1.12 Personal Highlight: Lucy Hone

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From the course by University of Pennsylvania

Positive Psychology: Resilience Skills

859 ratings

University of Pennsylvania

Positive Psychology: Resilience Skills

859 ratings

Course 4 of 5 in the Specialization Foundations of Positive Psychology

Learn how to incorporate resilience interventions into your personal and professional life with Dr. Karen Reivich. In this course, you are exposed to the foundational research in resilience, including protective factors such as mental agility and optimism. Several types of resilience interventions are explored including cognitive strategies; strategies to manage anxiety and increase positive emotions such as gratitude; and a critical relationship enhancement skill. Throughout the course, you will hear examples of individuals using resilience skills in their personal and professional lives. Suggested prerequisites: Positive Psychology: Martin E. P. Seligman’s Visionary Science, Positive Psychology: Applications and Interventions and Positive Psychology: Character, Grit & Research Methods.

From the lesson

Resilience and Optimism

In this module, you will learn the definition of resilience and understand the protective factors that make one resilient. You will differentiate between helplessness and mastery orientations, and understand the thinking styles underlying each. You will summarize major outcomes of optimism, and the mediators of those outcomes, as well as assess your own levels of optimism, using a questionnaire. Finally, you will hear about personal and organizational outcomes of optimism, and will be able to apply these concepts to your own life.

1.6 Introduction to Optimism and Optimism Definitions7:51

1.7 Benefits of Optimism13:03

1.8 What Optimists Do Differently12:55

1.9 Optimism Activity: Pursuit of Happyness Video13:07

1.10 Organizational Highlight: Sam Presti on Optimism2:27

1.11 Organizational Highlight: Maureen Rush2:17

1.12 Personal Highlight: Lucy Hone7:12

1.13 Summary of Week 1 and Preview of Week 22:27

Meet the Instructors

Karen Reivich, Ph.D.
Director of Resilience Training Services
Positive Psychology Center

[MUSIC]

We're now going to hear from Lucy Hone.

Dr. Hone is a resilience researcher.

She also was one of my students in our Master of

Applied Positive Psychology Program here at Penn.

She's from New Zealand, and

she's going to talk to you about resilient grieving.

Few years ago, her daughter, Abi, was tragically killed in a car accident.

And through that devastating loss,

Lucy explored what it takes to grieve resiliently.

She dove into all that was known about grieving, and

discovered that for her, what was known was missing

some important things in her own grief process.

And so, Lucy has written a book called, What Abi Taught Us,

that's the title if you buy the book in New Zealand.

If you buy the book here in the US, it's called resilient grieving,

How to Live with Loss that Changes Everything.

And in this book, Lucy talks about her own experience, grieving the loss of Abi.

Her family's experience grieving the loss of Abi.

And she gives us a practical guide to help us think

about what resilient grieving looks like.

And so you're going to hear in this segment Dr. Hone talk about the importance

of identifying what you can control versus what you can't control.

>> Hi, everyone from New Zealand.

So my name is Dr. Lucy Hone, and

I work at the Human Potential Center out of AUT in Auckland.

I actually live in Christchurch.

And I'm talking to you today because two and a half years ago

I got that dreadful phone call from the police saying they were coming to see us.

And to tell us that our daughter, 12-year-old little girl,

beautiful Abi, had been killed in a tragic road accident.

Where a driver had just driven straight through a stop sign and

killed Abi along with her best friend, and Ella's mom Sully,

who was a really dear friend of mine as well.

So, we lost all three of them in that fraction of a second.

So, as anyone will tell you who has experienced that phone call,

your life stops and spins and you get all those physical sensations.

And I remember thinking that my life path-forked at that moment,

and I could see where I thought my life had been heading, and

I could see my new life path.

So really, since that day, have become really fascinated

and sort of I'm developing this notion of resilient grieving.

We decided, my husband Trevor and I, right from the outset,

we decided that we weren't going to blame the driver.

That no goods would come for us in blaming the driver.

We were on a complete survival mission in those first few weeks, and

I just knew instinctively that blaming the driver was a red herring,

he's a bit part in this.

I've always felt sorry for him actually.

It was a mistake, we all make mistakes.

It's a terribly costly mistake, but

blaming him was only going to drag me down.

And I wanted to really focus my energy and

my attention on the things that we can change, not the things that we can't.

So we work really hard on that too, and

thinking about really the choices that we had to make,

the things that we could do, and just ignoring the bits that we couldn't.

We work really hard at not being victims, so we decided not to go to his trial.

He went to court, and we intentionally, instead,

decided to drive straight past the courtroom.

And I can picture it now, seeing all the media outside the courtroom.

It was a really big, and he was a foreign driver, sadly, and so

there was a lot of media attention on that.

And because we have a few incidents and

deaths in New Zealand with foreign drivers, not knowing our silly roads.

But we decided to drive straight past the courtroom and we went instead to our sons'

schools, and spent time, that time specifically,

the time that he was in the courtroom, talking to their teachers instead.

Choosing to focus our attention on the things that we could do.

So I think I've always had this little voice in my head that says choose life,

not death.

I felt we could have just got sucked down into a vortex of blame and

pain and misery.

And that wasn't going to help us as a family, and

it wasn't going to help our boys.

This issue of choice, I think I didn't at the beginning.

No, that's not right, I think I did right from the beginning, I think,

we've got to do this.

There is a way, we have a choice over this.

Right, actually, now that I think about it from those very first moments,

I remember thinking, wow, jeepers.

And really what I was thinking was,

we going to have to choose that hard work again and again and again.

And that is how it, that is how it feels.

It isn't the life, obviously, that I would have chosen.

I'd go as far as to say, it's really not the life I

want to live but I don't have a choice in that, and here I am.

So all I can do is choose the little things

that can make it a little bit better each day.

So whether that is dragging myself out of bed in the morning and going for a walk,

whether it is phoning a friend, phoning my sister for a laugh.

She makes me laugh more than anyone else.

And whatever it is, the strategies that really I have found help me.

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