Jane McGonigal's research on learned helplessness shows that hopelessness is our default, but dogs with a button to stop shocks learned to try anyway. The speaker calls this learned resilience: deliberately training yourself to say yes and keep moving forward even when solutions aren't obvious.
Good morning everyone. Here is your moment of yes for Monday, May 2nd. It's gonna be May. Had to sneak that in there at least once a year. All right. Listening to a great interview yesterday with Jane McGonigal. She's the author of Reality Is Broken. She's one of the top, you know, gamification experts in the world. Viral TED Talks, great stuff. She's got a new book and she was referencing the study 40, 50 years ago. Cruel study, wouldn't be possible anymore. But it gave us this term, learned helplessness. You may remember, they would take dogs and give them electric shocks, but half the group, there was a button the dogs could push, and when they pushed the button, the shocks would end. The other dogs had no solution. The next day, the dogs that had the button previously, if they got shocked and jumped over a barrier, they would escape the shocks. The other dogs who had no button the previous day, if they, once they got shocked, even though they could jump, to freedom, they didn't think that there was an option or a solution. So they just continued to take the shots. They took the beating even though there was a solution, there was an answer to their pain, thus coining the phrase learned helplessness. This idea that we as people or animals, we can learn helplessness if we are taught or to believe that there are no options. Well, a neuroscientist— well, a person in that group became a neuroscientist, went back and looked at brain scans of the dogs in that study. And what they realized was the helplessness wasn't learned. Helplessness was the default. But the dogs with the buttons, since there was something for them to try, they at least tried it. But hopelessness was the default in both groups of dogs. So this idea of learned helplessness, it wasn't learned. It was the automatic default response. It's the dogs who had something they could at least try That learned basically resilience. It was learned resilience. So that got me thinking quite a bit last night. Learned resilience. If giving up, if hopelessness is our default, what we need to train ourselves to do— yes, and— we need to train ourselves into this yes, and mindset to especially When things are difficult. If our default is to just throw our hands up in the air and say, I'm screwed, or there's nothing we can do, our default, our learned response needs to be, just keep trying. Yes, and just keep moving. Just keep doing something. Because when we do that, we often find a solution. We find a way to figure it out. Even if the solution isn't what we want, it's just another step, another step, another step, another step. And we get ourselves out of that hole, out of that rut. Right. So I love that. Learned resilience. And for me, again, that yes and mindset is all about responding proactively with purpose to everything that's dropped in your lap. Learned resilience. So that is your moment of yes for today, for a Monday. Who doesn't need to reinforce some resilience on a Monday? That's your moment of yes. Have an awesome week, everybody.
