All right, welcome back, module two. This module's going to focus on cognitive approaches to resilience. We're really going to drill into strategies that you can use to build optimism and to build thinking that enables resilience. So that's where we're headed. Now the first thing we're going to look at is what I call thinking traps. Thinking traps is really a term I just made up. But it comes from two different lines of research. And what those lines of research focus on are kind of overly rigid patterns in thinking that can undercut our effectiveness. A lot of folks have helped us to identify what those overly rigid patterns are. These are leaders in the field of cognitive therapy. So let me tell you a little bit about their work and then we'll get to how I think about it from a resilience perspective. So we've already talked about Marty Seligman's work, my mentor, his work on explanatory style. Remember, explanatory style is how you explain the causes of the good and the bad things that happen to you. And explanatory style is kind of habitual and reflexive. It develops over time. And in Explanatory Style Theory, Seligman and colleagues focus on how some of us have overly rigid ways of explaining our successes and our setbacks. And so that's one line of research that we pulled on. Another line of research comes out of work of Dr Aaron Beck and his protege, Dr David Burns. So Dr Beck and Dr Burns are two of the leaders in the field of cognitive therapy. And what they helped us to understand is that many of us, particularly if we're a little run down and depleted, can make errors in logic. That's one of the terms that they use. Or have cognitive distortions. And both errors in logic and cognitive distortions are beliefs that we had that are inaccurate and are certainly counterproductive. They get in the way of mental health, they get in the way of problem solving, they can undercut successful relationships. And so what we've done, is we've taken the work from Dr Seligman and explanatory style. And we've taken the work of Drs Beck and Burns, errors in logic and cognitive distortions. And said what are the shared features in these different lines of work? Well, the shared feature is all of those researchers are looking at the ways in which our thinking can become overly rigid. And because it's overly rigid, what I mean by that is you enter a new situation and your thinking is almost on autopilot. Your habits of thinking are driving the way you're interpreting this current situation. And whether it's explanatory style, or errors in logic, or cognitive distortions, all of these overly rigid patterns in thinking can make it much harder for us to see our current situation accurately. Those habits of thinking can get in the way of problem solving because we're not seeing the situation as it is. We're bringing to the situation our old habits of thinking, and they can undercut our ability to bounce back. Because you'll see, as we explore these in more detail, these thinking traps, as I call them, can get in our way of having productive emotion in a situation. So thinking traps, overly rigid patterns in thinking that can get in our way of resilience and well-being. All right, well, some of you might be asking why are we spending so much time thinking about our thinking. Well, there's a foundational principle that's really important for us to kind of just nail right now. And in fact, I've already talked about it when we were speaking about optimism. But that foundational principle is that our thoughts, so how we think, drives our emotions, our behaviors, our physiology. Now, from the perspective of cognitive therapy, you might be familiar with the work of Albert Ellis, who talked about the ABC Model. A stands for activating events, the things that happened to you, the trigger. B stands for your beliefs, what you're saying to yourself about that situation, that activating event. And C stands for consequences, the emotions and reactions. And what Albert Ellis taught us is that it's not the activating event that determines what we feel and what we do. It's what we say to ourselves, our beliefs, our thoughts about the situation that impacts how we feel, what we do, even our physiology. So the reason we're spending so much time thinking about our thinking in a course on resilience is that, look, we can't always control the stuff that happens to us. But what we can have more control over is our interpretations, our thoughts. And remember back in module one, we said one of the variables that really impacts one's level of resilience is mental agility. Is being able to look at situations from multiple perspectives, so that you're assessing things accurately and productively. And these thinking traps are going to get in the way of mental agility. So we're going to talk about the thinking traps, and then I'm going to teach you some strategies for challenging these old habits of thinking. So you get more mental agility, you're enhancing your self-regulation, you're regulating your thoughts, and that's going to give you greater resilience. Okay, our thoughts drive how we feel, our emotions. They drive our behaviors and they drive our physiology. So just to sort of put some flesh on those bones. Imagine that there's a fight that you just had with a loved one. And if what you say to yourself in that moment is this means we're going to get divorced, our relationship is over, I'm going to be miserable. Those thoughts are going to clearly impact your emotions, are going to impact what you do, to also going to impact your body, what you feel. You're going to have more or less fight or flight response based on how you're interpreting a situation. So let's start by defining the five thinking traps. And after I define it, I don't want this just to be sort of me talking at you with these definitions. I really want you to have the opportunity to kind of hear how these thinking traps influence our in-the-moment thoughts, what we're saying to ourself just as a stressful situation unfolds. And so after I define one of the thinking traps, then you're going to have the opportunity to click on two separate videos. Each of which will illustrate the thinking trap. So we've got some help from some of our friends to make this a little bit more vivid for you. So, you're going to see Dr Shannon Paoletti portray each of these five thinking traps. Just a word about Shannon. I've worked with Shannon for, I think, at this point it might be approaching 20 years. She is one of our primary instructors in our Resilience Training Program. So Shannon travels the globe teaching resilience skills to businesses, to soldiers in the army, and so forth. And then the other person you're going to see in these videos is Aaron Diamond Reivich, I've known him for 20 years because he's my son. And he's going to help portray what these thinking traps might sound like in the mind of a college student.
