A recent TED talk by Kelly McGonigal was an opportunity to demonstrate that the earth is not after all flat.  It was an opportunity missed – instead the talk ended up merely adding to the accumulated misinformation about stress.

The research programme that underpins the Challenge of Change Resilience programme was based on the fundamental question in science – what's wrong?  We quickly discovered that in the context of stress and stress management, the answer is pretty well everything.  What's needed is a paradigm shift.   There was a time when people were convinced the earth was flat, and despite evidence to the contrary, the shift from a flat-earth to a round-earth paradigm took a long time.  So it would seem with stress management too: ideas like life-events as a cause of stress have been so endorsed by psychologists that people continue to think they're true.  The evidence tells you otherwise: for any so-called 'stressful job' there'll be people who enjoy it and don't find it at all stressful. 

Think how much more effective your company could be if you could identify the best potential candidates for leadership and then fast-track them with training to enhance their skills.  The question, of course, is what these skills might be.  What is it that makes an effective manager?  And are the required skills 'hard-wired', or can they be learned through appropriate training?  These may not be million-dollar questions, but they probably get fairly close to it!

The first two steps in the Challenge of Change Resilience programme are waking up and controlling attention, and the key to understanding what the programme is about is attention.  Using a simple example, a piece of work arriving on your table is an event, and that event provides information through your senses about what needs to be done.  You then process the information and give attention.  When you attend to something it progresses, becoming a new event with new information, new processing, and new attention. 

Being awake is about having presence of mind, which means that your mind is in the present.  The practice of presence of mind is not to be in the present exclusively, however – we're constantly making sense of the world by moving between past, present and future.  The question is whether this is done intentionally or not.  In the Challenge of Change resilience programme, intentionally giving attention to the past or the future is called reflection, while waking sleep is having attention snatched away.  Reflection requires detachment, which means being able to maintain perspective, and the trap inherent in this process is attachment.  A detached view of the past allows you to learn from experience, and a detached view of the future provides scenarios that can be explored for their likely implications.  An attached view of past and future leads to regrets, guilt, and expectations based on hope or fear.