Diana Brecher || Boosting Student Resilience

Doctor Breecher is a cognitive behavioral therapist and educator who is a particular interest in working with clients who are experiencing anxiety and depression. In addition to teaching at Ryerson University in downtown Toronto, she has most recently been jointly responsible for establishing a university wide Thrive RU program at Ryer based in her work in positive psychology and flourishing. Thanks for being on the show today. Thank you. I'm

delighted to be here. Yeah, me too. You have lots of mutual interests, and you are doing lots of really important and interesting work to help students with their well being and anxiety, and lots of things so the big question is where to dive in. Right, let me ask you this, when did you first discover positive psychology, Like, how did that contact happen? Okay, So that's interesting because I think I discovered it in some ways years ago

without realizing that it was part of positive psychology. So I wrote a book review of Martin Seligman's book Authentic Happiness about eight years ago, and I became very interested in his work and followed him even from before that and the learned optimism. I was very interested in how that formed my clinical practice. I ran workshops on flow and optimal performance. So I was very interested in Chick

sent me High's work. So I think I was interested in positive psychology before I knew it was all under that big tent of that name positive psychology. And then as time has gone on, I registered for a six month certificate course in positive psychology last May, which I completed in October, and that really introduced me to a much broader range of research and work being done in the field. That's great, So you encountered all this work and you immediately saw its applicability to the work you've

already been doing with students. I mean you've been working with students for how many years? Well, I've been at Ryerson University in Toronto for just over twenty five years, and before that I did some training and other university counseling services, and as of July first, I left the counseling center for a year and started to just devote all of my time to the Thrive ar U project. Oh great, So well, if you're doving all your time to that, I think we ought to talk about it. Okay, great,

are you now? You started it? You coined that name as well. Well. With a couple of colleagues, we were talking about resilience program that I developed for students who actually had been waiting on the waitlist and the counseling center, and it was a skill based program to build resilience, and several of my colleagues outside the counseling center were very interested in it. We started to talk about how we could export it from the counseling center and into

kind of the mainstream of the university. And in fact, I was really inspired by Martin Seligman's work in Australia with the Geelong School. I don't know if I'm pronouncing that correctly. Yeah, Yeah, they're great, They're great. Yeah, And I loved what he did. It was so inspiring to think about actually going in and changing a culture from really from the ground up and also top down, And so that became the vision for the Thrive RU project is how do we work with faculty, staff and students

at different levels getting them thinking about positive psychologies. She how to increase a sense of well being in the students and educate them on those type of strategies so by the time they graduate, they actually really have two completely separate but integrated sets of skills, whatever their focus of their academic program is, and then the focus of their sense of wellbeing and resilience and capacity to flourish in the world of work and in their other dreams

in their lives. So it's a very lofty kind of idea, and we've started quite modestly and have been building out slowly. That's great. Tell me a little bit about which work has inspired you the most, which aspects of positive psychology or positive education. I read somewhere that you were particularly inspired in addition to mar So, I mean also by Sonya Lubermerski's work. Is that right? Absolutely? I read her book, The How of Happiness, and like it's a fabulous piece

of work. I mean, she has collected great interventions and really research validated interventions for people to increase what she refers to as that forty percent solution, so that forty

percent of our life satisfaction that's under our control. And so one of the things that I created was I kind of selected twenty six of the exercises to follow the rhythm of the academic year and created a workbook calendar where each week of the semester, for both the fall and the winter semesters, students are given a particular exercise that I feel would be really helpful given what's going on in the semester, and then some suggestions onto how to use this exercise to increase your sense of

well being and resilience. And we're just putting it out to press in January, and I've been writing about it in my blog. But I'm hoping that this is something that's going to be available to all of our students just as a download from our website. Oh that is so useful. That's so useful. I actually have a friend named Dan Werner who's doing a lot of work on hes Positi psychology at NYU, and he's doing some trying to create some curriculum to help college students were thriving

as well. I feel like I want to leak you guys up at some point. Oh yeah, for sure. What was his name again, Daniel Werner? Okay, So this is clearly an extremely important in this time in which students all across those country, you know, suicide rates are just they're always unacceptably high, but yes they are pretty you know, it's not like the numbers are becoming reduced and that's problematic, and students are just more depressed than ever. And what do you think is going on? You know, I get

asked that question a lot. What is going on? And you know, I'm not really sure. I have some ideas. So one possibility is that stigma has been reduced with respect to talking about mental health or mental illness, and so people are more willing to disclose how they're feeling. So maybe we're hearing about it more because we're in

the conversation. So that's one possibility. Another one is, you know, a colleague of mine is writing a book on burnout with millennials, and so his idea is that there's something about the pressures of being in this age group, you know, seventeen, eighteen to twenty five, that is just too much. That these young people aren't quite prepared for the demands of university, of being a young adult, the financial expectations, et cetera.

And it just gets too much. They just don't have the capacity to figure it out, and that feeling of being overwhelmed leads them to a place where they think there's no other solution. So in my work as a clinical psychologist, I've worked with, you know, quite a number of students who have felt that way, and our work together is to instill hope and to find ways to cope better and to maybe advocate for them around finances

or you know, academic responsibilities, et cetera. I mean, there's ways to really help clear the deck of it so the person is better able to cope with their challenges. But I don't know if anyone really knows why suicide

is up. We just know that it is, And certainly at my university at Ryerson, there's a very strong awareness throughout the administration and generally that we have to really support our students and their well being, and so part of This initiative that I'm involved in is to try to see how do we change the culture, right, like, how do we I think of it as like almost like how do we affect the hive? How do we get principles of positive psychology into the classroom, into the curriculum,

into the residences or the dorms. How do we do it around student programming generally with athletes, et cetera. And so part of my work is to bring training to people at all these different levels. I just finished doing a four week training session with our journalism department with the professors there, and we've been talking about how do we bring these principles of resilience into the classroom? Yeah,

I mean these are Resiliency is a big key. I was going to say it to a lot of what you're saying, and what are the different components resiliency that you see? Okay, So I've kind of conceptualized it like pieces of a puzzle that fit together. So think at the heart of the puzzle is mindfulness, which is really about the capacity to be present in this moment, not time traveling, you know, to the worrying about the future

and ruminating about the past. It's really about being pressed here, then if you think clockwise going around the circle, I've put in a work of gratitude and the kind of notion that you can start noticing the good things that are happening in your life and noticing possibilities. And as you begin to do that, you begin to feel more resilient because you're not just accepting the good stuff but not taking it in, it's really taking it to heart.

The next part of the puzzle is optimism and how one needs to learn how to become optimistic, and so I run a workshop on that specifically on actually each of these components. Then I look at self compassion Kristin Nef's work on that in particular, but also some of the mindfulness traditions like the loving kindness meditation and the notion of forgiving yourself for being stuck in a bad

place is equal to bouncing back afterwards. And then finally I've been looking at two ways of thinking about perseverance and grit, so I borrow from Angela Duckworth's research on perseverance more around the academic achievement, but also Christine Pedeski, who's a clinical psychologist in one of the many workshops I've attended that she's given in Toronto. She talked about

something called developing a personal model of resilience. So that's something that I teach everyone who goes through the training, is how do you tap into your amazingly resilient strengths and attitudes that you have very well developed from a when you're doing something you love to do that you manage obstacles because of the love of it, and then transport those same strategies and attitudes and metaphors into a different context where you're really struggling. And so it's over

a four week period. Usually I do four sessions with mindfulness integrated into each of the other four and people come away with some strategies and new kind of insights about integrating gratitude, optimism, self compassion, and perseverance. Oh, I really like it. I predict that if I asked you, like, where does creativity come into it, you would say in each of them, yes, absolutely, yeah, yes, because you have to really be you know, adaptability and being flexible so

crucial for resilience. And this the whole thing is a model of resiliency, right, it could also be a model of creativity. Oh, that's interesting. Imagine it can't because creativity does really require that we approach things in new ways without these preconceived notions and the kind of rigid thinking

that's the opposite of creativity. And I'm inviting anyone who works through this model is to really start approaching their life with much more flexibility and a sense of empowerment that they have that capacity to determine at least forty percent of their happiness set point. And this is in service of that. Yes, that's right, that's the Liver and Mersky work. That's right. So you know, it's interesting you described mindfulness, you know, actually the absence of mindfulness as

a form of time travel. Yes, can you ever how that is? Sure? So I think that when someone is spending all of their kind of emotional and psychic energy worried about the future. And so someone who, let's say, when I was working as a clinician, would come in with generalized anxiety and so everything is all a worry and they can't appreciate the present moment because they're imagining the worst case scenario of everything that's going to happen

in the future. So they're not really being present. They're living in the future, but they're living in an imagined future that hasn't come to me and may never come to me, but they're acting as if it's already happening. And similarly, some people who I've worked with kind of get stuck in their past and they can't let go of a relationship or they can't let go of a disappointment, and so they spend a lot of time kind of covering the same ground and being very self recriminating and difficult.

And so the time travel is in the sense that they're not actually in the present moment, which may in fact be much better than either the past or the future, and they're not able to see the good that is

happening in this moment. And a lot of my work as a clinician was to try to get these individuals to spend more time noticing what is working in their life but they have some control over so, you know, the notion of the Zoro circle that Sean Akor talks about, like taking charge of one small piece of your life and then developing some mastery over it and then taking charge of the next piece. So I'm a really strong believer in empowerment as it relates to living in the

present moment. You can't be in the present moment if your attention is elsewhere, and so mindfulness is about training your mind to be in this present moment. Do you think mindfulness and imagination are necessarily at odds with each other? Oh? Again, really interesting question. I think that mindfulness can work in

service of imagination. So I think that sometimes when we daydream, we're definitely not really present in the moment, and daydreams can lead to these amazing leaps of imagination and creative. But I also think that mindfulness is really important in order to be able to be creative, because you have to actually be very present in your life, even though

you may not be attending to your immediate surroundings. Sure so kind of you know, like the ultimate is to be able to have a rich imagination and be mindful of it at the same time. It seems to be kind of yeah, I mean, given that you don't have to like drive a car or pay attention to a lecture, but no operating having machinery while trying to be too creative, Yeah, I mean, because then you're divided attention and that can

be dangerous. Yeah. Sure, so I like that A lot, and I think there is this emerging understanding that mind wandering is not the opposite of mindfulness. They're not opposites. They're kind of on two different dimensions, and they can be combined in lots of interesting ways or mostly two ways. But so which two ways? I'm curious. Well, you can have mindless mind wandering and mindful mind wandering. Course, Yeah, that makes sense. Cool, Okay, So I like this model.

And then you've taken kind of the best pits you know for positive psychology. And it seems like gratitude goes hand in hand with mindfulness. You know, it's very hard being appreciative of something if you don't pay attention to it exactly exactly. And there's so many people I've worked with over the years who will say, yes, this good thing happened, but it doesn't count because I'm so worried

about this or I'm so depressed about that. And so it's this notion of dismissing or distorting the good stuff, And for me, mindfulness will help the individual think about Okay, this is also my truth. So I'm struggling and I'm strong. I like that's the place to be. What do you think we as parents and educators can do using the work you've done with young adults to help children manage

their worries effectively and even flourish. Right, that's a great question. Well, I think, for example, gratitude for young children is really I think an antidote to entitlement. Right, So instead of assuming that life should owe you all these good things, to take a moment to sit back and say, these are good, this is really exciting. I am deserving, not that I am deserving, but I am grateful for having

received this. Like for me, gratitude is like feeling blessed by whatever the good thing that happened to you, and it's this gift that came from the universe. And I think that's something that really works against the idea that the world owes you something. And grateful people are much more likely to feel happy in their lives because whatever good that happens, they're happy about it and they're not

expecting more. Yeah, that sounds good. And you can certainly apply that to children and which it's a lifelong even you know, you apply it to genarians for sure. So you've applied this work to You've done a bunch of initiatives I just want to talk about some of them. One is you did a workshop for Tha's Is that right, Yeah,

that's right, feedback on resiliency. Yes. So this is actually quite interesting because I don't think that these graduate students who work as teaching assistants we do a lot of time. They spend time grading exams for profits, or they'll be working in engineering labs or that kind of thing with all undergraduate students. Until this workshop, it seems that they hadn't really thought about what was the impact of their rating or their comments, either written or verbal, to these

undergraduate students. They didn't seem to think about how the students who's hearing the feedback may in fact be reacting to it. Is it going to help them learn anything? Are they simply going to just shut down because they've been,

in effect scolded by a bad grade? And so I got them to start thinking about character strengths, their own character strengths, and what does it mean to lead from those character strengths when they're giving feedback to whoever they're teaching, and then at the same time to consider that all of the students that they're working with, who they may never even meet, also have strengths that they can notice

in their grading. So it's like that of Yin Yang idea, where are you only going to comment on the mistakes? So are you also going to acknowledge really good things that are happening in the essay or in a project that you're grading. And so it was really helping them to try to think about their resilience and the resilience of the people they're teaching are equally important. And the growth mindset is much more likely to be as a

result of feedback. That's like, for example, sandwiched. So you give good feedback, then you do a critique, and then you do a summary of good feedback again, and so it gets delivered in such a way that the person can truly take it in good. How many workshops are there for tha's like that in this country. I don't know. I mean I just kind of made it up myself. I've ran it once and then they asked me to do it again because more students were interested. So I'm

hoping to run it more often. And this is what I mean by the infecting the hive notion. So if I get grad students beginning to think about giving feedback differently, even if I've never spoken to the professors with whom they're working, that might actually trickle up, and at the same time the students that they're grading, it'll trickle down.

And so I'm working at all levels of the university kind of simultaneously and hoping that we're going to reach some kind of critical mass where people are going to start talking about developing curriculum in some way that is going to be supporting growth mindset, that's going to be supporting positive characteristics, learning good habits, all kinds of things from positive psyche that I can see applying to higher education. Yeah, I can as well. And you've also done a workshop

for grad students on culturing optimism. Is that right? That's right. So I've taken Martin Seldman's work I'm Unlearned Optimism, and I've kind of created this a series of six questions that are kind of designed to help an individual flip from a pessimistic to an optimistic frame, be in a positive situation or a good situation or a bad situation. Because we know that you can be an optimist when something good happens, and you can be an optimist when

something bad happens. Similarly with pessimism, and so they then practice these questions and it helps shift the mindset. In fact, down the hall the other day at the university and someone who took a workshop of mine came up to me and said, you know, this resilience model really seems

to make a difference for me. And when I asked why, she told me that she wrote a letter to someone, a gratitude letter to who she was feeling grateful towards but had never expressed it, and had a transformative experience with this individual, who was actually her father, and it changed their relationship and he passed on fairly shortly afterwards, a few weeks later, and she told me that she was so grateful that she had done that letter because she now feels that she can carry her father in

a totally different way in her memory because of what they were able to talk about as a result of writing this letter of gratitude. And then she talked about how the optimism piece of the trainee helped her through the funeral and the family dynamics and everything else that has happened because she was able to shift out of a kind of a default pessimistic frame of reference and

move into an optimistic one. How do you define optimism, Well, it's really defined by others, particularly Martin Seligman, as the capacity to explain what things happen to you from a particular frame of reference. And the frame of reference if an optimist would say, when something good happens is that I played a role in making that good thing happen,

and this is going to be permanent and pervasive. And when something bad happens, but you see it more as something like bad luck, not so personally attributed, and also something that's going to be very situation specific and temporary. And so the way you explain those events in your life is integral to resilience because it helps you have enough energy to say, Okay, how am I going to transform this experience into something else? How am I going to make this bad thing temporary? How am I going

to make this bad thing situation specific? Who else is responsible for what this bad thing is? Not just me? And then if you factor in self compassion, which is forgiving yourself being in the messy situation in the first place, you're moving much closer towards resilience. So do you think that definition can ever lead to people not taking full

responsibility for their actions. No, that's true. But my experience has told me that people who think from a pessimistic explanatory style, they tend to be so good at blaming themselves that alleviating some of that burden is a good idea. It's not that they're going to take no responsibility for what I'm wrong. I'm just suggesting share the responsibility, lift the burden a little bit from your own self, and see are there circumstances outside my control that contributed to

the situation? For example, that's one question you can ask yourself. Or are there other people who played a role in this? And what I also say is this is your inside voice. So this is not something that you're supposed to walk around talking to other people about, but it is what you are. It's the script that you can say to yourself when you're really stuck in the mug and things have gone wrong and you're trying to figure out what

to do next. So self recrimination rarely helpful in that context, right, And there's yeah, that's right. There's certainly a difference between beating yourself up over something and taking responsibility. You can still some would argue that you know some philosophies like stoicism, perhaps would argue that, you know, it's good to have radical responsibility for all your actions, you know, for everything you do, to just to say, to recognize that you

have control of the situation. Yeah, so it gets tricky, you know. Optimism is one of those things, like you know, sometimes he defines it as and I like it better when he defines it as kind of like earned optimism, like you have hope for the future because you are confident that you have successes in the past with it, So it's kind of a more self efficacy. I think I prefer that definition of it. I haven't heard that before, and I really like it. The notion of earning the optimism. Yeah, yeah,

that's great. But I also think that there's a difference between kind of self recrimination blaming yourself for whatever has happened, even if you had no control in the first place. That's where I've seen the biggest contributed to pessimism is to blame yourself for things that go wrong and give yourself no credit for the things that are going well right right right. Both of them leave you stranded with nothing to work with. Yeah, I think that's quite right.

You also do a lot of work with using character strengths as part of resiliency. We haven't talked about that yet in the workplace, right, I mean, haven't you been helping retail management? Yes? Yes, yeah. So I went into a retail management course that's a fourth year course. The students are graduating and I guess three or four months from now, and this course is really designed to help

them figure out their next step in a career. And so I came in to help them look at how do their own self knowledge about what their character strengths are? What are character strengths In the first place, I had them do the via Signature Strengths survey. I also had them do the kind of three sixty where they ask five people in their lives what they think their character strengths are. So it's a way of trying to see how is the world mirroring what you know about yourself?

Are you being reflected actor really or not? And then that was before I even walked in the room. And then when we did the workshop, it was talking about how do you present yourself in the best light, for example, in a job interview or when you're going for a promotion, when you've just started out, you know, and you've been working for a year or so. Talking about being well organized or I'm a hard worker will only get you

so far. And a lot of people employers are interested really in what can they count on in these new employees. So it's the idea of how do you present yourself, Like do you come in and say, you know, I'm someone who has a ton of perseverance, and I have zest for life, and humor is my greatest strength, and so was compassionate. I mean, that's a completely different kind of conversation. You know, in the right match for a job, for example, in social work, that might be a great match.

Right in business maybe not so much. But what I wanted to do is to really help people start thinking about who they are in the world beyond what they've

been graded as. So you know, they're good at this task or that task in school, but who are they in a more three dimensional way, and then see that as how to begin to how that's how they introduce themselves to people, not saying these are my characters strings, but this is who I am, this is these are my values, this is what I believe in, And that becomes a much more interesting conversation and a much more competitive one. Yeah, it comes part of their identity right

and maybe helps fuel their passions as well. I like that. I like that. So lastly, I want to and I want to talk about the you know, you've really been applying this in lots of areas that have been really typically been applied. And another really interesting thing area you've applied it, I think is in the thesis supervisor supervisory relationship. I mean that's a very under developed, for what you know, area where we apply positive psychology to. Can you tell

me the work you've done with that, well? Sure. So the early work was as a clinician listening to graduate students who are stuck in very dysfunctional relationships with their thesis supervisors. And of course, as you know, it's years and sometimes it could be you know, I've had students come in in profound depressions that are definitely linked to an on going struggle within a power structure that they

have so little control. So I've had a lot of observations at the problem side of this and have you know, worked both address I've ad the depression of the anxiety or anything else, but also a lot of coaching around how do you negotiate things up the power lot? Right?

So out of that I started to think about what I now know more about in positive psychology, how can I help both graduate students and thesis supervisors, because sometimes the relationship is dysfunctional in the opposite direction to really develop a healthy working relationship in which they're both flourishing. Because really a visas supervisor is going to want their grad students to do well. It reflects on them as part of their job, and the grad student is completely

dependent on this supervisor to flourish in their career. So they both have a lot writing on it, right, And then in some professions it's like, you know, there's money connected to it, with grants and all of that. So I'm working on helping them begin to see, you know, how you give feedback and service of resilience, how you

create a contract to start with. So like the notion that having shared intellectual interest on a particular topic is necessary but not sufficient to choose a thesis supervisor, you have to have something more. You have to know more about each other. I think I think you have agreements around boundaries and parameters and expectations. I think sometimes there's exploitation where visis supervisor is really using their grad student for their own purposes and not so much to cultivate

the career of the student. And so then how do you assertively renegotiate those arrangements? And so I think building resilience in the graduate student can go a long way to help negotiate boundaries of that relationship so that it flourishes instead of it's being dysfunctional. I love that. I think that grad student well being is really undervalued, just proportionate to the amount of effort we put into undergraduates and their well being. I mean, grad students kind of

get ignored a lot. So all, I love all the work you're doing and I just want you to know that I support it wholeheartedly and thank you for being on the show. To me, thank you so much, Scott, it was a pleasure talking with you. Thanks for listening to The Psychology Podcast with Doctor Scott Barry Kaufman. I hope you found this episode just as thought for booking

and interesting as I did. If you'd like to read the show notes for this episode or hear past episodes, you can visit the Psychology Podcast dot com.