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