Hello, hello, and welcome to Sheep Persisted, the Gen. Z mental health podcast. I'm your host, Sadie. Sutton A. Psychology student at the University of Pennsylvania. Let's get into it. Have you ever known somebody who is really sharp, bright, popular, and they don't like themselves? And you wonder why? But adverse childhood experiences explain a lot of that because shame gets imprinted in the right brain early on and people can't get
talked out of it often. You got to go deeper to the felt sense and that's a beauty I think of of what we're learning that we can heal people, but not in traditional psychology, at least not initially. Hello, hello you guys and welcome back to She persisted. I am really excited you're here today. We're have a really interesting
episode all about resilience. We've talked a little bit about ACE scores and how we can boost our resilience with different ways that we think about things and broaden and build theory and all these different adjacent concepts. But I don't think we've ever done an episode fully dedicated to what resilience is, why some of us are more or less resilient, and how we can. Boost our. Resilience for when we go through challenging periods in our. Lives so I'm really, really.
Excited for this conversation, it's one of my favorites that I've had. In a while on the. Podcast Today's guest is Glenn Scarraldi. He has served on the stress management faculties at the Pentagon, the International Critical Incident Stress Foundation, and the University of Maryland, where he received
the Outstanding Teaching award. He is the author of a number of articles and books on human mental and physical health and is the founder of the Resilience Training International, which teaches practical, effective coping skills to build the strengths of resilience. We dive into a lot of different areas. In this episode. We talk about his background in the military and how.
That led him to start. Studying resilience, we talk about the ways that you can think about your mental health to boost your resilience and come at it from that angle.
We talk about the psychology of toxic stress and how that impacts our resilience we talk about the different coping skills that you want to use in low stress versus high stress situations because they're really different we talk about ACE scores, which are a really fascinating concept and something that you should absolutely be aware of and we also talk about how that impacts our lifelong stress levels and how you can heal from adverse childhood experiences.
We talk about finding specialists to work with, how trauma can impact our shame and self esteem, how to heal from that self doubt and what you should know about being truly resilient in your life. So we, we really go everywhere in this conversation. It's a really, really fascinating listen and I hope you guys enjoy it as much as I do. And as always, if you guys find this episode interesting, make sure to comment, share with a friend or family member, post about it on social media, leave
a review. It really, really helps the podcast. And I don't. Want to keep you too long? So with that, let's dive in. Well, thank you so much for joining me today on Cheaper Assisted. I'm so excited to have you on the podcast. We've talked about a scores and resilience a couple times on the podcast, but we've never done a full episode talking about what is resilience, what contributes to how resilient we are, especially as young adults, and
how we can improve that. So I'm really excited to have you on the podcast today and dive into that. It's great to be with you and I'm so impressed with what you're doing with your your life experience. Thank you. I so appreciate that. I would love to start with your background and research and how you decided to go into psychology. What piqued your interest as far as resilience and trauma?
And obviously we're going to talk about a lot of different dimensions of that in different ways that shows up, but what is your background? How did you become interested in this area? I'll try to make this quick. I always say that my life experience perfectly prepared me for what I'm doing today. I grew up in a little close knit community in New York and there was enough chaos in my home that I can empathize with just about anybody or anything and never be
surprised. But I was surrounded by wonderful extended family, terrific friends. I wish everybody could have friends like I had a close community. We go back to our unions. People say we always felt so safe in our school and that's not, you know, what kids are seeing today. But so I went to the United States Military Academy and West Point and I was during the Vietnam War and I I saw friends coming back with post traumatic stress disorder. I had no idea how to how to help.
After my active duty five years, I stayed in the reserves and started teaching high school because I like young people and coaching. And I saw this is a factory town and kids are struggling with broken homes and drugs and suicide and and rape. And I had no idea how to help. So I decided to go back to get my doctorate at the University of Maryland. They had a wonderful stress management program and was in public health actually.
And so I was, I was free to focus on not just psychology, but medicine and nutrition and exercise Physiology and complementary medicine. I was basically looking for anything that helped, and I was invited to teach stress management at the Pentagon, where I discovered that you could really do a lot of good in little small group classes for functional people, preventively teaching them skills, principles
and skills. And so at the university I was on loan to the Pentagon for a couple of days a week. But at the university I started developing, when I came to call resilience courses. And every day it was here the principle, here the skill, it's practice it, go home and do it for two or three days, we'll come back and process how it worked. And there were skills to prevent depression and anxiety and anger and build self esteem, which correlates with all of the previous three.
And we found that everything changed, which is really good news that you can actually strengthen people by teaching skills, not just information. I don't find that really helps much when people are under pressure. And so that was really good to know. And so I started a love hate relationship with books because people come up after class or workshops and say I'm depressed and I think that's related to stress. And where do I find a user friendly book?
And I say, I don't know, let me look. And most of the time I couldn't find one. We started writing books on depression, anxiety, anger, self esteem, lately resilience and adverse childhood experiences. So it's kind of important pieces of the puzzle, I think. And then I retired from the university so that I can devote more time to writing and training high risk people. And so I work today with the foundation that works primarily with military cops and firefighters.
My wife and I recently depleted 4 years of running in the dictionary recovery program, which addictions are often driven by unresolved pain. And so like you, I think I, I really love sharing what I wish I knew when I was 18 and hopes that people suffer unnecessarily because, you know, we, we know what, what helps, But sometimes it's hard to find that, especially when you're in the throes of, of crisis. What do you think? Is that difference between
information and skills? Because a lot of the time it's like almost synonymous. It's just kind of how it's presented. Do you think that framing it as a skill suggest that people can actually implement it, or that what they're experiencing is malleable? Do you have any thoughts there about why skills are so much more effective than just educating on what's happening? Well, it's like like a sport I always like in mental health to
golfing or playing piano. You know, you can get a lecture on beautiful music or beautiful basketball, but that doesn't make you good at it. You know, it's important to know big picture concept principles. And so I start with principles. You got to understand why you're doing a skill, but then it teaches a coping skill that's got to be practiced. And I think people think I just read a good book that that'll fix all my problems. Sometimes it does, but usually it doesn't. Yeah, yeah.
I want to get into how we define stress and resilience. And you talked about how that can present in a lot of different ways, whether it's depression or anxiety, addiction, PTSD. How do you kind of explain stress and resilience as a psychological concept? Because we've heard these words before. But a lot of the times when we're either working on interventions or conducting research, the way that these things are defined is actually really different from how we use
them in day-to-day language. Right. It's my whole thing has been take stuff out of the the clinic in the academic works and make it so that people can understand it. There are lots of definitions of stress and resilience, but but the way I generally look at it, stress is anything that calls us to be challenged to adapt. And some people say, well, stressor is the cause and the response is called stress. But people generally use those
terms interchangeably. But there is is good stress and that is what you know, it challenges you, but it's pleasant. Think of somebody in a flow state who's at the computer doing something they really like to do. Then there is tolerable stress where stress arousal gets elevated, but it doesn't stay elevated. You can come back to normal
before any damage is done. What we're often talking about is, is what's called toxic stress, which is stress that is so severe and or chronic that it overwhelms our ability to cope to the point that there is damage literally to our brains with with excess stress hormones. And that affects emotions, our ability to cope, our relationships. And so really it's a question of how prepared I am to cope with what life is throwing at me.
And so I think a good resilience course has to be comprehensive enough that it'll equip you with skills for anything that that life will throw at you. So for example, when I work with cops, it isn't just skills to be a good cop, it's skills to deal with what you see emotionally. The way I define resilience is just the inner strengths, strengths of mind, strength of character that help us respond well to the bad stuff, to
adversity. And these skills, these strengths are innate, capable of being developed, but specifically what they help us do is prevent stress related problems like depression, anxiety, PTSD, and so on. If we suffer those conditions, they tend to be less severe and with resilience, we tend to rebound quicker. And then the other part of resilience, which is often left off and beyond the ability to rebound and resist, is to optimize mental health and performance.
And so that goes beyond traditional psychology into, you know, being at your best. Really we want to overcome suffering, but we also want to enjoy life and and be good at at what we're trying to do, I think. It's really interesting. We've gotten better at talking about a lot of mental health concepts. And I think then I could be wrong because I wasn't in high school then, but like 50 years ago.
I don't imagine that students were all day every day in high school being like, I'm so stressed, there's so much to do I'm burning out. I'm the workload is too much and now that's a really common experience in high school and a justified response because you have AP classes and you're studying for the SAT and AC TS and college exams and the workloads are increased and we almost lose. That other side of the. Equation, like you mentioned, which is that stress can be good.
It allows us to mentally and physically perform better. It allows us to respond to those challenges. And so the more we avoid these things, the more intense they become. And so this narrative that we hear a lot about burnout and stress and overwhelm all being negative, there's both sides of that, which I think are an important part of the conversations that we're not just working to avoid all stress and minimize all potential stressors in our life. You mentioned different.
Skills for different levels of stress? Do you have some examples for people of like what a low stress coping skill would be versus a really high stress intervention? Yeah, so when I work with the high stress groups, I start out with the easy stuff so people can get to experience. Hey, this works. For example, I do a 5 minute foot to head stress reducer and you know, people say, well, I'm really busy. Can you give me something quick
and make sure? So, so I'll say, OK, just just sit comfortably and meditate a posture which is kind of be planned, the floor and and back well supported and just start to notice what's going on in your body. Because what we know from brain scans is if you can track what the body is doing, the brain starts to get into the resilience zone, which is where stress arousal is neither too high nor too low, but just right so that everything is is online. So track what's going on your body.
What is your gluteal muscles feel like on this chair? What does it feel like to be supported? And then kind of just do a series of put your hands on your stomach and just let compassion feel on the in breath your abdomen. Do a similar thing with your heart. Do a similar thing with the warmth of your hands around your eyes. And then a little massage, little thumb massage, little tapping, which is drawn from a trauma treatment.
They integrate parts from from our Eastern friends where it we're just be in contact with your true happy nature. You know, get under your thoughts, your racing mind and just for a moment rest in your core self, which you don't have to create. It's already there. It's already happy and wise and kind and, and humorous. And you just got to be aware of that. It's, it's innate. That's part of those resilience qualities we have. So that, that would be like kind
of easy stuff for anybody. Just abdominal breathing is easy stuff. But when I make try to make it a skill, I'll give people block sheets and I go home and do this say five times a day when you wake up and you go to sleep. And then initially at low stress times. And as you get good at the skill, try it a traffic light or try it with when somebody irritates you or cuts you off. The logging, I think it's just increases focus.
And when you look back over three or four days or a week you go. I can see my ratings improved. I was getting better at it with practice. So for example, abdominal breathing, that's so simple and almost everybody has success with it. But if you're asked to track it and then know that you're going to come back, say to a group of class and report on how that go, then the people tend to fill it in and kind of reinforces their
success. And if they didn't have success to talk about what would help to to make it better for trauma, you know, we build on those skills and all sorts of things that that work sometimes in therapy. But a lot of things can be self managed. And this is part of kind of a theme of my life's work is I want to take skills out of the clinic and give them to people to use on their own. You know, good therapist is
worth his or her worth in gold. But but I want to make sure people are self reliant and not just relying on a mental health professional too. And so many skills that can be used. For example, a lot of people have heard of EMDR for trauma, eye movement desensitization, reprocessing. But when people are having a bad day and maybe you can't get to the therapist, anybody can sit and go, OK, what am I feeling? What's going on in my body?
What emotionally am I feeling? What images and thoughts. And then just follow your own fingers back and forth 24 times. That's a self help strategy that, you know, it's not a comprehensive trauma treatment, but it might get you through the next hour, the next day. I just try to give people a whole tool bag of skills and they can pick what they need. Yeah, yeah. And it's.
Like you mentioned, like if information is sitting in the therapy office and talking about the experience and the skills are going out to the real world and practicing them when you need it. Both sides of that are really important to actually feel that difference in in the techniques. There are some things that can increase our stress and resilience throughout our whole lives, especially in childhood. I think people are becoming more familiar with ACE scores.
I think most people listening probably got screened for Aces when they went to the pediatrician's office and maybe throughout their whole life. But can you explain to us what ACE scores are, what adverse child experiences are, and then how it affects our stress and resilience throughout the rest
of our life? Yeah. So this was one of my recent delights was in 1998 two medical doctors, Felidian and Anda had access to 17,000 records of people in an HMO middle class, educated fairly well off and they found that the more adverse childhood experiences you have, the more likely you are to suffer from you name it, any psychological problem, just about any medical problem, any functional problem on a graduated basis. So the higher your A score, the more prone you are to get ill or
dysfunctional. And so the 10 most common in that group, Bear in mind that there's lots of others that are more appropriate for say minority groups or inner city groups, military people. But it was it was any kind of abuse, mental, physical, emotional, physical or emotional neglect, living in a home where there's a loss of a parent, from divorce to separation, seeing domestic violence, seeing somebody mentally ill or suicidal, on drugs or
incarcerated. So typically the more of those Aces you get, the more likely you are to have some kind of relatively serious problem, especially once you get to around four or more. And when you get to six or more, people lose on average 20 years of life. Now, that is just mind blowing. And that is about what the average cop loses. They die about 22 years younger than their peers, their civilian peers.
So this has been called the most important unaddressed public health problem facing our Nation Today, because even in California, where a lot of this is being pushed, maybe 10% of people are really up to speed on aces. How to heal it and how to not make your kids go through this again. So there's a lot of skills that are that are needed. I love the way that this is kind
of graphically depicted. If you think of a fire with flames and and that's the Aces, the bad stuff including attachment disruptions and then say 10 feet above is the smoke and that's all the depression, PTSD and autoimmune problems, obesity and precocious sex and premature pregnancy, so on, Felitti said. We do a disservice to treat the smoke without getting at the flames. In other words, that the trauma and wounds from the childhood diversity. What's between the two?
It is dysregulated stress, stress that is either stuck on too high or too low. And that is what causes all these emotional and even brain development changes. And if you like it, I always find it fascinating to talk about how the brain develops after ACES. It's very different than a kid who's securely attached and and living in a secure home. But people suffer for decades, sometimes not realizing there are treatments that are healing. And so suffering is is often unnecessary.
But it's usually not talk therapy for a lot of different reasons. You know, we we train our young people today still in in will talk to me about what you're thinking about what you're feeling. But the problem is people are traumatized in the 1st 18 years of life and particularly in the first three years of life. Trauma doesn't register in the verbal logical left brain. It registers in the non verbal right brain unconsciously. A lot of this stuff is below the level of awareness.
So when you're thinking calmly, you can say, well I'm upset because of XY and Z. The right brain says, I don't know if I could put words to that. I just feel a felt sense. It's kind of my body, it's kind of emotional. And so you can't talk to what's registering lodging in the right brain, but you can come at it from a body based in other words, reduce arousal in the body, that reduces arousal in the survival brain, the
emotional brain. And then ultimately that'll calm the left brain, cognitive brain so that you can eventually talk about it. But you start with treatments that that calm arousal come the body and also deal with images because that's what the right brain does. Just one more point about brain development. The first three years are critical.
The left brain isn't even developed in the first three years, but the right brain is. And so a lot of people say, well, you're an adult now, just get over it. Well, what you're asking someone to get over is something they don't even recall is the felt sense of dread or shame. And sometimes it comes from bad environments like abuse, but sometimes it's just a fairly good family where the kid is just exposed to super high expectations that they think maybe I can't meet those expectations.
And so low self esteem and shame often gets imprinted. Have you ever known somebody who is really sharp, bright, popular and they don't like themselves and you wonder why? But adverse childhood experiences explain a lot of that because shame gets imprinted in the right brain early on and people can't get talked out of it because it's not on the left brake that you can reason.
I mean, cognitive therapy can help to a degree, but often you got to go deeper to the felt sense and that's very different approach. You know, it's a body based imagery kind of approach and that's a beauty. I think of of what we're learning from adverse childhood experiences that we can heal people, but not in traditional psychology, at least not initially. What are your favorite? Techniques for addressing that felt sense that more internal experience and response to
stress. Is it a certain type of therapy? We mentioned breath work. Do you have any of these that work really well with your patients or that you've seen a lot of success with or that people find to be really effective and kind of decrease that feeling of being out of control or not knowing how to navigate what they're experiencing? Yeah, So as a public health guy, my my role is to educate people, ideally preventively, and then also to help steer them to the right kind of treatment.
The treatments I've been most impressed with, people are pretty aware of EMDR and we know that eye movements calm the emotional centers of the brain, and that's wonderful. The thing that I'm most impressed with, the treatment I'm most impressed with is what's called accelerated resolution therapy. Have you heard of this one?
No, I came across it when I was looking at what helps traumatize soldiers, and it was found that this worked even quicker than EMDR, sometimes went through three sessions. So it uses eye movements, but it brilliantly adds many, many different approaches, creative, innovative approaches. And so the way this works is you start with a body. OK, so you have this bad memory. Let's notice where on your body you feel the emotions and let's calm it with eye movements.
And then let's pull up the image itself and calm that with eye movements. And then let's erase and replace that image and re reinforce that with eye movements. And then ultimately, let's imagine a future where you cross a bridge to a, a place where you're you're feeling happy and well adjusted and you're leaving all your baggage on the other side of that that bridge and let's 3 and 479 movements.
It is brilliant. Lady Rosenstweig was trained in the MDR and she started adding all these innovative things to make it better, I think. And she was told you can't do that. You either have to stop doing it or don't call the MDR. So she's called it and I am just so impressed and, and the research is still fairly new, but impressive for the few years relatively that it's been around. But but therapists getting trained in this and they're really enthusiastic about it.
And I've had a number of people say, you know, where can I go? And I said, look on the website acceleratedresolutiontherapy.com, find a a therapist in your area. And I never anybody come back and say that didn't work. I hated it. Well, I will put that in the show notes. For sure. So, people. Can look in their city or state and find a clinician if they're looking for that approach. Yeah, it's, it's very, very
impressive. I've just seen things happen in one or two or three sessions that were, you know, could take weeks or months or years. Like it's called intensive trauma recovery. I was invited to a trauma conference at the University of West Virginia, and I talked about dissociation and how people can understand what that
is as a part of trauma. And I started talking to the organizers, a psychiatrist and his spouse who was a PhD art therapist, and they came up with this treatment that I thought, this is brilliant. I want to learn more about this and start training with them. And what it does is it divides a trauma which typically is all blurred and all crazy and the brain doesn't process it well and intrudes and so forth.
But it it gives the trauma memory structure by saying, here are the seven phases of the instinctual trauma response. Draw each one and then talk to me to the therapist about what's going on there. And then watch as I, the therapist, post your drawings on a whiteboard or wall and in a very kind, compassionate way, tell your story. So now you're eventually putting words to that. But art, sometimes I can't talk about what's going on inside, but I can express it with my hand, and that does.
And so in a Safeway, you hear that your trauma memory has a beginning, a middle, and an end. It's over, it's in the past and like ART, sometimes that can be done very, very quickly and set all memory in a way that that lasts without re traumatizing people. So those are the two that I
really, really like. And while we're talking about finding good treatments, Sidran, SIDRAN, if you send a e-mail to them, they're in Baltimore area and give them your ZIP code, they'll say, OK, here are people who identify as a trauma specialist. OK. Those skills are different than just traditional talk therapy. Yeah. Yeah. Quality assurance. But at least you can get somebody who's, you know, attuned to trauma.
So yeah, I love. That and I think it's definitely helpful to know exactly what to search for because especially if you're dipping your toe in the water, you haven't been in therapy before. It's not super intuitive that oh, all therapists might not have these backgrounds or they might not specialize in this area. It's not like you go to a General practitioner and they're like, oh, actually you got to receive this specialist. Sometimes it can be a little bit more on the patient to kind of
lead that process and advocate. So it's definitely a learning curve. Yeah. And I think to the end, initiated, we think all therapists are the same. Well, they're not. And you got to be a really good consumer. And some people get discouraged because sometimes you find one that's not particularly skilled in in trauma therapy, you know. So ask them, interview them and say here's my problem, I'm interested in treating it. What have you got?
And, you know, find out, am I comfortable with that person? Do they have the experience to treat when I'm troubled by? Yeah. You mentioned that shame and self esteem can also be part of this equation. I'm curious how that shows up. Is it something that people are thinking through? Like maybe they're like I'm not responding to stress in the way that my peers are? Or I feel like I should be having a different experience here and then shame and self esteem comes into play?
Or is it more like a something that subconsciously gets correlated between the two? How does that relationship play out? OK, so in our diagram here, here's this, there is a smoke and here's this regulated stress. Off to the side. I put shame and self dislike which is basically low self esteem. It doesn't always happen this way, but let's say a child is unwanted and that child gets messages from a caregiver, mom, dad, or a significant adult
figure. Maybe it's words, but it's not so much the words, it's the feeling tone that a young child in the right brain will register. So maybe it's a disgusted or angry look that the parent gives kid. Can't reason that out, but it gets ingrained in the brain. And so maybe 20 years later, as a accomplished adult that now adults thinks, I don't feel like I deserve this. I don't feel worthy. And it's not necessarily something they're consciously saying aloud, although it might be.
It's more like a felt sense, a sense of dread, a sense of I'm not good enough. And so cognitive therapy might help, but that's a left brain approach. And so, you know, you try to go at the shame. And so in a bottom up and imagery way. And so in, in the workbook that I fairly recently completed, the Adverse Childhood Experiences Recovery workbook, the idea that I try to convey is trauma by definition is overwhelming. It overwhelms our ability to cope.
And so it's good. There's no shame in asking for a coach. You know, a world class athlete generally has a coach with no shape. You know, we take specialized military equipment and and take it offline and give it maintenance and service and
sometimes we need that too. And so if you can find a good trauma therapist, it's a great idea, but the problem is a lot of people will never get the treatment that would help them for a variety of reasons, cost or stigma or I don't know where to go or I tried it once and I don't think anything's going to work because they don't realize all the different options. And so in the work like a layout, like a eight step skill based plan to heal from trauma. And for some people, they can do
that on their own, self managed. Others will maybe use it as an adjunct to working with a therapist. And sometimes therapists will get into the workbook and say, oh, let's work on this skill today together and, and see how it goes. But there are skills to regulate dysregulated stress, to regulate strong distressing emotions which maintain that stress arousal. There are brain keys, there are 9 or 10 keys that help the brain prepare to rewire so that these old memories are not continually
driving your adult show. We can strengthen and stabilize the nervous system through imagery, imagery that simulates what an ideal attachment relationship would have looked like. And again, that's not logic so much so. It's just imagine yourself as a as a young child being loved and and cared for and enjoyed by that ideal caregiver, whether it's mom or dad or both. What would that feel like? What would it, what would it feel like to hear that soothing tone or to see the smile or
loving gaze in the eyes? Anythings possible in imagery. Imagery can be very, very powerful. At that point then you're you're ready to go after the trauma memory and rework the image. There's some float back strategies where you'll you'll take a upset in the present and go why did I so overreact and trace that back to the earliest memory where you had similar feelings of shame or being insulted or criticized and settled that core memory as
well. After you've done that, there's often remnants of shame lurking in the recesses of her mind. And so there's some imagery skills to rework, shame programming that's imprinted in the brain. And at that point, you're then ready to do what I call transition skills because life is about more than just overcoming suffering. You know what kind of skills will lead to a happier, more satisfying life.
And that gets into pleasant activities, it gets into forgiving, it gets into developing character traits that I feel good about when I look in the mirror.
That's something that psychology books don't often talk about, but there's research that shows that people feel less traumatic stress symptoms when they feel good about who they are inside their character, even not just in America, but in Europe and and in Buddhist countries, like people who adhere to the five tenets of Buddhism, which I can remember them all. No intoxicants, no sexual abuse or misconduct, no lying, cheating or stealing. Less depression, less stress.
So character I think is really important and often is overlooked. Sometimes people are damaged morally by the way they're treated, but then sometimes we get older, we make decisions that we don't feel good about. And so part of resilience is learning how to rebound and be kind and look ahead because no one is irredeemable. No one is unchangeable. So there's a lot of hope, but it's one of those things we don't really talk about too often. I'm curious.
And this is. Totally just a theoretical. I'm not sure that there's an actual study or an actual measure of this, but do you think that most of us have some ineffective relationship between like those childhood experiences and how we relate to stress? Maybe you don't have any score or maybe you don't have the four to six that have that huge
impact on your outcomes. But do you think generally everyone to some degree could be more effective with that relationship to stress and then how we respond internally? Yeah, so I had the privilege of of getting to know a lot of students over the decades. I was at the university. We had little small discussion classes and we were talking about this a little before. You would be surprised how many people who on the outside look all put together.
Great. But I think just being mortal, you know, we have, we question ourselves. We don't feel good enough. You know, it's just a question of degree. One of my friends said everybody's got emotional problems. Just a question to what degree? You know, the skills are the skills and they help anybody in any, any state of emotional development. You know, it's just a question sometimes. How much help do we need with
developing those skills? Some people can learn it on their own and they're basically doing pretty well. But, you know, you can tweak a little things here and there, other people. That's when it's good to have a therapist because understandably, you know, you've been through a lot of hard stuff and somebody kind of walk you through the healing process would be really useful. Yeah, 100%. There is a study that many countries around the world, 99% of people have regrets.
Wow. And I think the 1% are probably sociopaths. They didn't understand the question. I mean, who, who doesn't ever make mistakes, you know? So part of this, I think, is being compassionate, having self esteem that says that was a mistake. I don't feel good about it, but it doesn't make me worthless or irredeemable. Yeah. Makes me human.
Yeah, very related. If you could like wave a magic wand and young adults could have one skill or one way they thought about things with regard to emotional resilience or how they navigate stress. Maybe it's a preventative measure, maybe it's something they learn in school.
What would that? Be what I love to do when I'm training groups like Federal Employees and Nation's Capital is ask them what do you think resilience is and what would you expect to take from our two days together or four days together? Some some of the best definition of resilience came not from academics or theorists, but from people in the trenches. And one nurse at a large Children's Hospital said, I think resilience is the capacity to absorb stress and maintain
yourself. And to me, that speaks to the feeling of worth, the feeling inside of being quietly glad to be who you are. That is independent of externals. So much of her culture says you have no worth unless you're bold and beautiful and rich and accomplished and have a nice car and and, and a great job. Those are nice sometimes, but it, it's not the good feeling you get when you look in the mirror.
And so I think, I think there are a series of self esteem skills that I've, you know, I, I started teaching in my courses and then wrote it up in a workbook, the self esteem workbook. And the way that came about is I studied under the leading self esteem researcher, Morris Rosenberg in 1980. I said, Doctor Rosenberg, you've spent your whole life documenting how low self esteem causes problems in people. What do you do if someone doesn't have it? You know what he said?
He said, I don't know. And so, well, that's no good. So I'm going to make a course up and, and I plumbed the literature and I boiled it down to skills that could be practiced. And we found you can actually improve self esteem with skills, practice skills that related to a sense of unconditional worth as a, as a human, not market worth, not social worth, but inner human worth, unconditional
love and the process of growing. And I think we learn a lot from our friends in the East. All of that done with compassion because it's difficult to do everything right. But we can try. And as long as you know, I love John Wooden, the the old Hall of Fame basketball coach. Success isn't the scoreboard. Success is the satisfaction and Peace of Mind of knowing that you've done your best. Sometimes the other teams better.
Some problems we can't solve, but we can feel good if we know we're good at the old college try. And so a lot of self esteem is just kindness. Not that we soften out our expectations. It's it's healthy to have good expectations, but to pursue them with kindness, with love and never with punishment. I think that's sometimes as parents, we make a mistake. You know, if I just Robbie, my kids do good, do good, do good
everything work out good. I think it's more important to teach kids to enjoy doing your best and accept the outcome well if people want. To get your workbooks that you mentioned or follow along with your work. Where are they able to do that? If you just go to Amazon and and search the books under my name, Glenn Shiraldi, or you can go to my website, resiliencefirst.com, but the books are generally easy to find. That's where I usually get all my books from Amazon. Yes, amazing.
Well, I will put all of those in the show notes. And thank you so much for. This conversation, I know it's going to help. So, so, so many people. You're very welcome and thank you.