Brain Fact Friday on "Building Resilience: A Pathway for Inner Peace, Well-Being and Happiness."

Welcome back to the Neuroscience Meets Social and Emotional Learning Podcast, for Brain Fact Friday and episode #126 on Building Resilience: A Pathway for Inner Peace, Well-Being and Happiness. If you are listening to this episode on iTunes, click here to see the images in the show notes.  This week’s Brain Fact Friday will take a closer look at resiliency, with some simple strategies that you can implement immediately, for improved results in your personal and professional life by accessing this powerful inner resource that will allow you to walk confidently, especially, on uneven ground. Rick Hanson, Ph.D., a psychologist, senior fellow of the Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley and New York Times best-selling author is so passionate about this topic, that he wrote an entire book on it, called Resilient: How to Grow an Unshakable Core of Calm, Strength and Happiness.[i] “If we are going to have lasting well-being in a changing world, we’ve got to be resilient. To be resilient, we’ve got to have inner resources.” (Rick Hanson, Talks at Google)[ii] In Today’s Brain Fact Friday we will cover: What does it mean to be resilient? How can we build it in ourselves and others? And how does it create a sense of well-being, an inner sense of peace and happiness? Welcome back, I'm Andrea Samadi, a former educator who has been fascinated with understanding the science behind high performance strategies in schools, sports and the workplace for the past 20 years. If you have been listening to our podcast for some time, you will know that we’ve uncovered that if we want to improve our social and emotional skills, and experience success in our work and personal lives, it all begins with an understanding of our brain. We started Brain Fact Fridays last month to dive a bit deeper into some of top brain strategies we uncover in our interviews, or weekly episodes and from the feedback I have heard, these short episodes are helpful for learning about the brain in quick, easy to digest lessons, so we will continue with Brain Fact Fridays and I do appreciate the feedback! Getting back to today’s BRAIN FACT: DID YOU KNOW: That Mindfulness[iii] leaves a lasting impact on our brain (Rick Hanson) and when we practice mindfulness, we become more compassionate, resilient, and more skillful with others. Rick Hanson quotes “If the mind is like a sailboat, growing inner resources is like strengthening and lengthening its keel. Then you can live more boldly.  Trusting you can explore and enjoy the deeper waters of life and handle any storms that come your way.” I first started to take a closer look at resiliency when I interviewed Horacio Sanchez on episode #74[iv] where Horacio, who named his company, Resiliency Inc[v] defined Resiliency as “a collection of protective risk factors that you have in your life.” He explains how there are some factors we are born with, and others come in through childhood, family, school, life events and social experiences. Horacio further explains that “if you have little risk, it takes less to be resilient. But—if you have a lot of risk, it takes a lot more protective factors to offset the scale.”  This is why two people can possibly respond in two completely different ways after a traumatic experience. One person walks away, and recovers quickly, while the other has a completely different outcome, and needs more assistance. With resiliency, we can overcome adversity or difficulty and have good outcomes in our life, but you can see why not everyone is born with exactly the same protective factors needed, so we don’t all have the same levels of resiliency. Horacio mentioned that “25% of the population are naturally resilient” so his work focused on instilling resiliency in those who were not naturally resilient due to the number of risk factors associated to them. This is what I love about this inner resource—that it can be instilled in others, or that we can build our own levels of resiliency, our own psy