The Power of Resilience and Relationships
Dr’s Robert Brooks & Sam Goldstein have written a book called: “The Power of Resilience”. I will be discussing their book with an eye toward how this perspective can be applied to making your relationship stronger.
Bad, upsetting things happen in all of our lives and relationships. One of the main factors in having a strong connection with our partner is our ability to bounce back from difficult times. Brooks and Goldstein present two important concepts that influence our resiliency: Mindsets and Personal Scripts.
The authors use the term Mindsets to indicate that Mindsets are not fixed Brooks & Goldstein
maintain that we can change our Mindset. The features that the author’s have identified as positive mindsets are:
- Feeling in control of one’s life
- Knowing how to fortify ones “stress hardiness”
- Being empathetic
- Being an effective communicator
- Having realistic goals and expectations
- Having good problem solving skills
- Learning from both success and failures
- Being compassionate
- Having thoughtful values
- Feeling special without feeling self centered
A place to start to see if how resilient you are according to Brooks & Goldstein is to rate your relationship on a scale of 1 to 10 on each of the above features and add up the results to see what grade you would give the resiliency of your relationship.
At the end of the book the authors present questions for you to answer to get a better understanding about yourself and how you can improve your personal resiliency which can, with a little tweaking also apply to your relationship.
The next blog will relate to the second area that Brooks & Goldstein relate to, our personal scripts and what stories do we tell ourselves based on our past and how that effects our ability to have a solid connection with our partner.