The Third Way

The Challenge of Change is explicitly described as a resilience training programme.  Conventionally, resilience is thought of as a measure of adaptability and recovery, illustrated by the story of the oak and the reed struck by a storm: where the mighty but inflexible oak is felled, the reed bends in the wind and returns to the upright when the storm recedes. 

Like all metaphors the story is only a partial truth.  In practical terms, the storm might be a popular current trend or opinion with which you disagree.  Being a reed might imply going along with the majority against your better judgement.  Acting like an oak might lead to doggedly maintaining your position, despite it being clearly wrong.

The difficulty here is thinking in twos, either reed or oak.  There is a third point, not simply somewhere along the continuum from malleable to rigid, but independent of it.  For example, after considered reflection you might well change your mind about the issue.  On the other hand, you might conclude that your view is correct, and holding to your principles is just as important as embracing change.  Occupying the third point means not being blindly identified with one or the other pole but making an informed choice: acting from a clear sense of one’s own values, being steadfast when the circumstance requires it but adapting when that’s more appropriate.

From the perspective of the Challenge of Change, developing this frame of mind depends on our ability to implement especially the third and fourth steps in the training programme: becoming detached and letting go.  Contrary to what the word might suggest, detachment is not aloofness, but rather the ability to maintain perspective, to not turn molehills into mountains or to be drawn in by the clamour of new trends. 

It isn’t easy to modify established habitual behaviour, which requires another facet of resilience: continuing to pursue a goal, despite seeming sometimes to take two steps forward and one back.  Training participants often say how they wished they’d learned about resilience when they were young, at a time when their habitual behaviour might more easily be modified.  A recent podcast hosted by a Challenge of Change accreditee, Victoria Soell, gives encouraging evidence that this is indeed happening in some schools.  

She was in conversation with Timothy Thomas, Head of School at the Munich International School in Germany, where teachers encourage what he calls ‘productive struggle’.  He notes how parents are increasingly concerned to make things easier for their children by protecting them from struggle, but important and worthwhile things require a sustained effort to learn.  In passing, Timothy highlights the potential risk of AI for resilience: taking the effort out of really discovering the value of those things. 

Sustained effort requires discipline, which might conjure up the image of a tyrannical martinet.  Instead, Timothy makes the case for developing resilience through optimistic but realistic encouragement to persevere, more ‘if at first you don’t succeed, try again’ than a glib notion like ‘no gain without pain’. 

The four steps in the Challenge of Change – waking up, controlling attention, becoming detached, and letting go – are sequential.  Only when you wake up from the dream of waking sleep or the nightmare of rumination do you have the opportunity to control your attention and gain perspective.  Maintaining perspective allows the final step of letting go by showing the difference between what’s helpful and what isn’t, between what should be persevered with and what serves as an obstacle. 

What we let go of is not the task but the rumination that might come with it.  Rumination not only undermines performance but also compromises health and well-being.  Resilience is illustrated in the training with the metaphor of balancing in the loft of the house of the mind, not being sucked back into the flood of ruminative thoughts passing below.  Resilience is a balancing act, reconciling the opposites of the oak and the reed.  The four steps in the programme offer the opportunity to do so, but will only work with sustained, resilient practise.

Note: If you’d like to listen to Victoria’s podcast, you can find it at:

https://open.spotify.com/episode/1uADSxck4PQ6CaHuaJQzpJ?si=H0CBYczvTra8c-ojA1_lRw&t=9

Accidents

‘They were meant for each other’.  Really?  The truth is that nobody is intended for anyone else: relationships happen by chance.  If you use a dating app you have some choice as to who you might want to meet, and however you end up meeting someone, you do have a choice as to whether or not to proceed with the relationship. 

In fact, limited choices aside, relationships – and hence any subsequent generations born of those relationships – are largely a matter of chance or accidental encounters.  When we think about the past it can appear to be a logical unfolding of events over which you had control, but just consider how much your path in life has depended on whether or not you took opportunities that were presented.  ‘If only I hadn’t….’; ‘I’m so glad I decided to…’.  

We often remind participants in the Challenge of Change Resilience Training® workshops that nothing is static: the one constant in life is change, much of it completely unpredictable.  Change is definitely a challenge, and a way of reframing the future is as a sequence of accidents waiting to happen.  

Resilience is the ability to adapt to these unpredictable changes.  They occur in every aspect of your life, and although the Challenge of Change programme is delivered in the context of corporate training, and aimed at helping people to be happy at work, the principles apply equally to life outside of work.  Indeed, during follow-up contact, a frequent comment is how much the programme has helped people deal with problems in all aspects of their lives.

Any change makes a demand, which is erroneously described as ‘good stress’.   Once you define stress properly – as ruminating about emotional upsets – there is no good stress.  Churning over upsets just leads to misery, and as our research has shown, it impacts significantly on our health and well-being.  Whenever there’s change there’s a demand to respond, which we label pressure, not stress.  Pressure is inevitable, and can be a great motivator.  The key benefit of the Challenge of Change is showing how to not transform that pressure into stress.

Describing the future as accidents waiting to happen can sound negative and depressing, but there is a different way of considering this.  It is self-evidently true that we have no way of knowing how things will change.  Where anxiety might arise is from trying to control what happens, and then being thrown when things don’t work out as you’d planned.  This is reflected in one of the measures in the psychometric Challenge of Change Profile®, called Perfect Control.  The combination of perfectionism and needing to be in control signalled by high scores on this scale incurs constant vigilance, and emotional upset when unrealistic expectations are not met.

Consider a simple work example: given the financial and time pressures we’re all under, how many things are done absolutely perfectly?  A better way of thinking about tasks is the threshold of added value, which is to continue improving on something until there is no longer any further gain from the additional time and effort spent.  High scorers on the scale just don’t see the threshold.

Planning is an entirely appropriate strategy, which we call reflection to distinguish it from negative rumination.  So too is learning from past errors, but it all depends on your frame of mind.  If your plan is based on one-right-way (usually my way!) you’re likely to score low on another of the Profile scales, called Flexibility.  Low scorers find it hard to adapt to unexpected change, and coupled with a high score on the Rumination scale this is a recipe for miserable churning.  The solution is to take the last two steps in the training: to become detached, which is to keep things in perspective, and to let go.

Appropriate humour is often a facilitator for doing so.  My colleague Nick Petrie offers a great example in our book, ‘Work Without Stress’.  He describes a company of driven individuals who sometimes ended up making molehills into mountains, until one of them might remind the team, ‘Guys, we make milk cartons!’  The ensuing laughter reinstates a proper perspective, and they can then get back on task.  Things remain to be done: what you let go of is not the task but the rumination that goes with losing perspective.

Our plans do often come to fruition, and past experience does inform the way we do things, but we equally distort the past and entertain unrealistic expectations that things will work out exactly as we intended.  Resilience is negotiating change without losing our balance, and resilience is a skill we can acquire and enhance through practise.  The four steps in the training programme provide the way to do so: being awake, maintaining control of our attention, keeping whatever happens in perspective, and letting go of pointless ruminative thinking.

Bell-Ringing

If you lined up a large random sample of people, ranging from the shortest at one end to the tallest at the other, you’d notice that most are clustered around the average height, with fewer and fewer people towards the shorter and taller ends.  You could then plot the distribution on a graph, with height in intervals of one centimetre along the horizontal axis and the number of people in each interval on the vertical axis.  Smoothing out the dots, the distribution would be more or less bell-shaped – hence the bell-curve.

The concept achieved notoriety with the publication of a controversial book in 1994, ‘The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life’, by Murray and Herrnstein.  The authors argued that IQ is predominantly genetic and unchangeable, which led them to echo (though without actually using the word) the long-discredited eugenic view that those with low IQs should be discouraged from reproducing and those with high IQs encouraged to do so. 

Even more controversial, they generalised the argument to endorse supposed differences between IQs of white and black Americans.  In fact, during the early part of the 20th century eugenic views were widespread, and it took the genocidal application of eugenics by the Nazi regime during the second World War to expose the idea as simple bigoted racism.  Since then, the principles of eugenics have resurfaced from time to time under the guise of ‘science’, but while they still find adherents they are robustly challenged.

Unfortunately, one consequence of the publication of Murray and Herrnstein’s book has been a kind of halo effect, where the distinction between specious theory and statistical distributions has become blurred.  Just as with height, many real-world features are in fact bell-curve distributed.  There are of course different distribution patterns, and the curve might not conform to a smooth bell shape, but in traits that are bell-curved there is a range between opposite extremes, with the majority grouped around the average or mean. 

More or less symmetrical bell distributions around the mean are called normal distributions, and normal distributions have unique properties that make them particularly advantageous for statistical data-analysis.  One of these features is that you can estimate how many people would score within specified distances above and below the mean.  Formally, this is expressed in standard deviations: for example, approximately 68% of the sample would fall within one standard deviation above and below the mean, and about 95% within two standard deviations.

The relevance of the bell-curve for the Challenge of Change Resilience Training® lies in the eight discrete scales comprising the psychometric Challenge of Change Profile®.  Scores on each scale range from 0 to 10, and all of them display approximately symmetric bell-curve distributions in random samples of people.  The magnitude of the score is particularly important for the scales we call ‘one-edged’, where for example either low scores (for Rumination) or high scores (for Detached Coping) are definitely preferable, but there is a preferred direction, high or low, for all of the scales. 

Scores on psychometric scales are always subject to various forms of bias.  For example, the longer the question is pondered the less reliable the answer will tend to be.  The first response that comes to mind is generally the most reliable, hence the encouragement to people to base their responses on that rather than trying to consider every possible variation in the situation described in the question.  Response bias is further minimised by the extent and sophistication of the statistics used to construct questionnaires, and an important feature of the Challenge of Change Profile is that the scales have all been subjected to lengthy and ongoing statistical analyses.  The validity of the scales has also been informally endorsed by the participants themselves, in their responses to anonymous end-of-course feedback questionnaires.  

A degree of caution is nonetheless required when interpreting the scores, and an advantage of the normal distributions is that appropriate cut-offs can be determined.  This allows ‘high’ and ‘low’ scores on the scales to be qualified: a high score isn’t just 10, but falls in the range from 8 – 10; a low score is in the range from 0 – 2.  By taking response bias into account, statistically-determined ranges help to guard against misinterpreting the results. Again based on distributions, the bell-curve for the Emotional Inhibition scale tends to be skewed towards comparatively higher scores for women than for men, so that more nuanced recommended score-ranges can be offered for this scale. 

The Challenge of Change Profile scales provide valid and reliable assessments of the habitual ways that people behave with regard to stress and resilience.  They measure a set of relatively stable, habitual behaviours rather than fixed biogenetic predispositions, and underpinning all of the scales is the evidence-based reassurance that, with dedicated practise of the training, scores on all eight scales do shift significantly towards the more favourable range.  The training programme shows clearly why these changes contribute to enhanced health and well-being, and offers a unique four-step process for making them happen.

Carpe Diem

Nothing is forever.  Everything – every plant, animal, planet, star – exists for a while and then passes.  ‘A while’ might range from a day for a mayfly to billions of years for a star, but pass they will.  As far as we can tell, only humans are obsessed with finding some way of contradicting the nature of things and living longer.  To what end?  The only justifiable motive would be if those extra years benefited others, but there’s little evidence for that.  Instead, it seems merely clinging for as long as possible to the temporary form that each of us calls ‘me’.  Prolonging such a life offers little more than an extended opportunity to shop.

A recent article in The Economist described these efforts to live longer, which in the case of one enthusiast entails rising daily at 5.00am, consuming 100 prescription medications and supplements, working out for over an hour, eating a calorie-controlled diet and fasting from 11.00am. No gain without pain, except that there’s only pain, no gain – try as you might, life for each of us will end.  The futility of it all might be merely diverting if it were not so desperately sad.

The Challenge of Change blogs revolve in one way or another around a corporate resilience training programme, so questions about ‘Life And The Universe’ might seem too deep and profound to be an appropriate topic.  However, the Challenge of Change Resilience Training® is in principle about how life can best be lived.  The training focuses on living as much as possible in the here and now, regardless of how long or short the life might turn out to be, and it offers practical tools for avoiding one of the key factors that compromises well-being: feeling stressed.

The conventional view, that our stress is caused by other people or events, makes us victims of circumstances that we may have little opportunity to change.  In contrast, the training defines stress not as the property of events but as ruminating about emotional upsets.  Rumination is dedicated to salvaging self-esteem – in other words, attempting to put that same ‘me’ back on its pedestal.  A simple illustration is losing an argument with someone, but then repeatedly resurrecting the argument in your mind, but with you magically ending up winning each time.  Nothing changes the fact that you lost, and you’ve forgotten a simple principle of life: win some, lose some, which is unchanged by churning over it.  

To read this blog requires taking the first two steps in the training: waking up and controlling your attention, giving it intentionally to what you’re reading here and now.  Rumination traps us in the past and the future, and the resolution is offered by taking the last two steps in the training programme: regaining perspective by becoming detached, and letting go.  As you read the blog you might be assimilating the ideas into what you already know, which does mean going into the past, as well as perhaps thinking about how they might play a role in your life in the future.  Giving your attention intentionally to past and future in this way we call reflection, to distinguish it from the loss of control when attention has been hijacked by rumination.

Nobody is constantly awake, but with practise of the four Challenge of Change steps we’re able to be more awake and living in the present more of the time.  The training offers a simple strategy for coming into the present: to connect with our senses, which only work in the present.  Nothing can be seen or heard yesterday or tomorrow, except in our imagination, so connecting with your senses will immediately bring presence of mind.  Intentional reflection is how we make sense of the world, and does require taking the past and future into account, but the only time that life is actually lived is now. 

False Positives

The diagnosis of ADHD in clinics and hospitals in the USA rose by 60% in just two years, from 2020 to 2022.  How is that possible?  One proposed reason is that it wasn’t sufficiently recognised, so the increase can be attributed to greater diagnostic accuracy.  Wider awareness would have had a particularly marked effect amongst marginalised groups, where it might have been even less recognised.  However, a different view, and one gaining traction, is that there isn’t a disorder to be diagnosed – that it isn’t so much a disorder as a difference being promoted as a disorder.  

ADHD depends for legitimacy as a disorder on the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), currently in its 5th revision.  The manual has been widely criticised precisely because it is predicated on disorders – it confers a stamp of approval on clusters of behaviours by medicalising them.  As a prominent critic has pointed out, in contrast to conventional medical definitions the diagnoses described by the DSM ‘are based on a consensus about clusters of clinical symptoms, not any objective laboratory measure’ (Thomas Insel, Director, NIMH).

ADHD is bracketed with a variety of behaviours generically labelled ‘neurodivergent’, which in principle offers an opportunity to represent these behaviours as a distribution rather than a diagnostic category.  However, neurodivergence has in its turn been placed firmly in the category of a neurological disorder.  The claim that 15% of the UK population is neurodivergent means that more than one in seven people are neurologically disordered, but while many adults so ‘diagnosed’ are relieved to have an explanation for their different behaviour, how divergent are they, and divergent from whom?  How different from those whose behaviour falls between 15% and 50% of the population?  It would simply be a matter of degree, not a step-changed category.

There is no doubt that in circumstances such as a class full of schoolchildren, even a single inattentive, over-active and impulsive one can be extremely disruptive, but consider this in a different context: these are also characteristic behaviours of extraverts.  Should we consider extraversion a disorder?  The extraversion-introversion continuum is best explained as a function of a neuroscience model titled stimulus intensity modulation, which argues that extraverts have relatively lower levels of resting (or basal) cortical arousal compared to introverts.  Extraverts’ stimulus-seeking behaviour is intended to raise basal arousal to optimal levels, and the model has been validated using objective physiological evidence such as responsiveness to anaesthetic induction. 

Applying the model to ADHD, it helps to make sense of the positive effects of methylphenidate as a pharmacological treatment: the drug acts as a stimulant, which paradoxically reduces overt disruptive behaviour.  Perhaps the real reason for an over-diagnosis of ADHD is a consequence of including those whose behaviour tends towards the extraverted end of a normal distribution.  However, extraversion doesn’t comprise an impairment.  Indeed, in many social circumstances it might even be an advantage, so deciding whether or not someone is suffering from ADHD might best be clarified by considering the degree to which it impairs their everyday lives.  Though impairment is an imprecise and subjective judgement rather than offering an objective laboratory measure, it might allow a clearer focus of resources on those in genuine need.

Imprecise definitions are not unique to the field of ADHD, and there are clear parallels in psychological perspectives on stress.  For example, the incidence of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) following exposure to trauma has been quoted as up to 60%, but how is the diagnosis arrived at?  Is it the frequency with which symptoms such as flashbacks occur, or their intensity?  How many symptoms are required to determine the disorder?  Do predisposing factors play a role, and how do they interact with exposure?  As noted in an earlier blog (‘Righting Wrongs’), much of the research in psychology fails to meet conventional scientific criteria, and in fact, more carefully controlled studies indicate that the incidence of PTSD is more likely between three and five percent. 

As we acknowledged in an earlier blog (‘Carried Over the Threshold’), this is not in any way to minimise the suffering of the victims of PTSD, any more than an attempt to dismiss the social and behavioural difficulties that people thought to be neurodivergent might experience.  Rather, it is questioning the vague and imprecise way in which they are defined and measured, which inevitably leads to unreliable conclusions.  The threshold referred to in the earlier blog is the notional point at which what we call everyday stress is transformed into PTSD.  Approached this way, PTSD lies towards the end of a distribution, and the degree of rumination about emotional upsets across the distribution offers a helpful metric.  

In the Challenge of Change programme, rumination – churning over what-ifs and if-onlys – is how stress is defined, and it forms a core characteristic across the whole distribution, irrespective of the threshold. Once the threshold is crossed, behaviours including rumination intensify and significantly impair sufferers’ functioning, and PTSD is best treated with intensive one-on-one counselling and appropriate drug therapies.  By contrast, the Challenge of Change training provides an integrated series of steps aimed at modifying ruminative behaviour in response to everyday pressures, and the training begins by changing the language that’s used: instead of drawing a misleading distinction between so-called ‘good’ and ‘bad’ stress, we distinguish between pressure and stress. 

Pressure is simply a demand to perform.  The intensity of the pressure will fluctuate, but since change is the one constant in life, we’re continuously subjected to pressure: there is almost always something to be done!  An important first step is to avoid describing this natural pressure that arises in everyday life as stress.  Walk into any corporate office and you’ll hear exasperated proclamations about how stressed people are.  Most likely, all that’s happened is that pressure has increased.  In the absence of rumination it remains pressure, but proclaim stress often enough and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.  

*  Note: Victoria has been accredited in both the CoC Resilience and Dream Team training programmes, and in view of her expertise and experience in the field of ADHD she was invited to collaborate on this blog.