Show Notes – Lucy Hone

Personal definition of resilience – Professor Karen Reivich – resilience is how we cope and how we steer through challenges and adversity but it's also about learning from them.  She has removed the words bounced back from the definition as she hasn't felt bouncy in the last few years.

The capacity for resilience thankfully resides in all of us.  It isn't a fixed trait.  It is a combination of the way we choose to think and act and the way we can use our strengths and skills and relationships to support us in times of need. 

Resilience is built by how you deal with what happens to you. 

There is an ideal number of events that happen to you before it becomes detrimental. 

Talked about the impact of the earthquakes on the Christchurch community.

The education sector in Christchurch has changed for the better in many ways.  Part of a MOE funded community of practice with secondary schools in Christchurch at the moment.  This is a yearlong pilot project.  Four representatives from every single secondary school.  All sharing what works for wellbeing.  There is a shift of post traumatic growth within the city that we realise we have to do things differently.  People have learned to work together in an unprecedented fashion.

MOE talking about promoting resilience in our schools, putting wellbeing first.  We would like to see this community of practice rolled out to other regions in New Zealand.

Works internationally with colleagues all over the place who are promoting resilience in schools.  The first lesson we have learned is that you have to start with the staff.  Children have a fantastic BS monitor so if you don't buy into it at staff you can't pass that learning on to those you are teaching.  They talk a lot about health by stealth.  It is going to take a cohort to see any significant change. 

Really important to involve the parents in the learning.  It has to be whole school well-being.  You can't have a system shift unless you are addressing every aspect of the system.  They run introductory sessions for parents called Positive Psychology 101.  Whanau (family) engagement is key.

Hypothesis – she was better able to adapt to Abi's loss because she had these tools at her fingertips because she'd had her academic training and then she'd had professional practice in helping organisation in the post-earthquake environment.  How to foster relationships when I needed them most and how not to fall into common thinking traps that make us alienate us from those relationships.  She would describe it as latent knowledge. 

Trauma and tragedy, adversity, tragedy and loss do not discriminate – they happen to us all.  It is really important that we equip the whole population to help themselves.  

The free range childhoods that we had definitiately contributes to your resilience.  Being able to fail, being able to fall, bruise your ego, have relatioships that are testing.  Those things do actually boost our resilience over time.  We learn from struggle.  As parents we don't like to see our children struggle.  But she also knows that looking at all the research, and anecdotal evidence, that if you mop up after them, and clear the way of any obstacles, that doesn't develop robust children who are able to cope.  It is really important to let your children to fail otherwise we create fragile thoroughbreds. 

Carol Dweck's - growth mindset.  You Tube videos about this subject.

Believing that you are born brilliant reduces people's willingness to put themselves out there and at risk because they fear they are going to expose themselves as not being perfect.

"Next stop the five stages of grief…"  Grief experts and literature they were provided with at the time of Abi's death were so passive in tone.  If felt we told to just sit there and wait.  All of my training stood at odds with that; focusing your attention on what you can change and accepting as best you can the things that you can't change.  She wanted to bring positive psychology to the bereavement context.  Parental bereavement is known as being the worst type of bereavement.  You are learning to relive in an entirely new landscape.  She didn't want to remove grief but she wanted to cope.  And she wanted to know she was doing everything she possibly could to ease who own and her families process through that loss.  We discovered you can live and grieve simultaneously.  It is so important that people are told that there are ways of thinking and ways of behaving that will support them through bereavement.  And these are pretty simple strategies. 

All of wellbeing and resilience is about trying things for yourselves.  Ask yourself "is whatever I'm doing helping or harming me towards whatever goal is important to me?"

We expect people to be mind readers especially in grief.  She wrote a whole chapter in her book on how to help the bereaved.

One tool for maintaining resilience – mantra "accept the good."  It teaches her to choose what she focuses on.  You have got to notice the good.  We have a negativity bias so we really have to tune into the good.  Find your own language that works for you.