🙏#11: The Resilience Project by Hugh van Cuylenburg - Book Summary & Key Takeaways
What are the 3 core principles to maximise mental wellbeing? What is Negativity Bias and how do we combat it? What are the daily practices we can implement for our happiness? How do we Do The Work?
👋 Hello courageous people! Welcome to the eleventh edition of the newsletter!
🙋♀️ Confession time: this week’s book was supposed to be 📚 In The Realm Of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters With Addiction 🖋 by Gabor Maté, BUT what I didn’t realise when I selected it was that it is a five hundred page behemoth 🤯. So in order to buy myself more time to get through it, it will feature in next week’s newsletter.
This week, our featured book (at a much more palatable 196 pages 🤪) is 📚 The Resilience Project: Finding Happiness Through Gratitude, Empathy and Mindfulness 🖋 by Hugh van Cuylenburg.
It focuses on Positive Psychology, which I believe in wholeheartedly and I have experienced its tremendous effects. However, I will issue a caveat:
If someone told me 3 years ago when I was at my darkest depths to use Gratitude, Empathy and Mindfulness I would have told that person to get absolutely f*cked. 😑
Now that I have done a lot of healing of my own trauma, I can see the value and see the merit in this because I have the headspace and stability to engage with it. So if you are in a place where you can engage with this, awesome. If you aren’t, that is totally okay and I hear you one hundred percent.
So listen to yourself. Do what feels right for you. Take what’s useful and discard the rest. ❤️
Alrighty, let’s jump in! All text in italics are quotes taken directly from the book.
🌏 What’s the story behind The Resilience Project?
Hugh van Cuylenburg was a teacher, with one of his first jobs out of university being at an all girls private school. A little while after graduating, he went and spent some time in India volunteering at a school that desperately needed some extra hands.
Soon after arriving at the school which had 150 students from the ages of 4 to 16, he was assigned a few students from grade 3 to give him a tour:
“My little tour guides stood in front of this haphazard tangle of useless metal and jerked their thumbs at it. ‘Hey sir,’ they said, ‘look at this.’
At first I thought they were pointing out how underwhelming it was, as in ‘Hey sir, have you ever seen anything more miserable? Isn’t this sad? In our entire school all we have is broken swings and a seesaw that doesn’t work.’
It took me a moment, however, to realise they were in fact saying, ‘Hey sir, how cool is this setup?’ They were excited and proud to show me their amazing play equipment. The kids absolutely loved it.” - page 50
Similar experiences continued to stick out to Hugh. He shares that one night he didn’t sleep, churning his brain comparing the overall happiness of the people in this tiny village in India to what things were like back at home:
“I thought of all the people I knew back home in Australia, and the students I’d taught over the years who’d struggled with depression, anxiety and other mental illnesses. Why were we in the developed world so broken? Why were we in Australia, such a beautiful and privileged country, so anxious and depressed?” - page 53
He continued observing and studying the people and their behaviours to try and get to the bottom of these questions.
One student in particular stood out to Hugh, quickly becoming his favourite. His name was Stanzin. Hugh described Stanzin as the “most caring, selfless and truly happy person I have ever met”.
📝 To the point where Hugh started taking notes on him and studying his behaviour to try and ascertain what made him so special and so happy.
“One lunchtime as the kids were running out to play, I walked over to Stanzin as he was lacing up his shoes.
‘Sir, look. Look!’ he said, pointint at his feet. ‘Sir, dis!’
In Ladakh, people find it almost impossible to make the ‘th’ sound, so I knew he was saying ‘this’. The message was, ‘Sir, look at this! Look at my shoes. Isn’t it awesome that I’m lucky enough to have shoes on my feet?’ - page 54
🍚 When he was eating the lunch that the school provided—just plain rice—he would say
“Sir, dis! Dis! Sir, how good is it that we get lunch at school? Can you believe how good this is?” - page 54
👨❤️👨 Stanzin not only valued the things around him, but the people as well.
“Whenever he saw me he’d stop whatever he was doing and individually point out his playmates. ‘Sir, dis person and dis person and dis person and dis person …’ “ - page 55
Ultimately, Hugh was able to draw out three key principles that Stanzin and his happy community practised every single day that were key to them having such a high baseline of wellbeing.
👊 What are the 3 key principles to improve mental wellbeing?
🙏 Gratitude
💛 Empathy
🧘♀️ Mindfulness
Let’s dive deeper to understand exactly what each one means and how we can harness their benefits in our everyday lives.
🙏 Principle 1: Gratitude
“The ability to pay attention to what you have, instead of worrying about what you don’t have.” - page 56
A lot of the time we can unknowingly fall into a model of happiness called the ‘if and then’ model:
“If I buy this car, then I will feel happy.
If I get this promotion, then I will feel happy.
If we buy and live in a house like this, then we will feel happy.
But the ‘if and then’ approach doesn’t work; months after we buy a new car, we’ll see a better car and think that’s our key to happiness.” - page 56
If we are constantly focussing on what we don’t have, we are on a pathway to continued dissatisfaction with our lives.
We need to take a leaf from Stanzin’s book and exercise our gratitude muscle by pointing out to ourselves ‘Dis person and dis person. Dis pair of shoes. Dis bowl of rice.’
🌈 What one daily Gratitude practice we can use that will radically improve our lives?
If we spend just a few minutes at the end of the day doing this exercise, the positive benefits abound:
📝 Before you go to sleep, write down three things that went well and why they went well.
That’s it, super simple and super easy. This exercise was originally conceived by Dr Martin Seligman, the founding father of Positive Psychology and the research shows that people who engage with this activity have more life satisfaction and less depression after one month, and are even better again in both those markers at 6 months.
This exercise also becomes easily addictive as well, as we start to look for those positive things even as we move through our day, excited to be able to list them for that evening as ‘something that went well’.
😤 What is Negativity Bias and how does it affect us day to day?
As human beings, we have a built in Negativity Bias—and for very good reason. As we have evolved, we needed to prioritise our attention towards threats in order to stay alive. There is after all no point in staying engaged in a pleasant conversation with a friend if the house is burning down around us.
Of course this is a useful situation. Where negativity bias stops serving us is by making us more inclined to dwell on negative events or criticisms of ourselves and others.
This means that we have to actively work on and prioritise having positive thoughts and emotions, which is why the Three Good Things exercise serves us and our negatively geared brains so well.
💛 Principle 2: Empathy Acts of Kindness
“Empathy is the ability to psychologically feel what another person is feeling. The more empathetic we are, the more likely we are to act in a kind way.
When you do something kind for someone else, your brain releases oxytocin, which is known as the ‘love hormone’, allowing us to feel joy, happiness and love.” - page 57
Now I have a slight issue with the framing of this category as “Empathy”, because having empathy for someone and performing acts of kindness (which to me, is much more what is meant by the entire category of “Empathy”) are two completely different things.
Brené Brown also touches on the concept that we might have all been leading ourselves astray on the concept of Empathy for many years, in her latest book Atlas Of The Heart (coming at you in a future edition 🙋♀️)—her recent take on it is that it is quite literally impossible for us to feel what someone else is feeling, and expecting ourselves to be able to do so is a farce.
Acts of Kindness on the other hand, does have a large body of research behind it and the stategies outlined in the book have great merit, I just think they have been mislabelled.
🌻 What one Act of Kindness practice we can implement?
Once a week, perform a kind act for someone else and you will both reap the rewards. This could be:
Think of someone you feel extremely grateful for, or that has had a positive impact on your life. Write down how they have impacted you, and send it to them as a written letter, text or email.
Think of someone who is going through a tough time, send them a kind message.
Perform an act of service for someone - cooking them a meal, ordering them a treat to their house off Uber Eats or booking them a massage.
Give someone a hug (with their permission!), especially if they might not get a lot of physical touch in their lives.
Performing acts of kindness has been proven to release endorphins, which are our body’s natural pain killers and give us a heightened sense of wellbeing. Acts of kindness are a strategy for bio-hacking our wellbeing!
🧘♀️ Principle 3: Mindfulness
“Mindfulness—taking time to focus solely on the present moment.” - page 58
This is a trait that was common among every single one of the villagers, and it was even embedded as a practice at the school in India where Hugh was volunteering:
“Another thing I noticed the villagers did that we don’t really do back in Australia was meditation. I’m not talking about just now and then; as devout Buddhists, they meditated every single day.
Between 8.30 and 9 am – before classes started – the students would assemble in the yard, where they would sit in silence and focus on being in the present moment. ‘So, they’re praying are they?’ I’d asked the English teacher when I’d first arrived in the village. ‘No,’ he said. ‘They’re doing meditation.’
I scoffed inwardly and thought, ‘What a ridiculous waste of time. Surely the kids would rather be doing something more enjoyable than sitting still at the start of every day.’
But then it was pointed out to me that meditation at the school was 100 percent optional. The kids didn’t have to attend if they didn’t want to, but every child turned up early because they didn’t want to miss out. There had to be something in that. Eventually I decided to join in.” - page 55
The fact that these kids were VOLUNTARILY practising meditation absolutely blew Hugh’s mind, and it was one of the key things that made him really explore this as a key principle.
🌳 What one Mindfulness practice we can implement?
“Go for a walk and think about three things you can see, three things you can hear and three things you feel.” - page 187
As someone who still has a love/hate relationship with meditation (can anyone relate?! 😍😒) the thing I really like about this exercise is that is is extremely accessible and doable.
It isn’t asking us to sit down and meditate for thirty minutes non stop, in silence like those kids were doing at school, nor do I think this should be the ultimate goal.
Through this simple practise, we can become more calm, more centred and less anxious.
🏋️♀️ How do we show up and actually Do The Work?
If you’re still with me and reading (Hi! 👋 Nice to be here with you!) I’m sure you’re having some similar thoughts to me as I finished reading this book: “I’ve heard most of these strategies before, so what?”
The thing is, no matter how many books or newsletters about these concepts we read, they aren’t going to do us any good unless we actually do the work.
We have to actually implement these things, try them, embed them into our routines to see if they help us as individuals or if it’s legitimately other strategies and other tools that we might need in a given moment.
So there’s no magic bullet, if we want to feel the benefits we need to do. Not just read.
This week I have been practising the Three Good Things exercise, and I’m going to continue doing it for the next 7 days.
🙌 What is your commitment going to be?
In closing, there are two sides to every coin and it is true for our mental health and wellbeing. If we think of our lives as a garden, to reach human flourishing we need to do two things: we need to pull out the weeds 🌱, and we need to plant some beautiful flowers🌷. This needs to be a balance. If we do all of one and none of the other, we will never truly flourish.
Sometimes it is time for pulling weeds and tackling the awful, hard things in our lives. Other times it is for planting the positive seeds for our future. The Resilience Project and its strategies sit wholly in the latter camp.
I know I haven’t been ready for this type of work before, but I feel much more ready now. There is a season for everything, and wherever you are on your journey know that you are not alone.
Until next week,
❤️🙏 Eleanor
🧠 Resources & Links
✍️ The Resilience Project Journal (also a big fan of this!)
🖥 The Resilience Project Website with more resources and info about their programs
📸 Follow Hugh van Cuylenburg on Instagram - 78k followers
📕 Next week’s book
Coming out next Friday 15th April 2022 is edition #12 (for real this time, I promise 😆), featuring:
📚 In The Realm Of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters With Addiction
🖋 by Gabor Maté, MD
If you’re not already, subscribe now to get the next edition straight to your inbox! 📬
Love this one. Thankyou