Good Business_ Leadership, Flow, and the Making of Meaning - Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi [128]
Of these three factors, the third one is the most relevant to our purposes. External supports by themselves are not that effective in mitigating stress. They tend to help only those who can help themselves. And psychological resources are largely outside our control. It is difficult to become much smarter, or much more outgoing, than one was at birth. But how we cope is both the most important factor in determining what effects stress will have and the most flexible resource, the one most under our personal control.
There are two main ways people respond to stress. The positive response is called a “mature defense” by George Vaillant, a psychiatrist who has studied the lives of successful and relatively unsuccessful Harvard graduates over a period of about thirty years; others call it “transformational coping.” The negative response to stress would be a “neurotic defense” or “regressive coping,” according to these models.
To illustrate the difference between them, let us take the example of Jim, a fictitious financial analyst who has just been fired from a comfortable job at age forty. Losing one’s job is reckoned to be about midpoint in the severity of life stresses; its impact varies, of course, with a person’s age and skills, the amount of his savings, and the conditions of the labor market. Confronted with this unpleasant event, Jim can take one of two opposite courses of action. He can withdraw into himself, sleep late, deny what has happened, and avoid thinking about it. He can also discharge his frustration by turning against his family and friends, or disguise it by starting to drink more than usual. All these would be examples of regressive coping, or immature defenses.
Or Jim can keep his cool by suppressing temporarily his feelings of anger and fear, analyzing the problem logically, and reassessing his priorities. Afterward he might redefine what the problem is, so that he can solve it more easily—for instance, by deciding to move to a place where his skills are more in demand, or by retraining himself and acquiring the skills for a new job. If he takes this course, he would be using mature defenses, or transformational coping.
Few people rely on only one or the other strategy exclusively. It is more likely that Jim would get drunk the first night; have a fight with his wife, who had been telling him for years that his job was lousy; and then the following morning, or the week after, he would simmer down and start figuring out what to do next. But people do differ in their abilities to use one or the other strategy. The paraplegic who became a champion archer, or the blind chess master, visited by misfortunes so intense that they are off the scale of stressful life events, are examples of individuals who have mastered transformational coping. Others, however, when confronted by much less intense levels of stress, might give up and respond by scaling down the complexity of their lives forever.
The ability to take misfortune and make something good come of it is a very rare gift. Those who possess it are called “survivors,” and are said to have “resilience,” or “courage.” Whatever we call them, it is generally understood that they are exceptional people who have overcome great hardships, and have surmounted obstacles that would daunt most men and women. In fact, when average people are asked to name the individuals they admire the most, and to explain why these men and women are admired, courage and the ability to overcome hardship are the qualities most often mentioned as a reason for admiration. As Francis Bacon remarked, quoting from a speech by the Stoic philosopher Seneca, “The good things which belong to prosperity are to be wished, but the good things that belong to adversity are to be admired.”
In one of our studies the list of admired persons included an old lady who, despite