise a product that answers the need, and you can see it very clearly. Martin Seligman, who's probably the most eminent psychologist in the world, he's the Robert De Niro of psychology, in the sense that he did some really good work at the start of his career, and he's done some not so good work at the end of his career, and he reports in his own book how he'd written some very lovely, popular psychology books, and the US Army and pretty much education authorities came to him and said, "If we gave you money, will you solve our issue?" A much needed book that unfolds the surprising secrets of resilience. Something I never knew I needed to read but I'm so glad I did, its opened up a whole angle of thinking. Nadiya Hussain While asking for resilience feels like an honest invocation, the term has been heavily politicised. A book that confirms what I've always believed, that we can't be resilient on our own. In fact resilience is about all of us being stronger than any of us. Gary Lineker A fascinating analysis of resilience - what it is, what is isn't and why, when we develop it together, it becomes something better and more important, fortitude. It seems that resilience is a team game. Alastair Campbell

If we look for those who stumble to get up and win, then surely it places demand and responsibility on victims of adversity? Bruce Daisley: Yeah, and I think we can see how identity is definitely a conflicted part of this, because for some of the people concerned, channelling everything into accomplishment for identity can prove enriching, but also incredibly endangering. From quotations that we see, Simone Biles, the American Gymnast, during the course of the Olympics, she was probably expected to win at least four gold medals, she end up winning, I think, one silver medal and maybe a bronze as well; she said, during the course of what was effectively quite a public breakdown, she said she was very grateful for the praise she received by coming clean on mental health issues, because until now, she'd seen herself merely in the fact that she was an accomplished athlete. In the US Army, the issue was PTSD is off the scale. You're significantly more likely to die from suicide if you're a combat soldier during the course of your life, than you are to be killed by an enemy combatant. So, as a result of that, there was a need for it. The skincare regime, there was a demand for it, and so people created a product. And the interesting thing, what catalysed that exploration for me, is that so many people I know who've done resilience courses have said to me, "It didn't work, I don't feel any different". Okay, that's really interesting, because like a skincare product, it's a charming, lovely idea, we build a routine around it, we've created something that seems in service of self-care; but if it doesn't work, there are fair questions to ask about that. We can only respond to requests for professional speaking engagements. We are unable to respond to requests for autographs, shoutouts and personalized messages. I think the most critical thing for work right now is that a lot of us have thought, the amount of organisations I've chatted to who say, "We've got this policy of three days a week or two days a week", and then when you chat to the workers, they're like, "Well, we're not doing those days". So many firms are really struggling to get people to come in the amount of days they want, and it's the wrong focus, to some extent. The focus needs to be, "How do we make people feel like they're part of something?" That might be one day a month, two days a month, where there's something meaningful, where you're sharing ideas together, where people feel like their voice is being heard, where you're talking about the plan for the next quarter, and everyone feels like, "My idea's up on the board". Those things are far more meaningful for us, feeling like we're all in this together.

Bruce Daisley | Future of Work Speaker | Chartwell Speakers Bruce Daisley | Future of Work Speaker | Chartwell Speakers

So, if you're going to make one thing change, then you might say, "If I'm feeling no autonomy at work, is there something I could do to reduce the amount of time I'm spending in meetings? Is there something I could do to set some time aside to do something separate?" The illusion of modern work is we all feel like we've got infinite time, and we'll just answer this, then I'll answer this, and if I just need to work later, I'll work later; and we never make decisions of scarcity. But I guess one of the critical things you'd say is, if people are feeling an absence of control, if people are feeling no resilience, then thinking about how you can gift them some space, and there's a solution to it as well. The Blitz spirit is a good illustration of it, "I'm no longer this Financial-Times-reading, bowler-hat-wearing businessman, I'm now adjacent to this person who's next to me on this street. We've got this new shared identity which is, we're bomb blast survivors", or you know, remarkable things in the testimony of survivors of 9/11. And one woman says really vividly, "Everyone who was on the streets on 9/11 had a calm to them, had a community, a sort of sorority, a brotherhood, where they were buying things for each other, they were doing things for each other. So, people seek to fill that void that trauma's created, by the actions they take. And I think through all of that, we can see, to your point there, that identity can be this really powerful motivating factor, but it also can be this incredible tinderbox that can really be an explosive combination inside of us.Our Skills Sprint is designed to create lots more momentum for your learning, making it easier to learn So, I think I would say, I'd broadly categorise grit and growth mindset as the resilience orthodoxy. I think it's probably slightly unfair to growth mindset, because I think there is vaguely some substance to growth mindset, but it's not remotely the substance that is pedalled, offered and promoted. It's worth saying that people have really struggled with any degree of clinical desire to replicate the effect of growth mindset. In fact, pretty much the first model of growth mindset has been pedalled; I don't think there've been any replications of it.

Fortitude: The Myth of Resilience, and the - Goodreads

This interesting book lifts the cover on the resilience myth that we've all been sold, and shines a light on how and why resilience is not what we think it is, and not what we should aspire towards. Simultaneously, Vincent Felitti said something which is just astonishing. He was dealing in a weight loss clinic, and he had patients who were 300 lbs, 400 lbs, you know, people really struggling with obesity, and he found himself accidentally asking a question of one of them, which was related to her sexual history. And effectively, he discovered firstly that this patient had been abused by her grandfather, but then he started asking other patients. He found 55% of his patients had experienced sexual abuse as children. This expectation of resilience frequently serves the purpose of making help unnecessary, if a victim proves unable to cope it suggests an additional weakness, maybe they weren’t worth helping in the first place.But what you discover is, through each of these ten questions, you give a yes or no answer, or you give a 1 or a 0 zero, and you add up your score at the end of it. So, it enables you firstly to have a discussion with a doctor, because you can say, "My ACE score is 4", and it enables you to have a discussion. But what you discover is, once you know this ACE score, once you catalogue someone's experience of adversity, of trauma really, it's got a remarkable correlation with life outcomes. The second part is, I'd read this work that I couldn't get out of my head, and it was about a study that's very relevant. We're recording this just in the week that Mo Farah has come out and said, "Actually, I'm not the person you think me to be. I'm actually, rather than someone who was sent here by my family and have formed a new life here, my dad's died, my mum effectively sold me into modern slavery, and I came here as a domestic servant. And, from the age of pre-teen years, I was a domestic servant". So, we might look at Mo Farah's story and go, "Well, at least he's been gifted with this good fortune that's lifted him out of this traumatic start in life", but no, they're not an accidental coincidence. Sarah Ellis: So, just thinking a little bit about identity, and we've mentioned it already, but one of the things that we've talked about before on the podcast is this idea of enmeshment, which is essentially when your identity isn't distinct from your job, so the work you do becomes who you are. And, there's some real dangers to that, because with our blurred boundaries, and when we are all probably working longer than before, there's certainly no evidence that people are working shorter that I've seen, this feels like it continues to be a risk. You mentioned a researcher called Ericsson, who talks about how important our sense of identity is in terms of providing us with our ability to see ourselves in the same way with continuity, but something that's separate to the work that we do, or maybe the family that we're part of; we have this own sense of self. I wonder if you could just talk a little bit about how that helps us to be resilient and to have that fortitude, and I think probably the killer question, and it might be an impossible one is, if you don't feel like you've got that, what do we do about it? What you get then, you get into stories of, okay, right, so here's an interesting profile, that all of these people who won gold medals, and I'm not pointing this specifically at British athletes, but people who won gold medals were trying to resurrect a shattered sense of self. And we also know that people who've had a shattered sense of self might consider that they will restore their sense of self-belief at all costs.