1: Super Bowl XLIX. Closing seconds…  

The Seattle Seahawks have the ball on the one-yard line. All they need to do is punch it in to score the winning touchdown. Seahawks head coach Pete Carroll calls for a passing play. The pass is intercepted.The Seahawks lose. Some sportswriters call it one of the worst calls in league history.

“Such judgmental comments can sometimes crush your morale and resilience,” writes Dr. … continue reading

1: VUCA stands for Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity.  

That’s our world. There are two ways we can show up.  

Option one? A reactive mindset. “We feel threatened with fear, stress, self-doubt, ego, and conflict; where an unconscious and reflexive series of protective responses can dominate our psyche and ripple through our actions, activating similar experiences in others that can instantly drain energy and fragment teams as well as families,” … continue reading

1: Imagine participating in a stressful group task where we compete with strangers in a mock job interview and tests of cognitive ability.  The study maximizes two aspects of stress: the pressure to perform and the threat of being compared with others, Kelly McGonigal shares in The Upside of Stress.

Immediately afterward, we play the Trust Game.  We are given $100.  The other player, a total stranger, is … continue reading

1: We’ve got it all wrong.

We’ve been taught that stress is bad for us.

This belief is harmful, Kelly McGonigal argues in The Upside of Stress: Why Stress Is Good for You, and How to Get Good at It: “The best way to manage stress isn’t to reduce or avoid it, but rather to rethink and even embrace it.”

The fight-or-flight survival instinct is part of our stress … continue reading

One of our challenges with stress is understanding exactly what it is.

We use the term stress both to describe a traffic delay and a death in the family. 

We say we are stressed when we feel busy, frustrated, anxious, or under pressure.  We might find ourselves “getting stressed out by email, politics, the news, the weather, or our growing to-do list,” Kelly McGonigal writes in The Upside of Stress… continue reading

In 1936, the Hungarian endocrinologist Hans Selye injected rats with a hormone from cow’s ovaries. Things did not go well.  The lab rats developed bleeding ulcers.  

Next, Hans injected the rats with a salt solution and a hormone isolated from a cow’s placenta. The rats developed the same symptoms.  Next up was an injection made from kidneys and spleens, Kelly McGonigal writes in her book The Upside of Stress.  

Same … continue reading

Are we approaching life with zest or avoiding it? Is our real goal hoping to avoid challenge and failure? Put another way: do we see obstacles as threats or as challenges to get better?

This week we’re looking at some of the lessons from Brian Johnson’s Optimize course. The big idea for today is: happy people are open to life’s experiences. Brian encourages us to adopt a playful attitude towards … continue reading