Mark Murphy explains factual thinking, the first part of his 5-part resilience model. People with low resilience catastrophize: they see a merger and assume disaster. Cognitive restructuring teaches them to reinterpret the same facts more positively.
So when we think about where resilience comes from, remember, we're talking about our 5-part model here. Let's talk for a minute about one really important aspect of this, and that is factual thinking. One of the things that you see goes wrong with resilience is that people with lower levels of resilience, they tend to catastrophize. What's that mean? Now let me kind of explain. First, how do we see the world? Well, generally human beings kind of parse the world and interpret it by looking at facts, interpretations, and reactions. So we have a set of facts, that's kind of our objective reality, it's what's happening in the world. I'm getting a promotion, I'm not getting a promotion, we're buying a company, we're not buying a company, whatever the objective reality is. Now, the problem is that the human brain then takes that set of facts and makes an interpretation of that. That's a good thing, that's a bad thing, I like that, I don't like that, and then whatever our interpretation is drives our emotional reaction to it. Now, what you find with people that suffer when it comes to resilience— that is, they have lower levels of resilience— is that they take that set of facts and rather than making a more positively skewed interpretation, they make a more negatively skewed interpretation. And one of the reasons they do that is a set of irrational beliefs that causes them to have a more negative skew on the world. So if you're dealing with resilience, let's say you're your organization has just gone through a merger and you've been acquired by another company. So now you're sitting there and there are a bunch of employees who are looking at this saying, "Oh my gosh, this is— mergers are always bad. They never end well for the people who've been acquired. It's always a disaster." That's the set of irrational beliefs that they're holding on to that is causing them to look at your giant change effort or your acquisition or whatever in a very negative light. So how do we reframe that? How do we deal with this and help that person sort of cognitively restructure that? Them so that they can look at that same objective reality, those same set of facts, but have a more positive view of them.
We're gonna use a 4-step—
