Resilience Can be Taught! – Keys to Fostering Resilience in Students, Parents, and Staff

Hans Magleby:
Welcome everyone. My name is Hans Magleby. I am the co-founder of the WhyTry organization along with Christian Moore. Christian is my business partner and my longtime friend dating back to when we were high school buddies back in our teen years. And together we’ve created a couple different programs that … We shared one last week, the WhyTry program is used in nearly 30,000 schools now across the country. In Canada, in the UK, we have teams over in Ireland using it and in England. We’ve got folks in Australia and New Zealand. Mostly English speaking countries. We do have Spanish resources as well for some of the program, not all of it. But, today we’re excited because we’re going to share with you a little bit about a couple of other resources and other tools we have in another program that we call Resilience For Youth. And talking about the importance of resilience and how we can teach resilience. I wanted to just start off sharing with you briefly a little bit about me and a little bit about my colleague on the line here. 

Hans Magleby:
I have a background in teaching. I was a teacher. I was an art teacher. I have a degree in art. I also was the art director for a video game company so I’ve had a lot experience with technology and kind of user experience, product design. Kind of my role has been taking the example of a lot of great teachers and educators and counselors. People like Christian and people like Bruce that’s on the other line here. Bruce is one of the first people to use … Really the first person to use WhyTry extensively in a school setting. And Bruce is a former school counselor. He was counselor of the year. He was an award winning counselor. He was counselor of the year for the state of Utah. He won a national award and was honored at The White House under the first President Bush. And Bruce has been in many ways a model for me as we’ve been creating resources and program materials. I’ve taught many groups of classes and kids with Bruce and kind of watched and learned from him. He’s been in many ways a mentor for me and a lot of us in WhyTry. 

Hans Magleby:
And where we are today with WhyTry, we never really set out initially to do what we do. It was kind of just sort of an evolution that brought us to where we are. And we’ve been able to accomplish a lot and reach a lot of different educators. We’ve been doing this for nearly 20 years. I’ve trained educators in every single state. I’ve worked with schools and consulted with schools on how to engage kids and how to motivate them, inspire them, and to help them know how to overcome some of the challenges that they’re dealing with and really help them to be ready to learn when we’re focusing on academics. And so we’ve accomplished a lot as an organization over the last 20 years. But I think the thing I’m most proud of is that my wife and I have five kids. This is just a quick picture of my family here. My wife’s name is Tracy. Next to her is my oldest son, his name is Grayson. This is kind of a strategic picture. It makes me look like I’m the tallest here, but he’s got me by a couple inches. He’s very athletic, plays sports. Next to him is Chloe. She is the next oldest. This is a couple years old. She’s now in college. She loves dance and she’s very creative. I think follows in my shoes with kind of the creative genes in our family. 

Hans Magleby:
Next to her is Truman. He’s probably one of my smartest kids. He’s always tested very high above grade level in most of his academic subjects. The thing I worry about Truman is that he doesn’t always put his full effort into things that he does. And I worry what’s going to happen to him when he experiences some really difficult challenges. Will he have the ability to stick with it and push through and persevere? And then on the other side over here next to me is my son Rock. Rockwell. Rock’s been diagnosed with ADHD. He is one of the most fun kids to be around on some days and he is sometimes the worst kid to be around on other days. He has struggled a lot with challenges in learning, challenges emotionally. He has a hard time regulating his emotions. And my wife and I have probably spent more time trying to help Rock than maybe all the other kids combined. But one thing I know about Rock, he’s going to be an amazing adult one day. Because he’s struggling through so many challenges right now that he is learning to overcome them at a very young age. 

Hans Magleby:
And it’s interesting, I actually worry less about Rock’s future than I worry about my son Truman, who’s my high performing student. I would argue that Rock has a resilience advantage over his brother Truman. And that’s what we’re talking about today. What is the importance of resilience? Is it something you’re just born with or is that something that we can change? Can we teach that? And then in the middle there is Josie and she’s my favorite. Don’t tell anyone. Don’t tell my kids I said that. I think she’s the youngest, she’s just at that cute age. I wish I could freeze her. She’s so affectionate. So it’s amazing to me how fast they change because I look at her older brother standing behind her and how he’s this huge adult now and his little sister … He was just barely her age it seems like. One of the things as we talk about resilience I wanted to share with you is a little bit about Christian. Christian is … Like I said, he’s my good friend from high school. He came from a pretty challenging environment. I won’t go into his story. He talked last week and you guys can go watch the archived webinar from that. Him sharing his experiences and his story and his background. 

Hans Magleby:
But Christian, his claim to fame is he got a masters degree and became a licensed clinical social worker with about a fifth grade math level and a sixth grade reading and writing level. He had severe learning disabilities, came from a very difficult home environment, and overcame amazing things in his life. And has figured out how to thrive in really adverse circumstances. And how to be resilient in really adverse circumstances. And so these are some pictures of one of his good childhood friends and his mom, who’s become a mentor for him for many years and he’s still very close with her today. He calls her Mama Jackson. Mrs. Jackson. But Christian is the author of this book, The Resilience Breakthrough. And this is something that we published about five, six years ago now. And it’s been something that we’ve been very excited about because we really feel like we’ve discovered a breakthrough in the field of resilience. It’s kind of the basis of our theory of what we’ve been teaching in WhyTry and what we’ve been teaching to kids for the last 20 years. 

Hans Magleby:
And it was interesting. We were getting ready to publish this and our publisher was going through some different titles to the book with us and we came up with one title that I really liked but our publisher kind of had an issue with it. We ended up going with The Resilience Breakthrough, which I also like. I feel like we go the really title. But this was the title we were playing around with. Resilience, The Second Greatest Principal in the World. And we were talking about this and our publisher said, “Why would you publish a book about the second greatest principle? Everybody’s going to want to know, what’s the greatest principle? Who wants to read the second greatest?” And I thought, well that’s why it’s good. It gets your attention. It makes you ask, what’s the greatest and why is this the second greatest? And so thinking about that, I don’t believe resilience is the greatest principle in the world. I think the most important principle … The Beatles got it right, is love. Showing you that picture of my family, I had a really tough thing happen in our family. Not my immediately family, but my sister’s family a couple years ago. 

Hans Magleby:
My sister’s oldest son, my nephew, went to work and while he was at work just in a very unexpected way he collapsed and it turns out that he had had a massive brain aneurism. They tried to resuscitate him and there was nothing they could do. He died. And it was just this sudden crazy unexpected thing. He was perfectly healthy and they lost him. And it was a huge rock bottom moment as you can imagine. It was something that we all were struggling with. And it had a big impact on me because I remember thinking how fragile life can be. We’re at a time right now where we’re seeing a lot of loss of life with this pandemic and I think a lot of us feel somewhat that way. Life can be very fragile. And it made me think, what if I knew this was going to be my last day and I had one more chance to speak to my kids, what would I say? What would be my message for them? What would I want them to know? And I think the thing I would want them to know is The Beatles message, all we need is love. 

Hans Magleby:
The most important thing that I have learned in life has been love. The love that I felt between me and my wife, to my parents, to my siblings, to the feelings of love that I have for my children. The importance of that. Of all the things that I’ve learned, that is the most important thing that I would want them to know is the importance of love. And to me the qualities of love that I would want to instill in my kids and make sure that they know why it’s so important is empathy. Understanding other people. And that unconditional kindness is the key to that. And compassion for others. And so I look at love as how I measure myself and that’s what I would hope my kids would understand. That love is the greatest principle. It’s the most important thing. And that would be what I want them to know, that I love them, that I care about them. But second only to love to me is resilience. Because if I’m not going to be here and I can’t help my kids, I can’t help them overcome a challenge that they’re dealing with or be there to hold their hand or to support them in some capacity, but if they know what resilience is and they know how to be resilient, I know they’re going to be okay. 

Hans Magleby:
No matter what happens to them because I can’t control the circumstances of their life. They are going to go through difficult challenges and trials. Everyone does. But if they know how to be resilient, they’re going to be okay. And that’s most important to me. I want them to learn resilience. So to us, resilience is the second greatest principle. Now we came up with the title The Resilience Breakthrough which I think is probably a more appropriate title because we really do believe we’ve discovered a breakthrough in resilience and how resilience can be taught. So I’m going to turn it over to Bruce. He’s going to share with you a little illustration of this. A little example. 

Bruce Bushnell:
First before I begin, thanks Hans for sharing that. And just wanting to say one other thing, Hans mentioned he had trained in every state and I have too. What gives me the greatest hope when we’re going through all the challenges of things we’re going through is you. The people that are on this call today. The great educators I have met all across this country I call lifetime friends, through training and things. So I just wanted to thank you before I … I get emotional easy. But I was just thinking about you on this call. I want to thank you for who you are and what you do and how great you are in making a difference in young people’s lives and we need you. And I hope you’re taking care of yourself. Because the most important thing, you want your students to be resilient but you need to be resilient so you can reach them. 

Bruce Bushnell:
Now Hans mentioned, have you ever wondered why? And I have wondered why. Maybe some of you have too. That one student … You can click on that Hans. One student will take their challenges and whatever it is, adversity in their lives, their problems and they begin to hurt themselves and others and they shutdown and they quit and they give up. While another student might have the same types of challenges but in spite of their challenges or her challenges, they continue to try to be better each day and move forward in a positive way in their lives. And so I like to share the definition that’s in the book, The Resilience Breakthrough that Christian had. First of all, what is the difference between them? And we really feel, it’s what this whole webinar’s about today, one student has resilience, the other one doesn’t. And so we asked the question many times in our training, is that something you were just born with or is it something you can teach? And we through our research for the book and all the research out there and through our experiences, we 100% know that you can help students learn and teach resilience to them and to adults. 

Bruce Bushnell:
So our definition in the book for resilience is this. The ability to bounce back when you have every reason to shut down but you fight on. And so whenever we have trauma, a student has trauma or a challenge or a problem or adversity, sometimes you have that feeling. Maybe it’s adults who’ve had that feeling. We have every reason to shut down but we hand in there. And sometimes we show grit and determination and endurance. But the second part of it I really like and it’s the ability to bounce back when you have a reason to shut down but you fight on. Resilient people, students, have both tapped and untapped reserves. And you notice that untapped’s in green. That’s something we feel like all students have the ability to be resilient. They have it within them but we help them to discover it and bring it out. And then enable them to overcome and thrive as they face setbacks, challenges, and the fears of the daily life. That word thrive is interesting. When you first talk about resilience it can be grit. It can be perseverance. Just hanging in there. When we talk about bounce back and we talk about thriving, it’s beyond that. It’s returning to form. It’s being able to move forward in a positive direction and produce productive outcomes with energy and maybe enthusiasm for life and you have hope. 

Bruce Bushnell:
Within this we have a curriculum called Resilience for Youth and we have a variety of activities. One of my favorite is an object lesson. Hans, if you’ll kind of shift it so they can see me. Not that I want everybody to see me. But in this object lesson usually we have two students come up or if we’re doing a training, two educators come up. But I have two basketballs in my hand. These two basketballs represent … I’m going to have them for my object lesson represent two students. And these two students, just tell you a little bit about them. They come from the same neighborhood, from the same school, the same grade, they have the same teacher. They may even be in the same home. They have a lot of similarities. But when a challenge comes along each student responds a little bit differently and that’s represented by these two basketballs. So I’d like to see how they respond when they have a challenge. So I’ve got to scoot my chair out of the way for just a second. So watch this. Kind of observe what you see. Tell me what you see from these two basketballs representing these two students. So a challenge has come in to their life and usually I’m going to raise it up and I’m going to drop the ball and just watch what happens to the basketballs. 

Bruce Bushnell:
All right. Here we go. See them? Here we go. Well one basketball could go up and hit the ceiling. The other basketball, you didn’t even see it. It didn’t come back above the table. It just kind of … It had a thud and it was deflated and it didn’t bounce back. And that’s what happens to a lot of our students. When they have a challenge or trial, some students are prepared and have fostered resilience. You say, what’s the difference between two basketballs? Well one has a lot more air, the other one has less air. But if we said that it related to our students, one has fostered and has more of a resilient mindset and has the skills of resilience, the ability to really bounce back and return to form and thrive, while the other one has struggled a little bit of that and they’re deflated and they’ve given up. How would it be to play a basketball game with a deflated basketball? It’d be very difficult. But how is it in life to face a challenge without having the skills and the ability and the hope and the actual learn the skills of resilience? A lot of students would like to be resilient. They don’t know how and that’s something that we provide is the how. 

Bruce Bushnell:
And so in a sense, we’re putting more air back in the basketball or we’re helping students to really have more fuel, the fuel of resilience to help them face their challenges. So when we do an object lesson or an activity, we have processing questions for each activity. So this activity we process that and help bring out certain principles that we want students to become aware of. But the main thing there is okay, if we lack resilience or we’re weak or the ball didn’t bounce back, how in our lives do we help, again, acquire that resilience to be more resilient and move forward in our lives and produce productive outcomes? I love doing all our activities because it helps engage students. 

Bruce Bushnell:
Moving on, talking about … Our goal is to have resilient students, staff, parents, and community. And so you’ve heard the word, the growth mindset. A lot of times in WhyTry we call it the resilience mindset. Here’s an example we see sometimes across the country. Two teachers are faced with cutbacks which we may be facing a lot of things right now. One of them comes to hate their job, doing only the bare minimum and blaming poor teaching on lack of resources, while the other teacher or educator determines to make the most of what they’ve been given using their creativity to provide their students with engaging, relevant learning experiences. That difference is resilience. That resilience mindset. We’ve seen it when we’ve gone in communities. There can be two neighboring schools right next to each other. Same city, same overarching problems, challenges, demographics. Yet one of the schools is improving their academics, closing the gap, their test scores, lowering dropout and the other is not. But a resilient mindset permeates the first school from students, to teachers, to administrators, everybody. While the second school experiences high turnover and mounting behavioral issues. And so we think the difference is resilience. 

Bruce Bushnell:
And this is a concept we teach in our training that success does not equal resilience. This is not what we’re talking about today. It’s not necessarily about just pure success. You can have two students and let’s say this young lady … I’ll give the example, my daughter, Brook. Young lady on the left. Brook was a 4.0 student. She had a goal to have a straight A GPA when she graduated so the spring of her senior year, fourth term, she got her first A minus and she had a meltdown. She had to have some counseling, she was distraught. I would have died or whatever to have an A minus. But she was so upset about that. Yet this student over here on the right, we’re not knowing everything about each of these students, but the student on the right may be struggling in school. Maybe grades are really hard. But if you knew what was going on in that student’s life at home or in the environment with peers, maybe there was domestic violence. Maybe there’s all kinds of challenges in the home. Maybe there’s a learning difference. Maybe there’s a variety of things. Maybe there’s only one parent. One parent’s in prison. We don’t know. But sometimes I think it’s a miracle that students even show up to school. 

Bruce Bushnell:
So that student on the right may be actually be more resilient than the student on the left. Now they both can have resilience or they both could lack resilience. But that’s kind of the point here. That it’s not always tied to success. A lot of times being more resilient will lead you to more success productive outcomes but not always. So success does not always equal resilience. 

Hans Magleby:
I love that Bruce. Christian always talks about resilience is the great equalizer. It transcends culture, gender, socioeconomic status. It’s applicable to everyone. So your high performing students as well as your students that are struggling, they all have the need for resilience. Just because a student is having success doesn’t necessarily mean they’re resilient, right?

Bruce Bushnell:
Absolutely.

Hans Magleby:
It may be that they’re not experiencing a lot of adversity at this point. 

Bruce Bushnell:
Matter of fact, Hans, just to add one thing, we’re working a lot with colleges now. A lot of the colleges say they have students, they come in as good academic students but they have some form of setback or something in their personal life and they shut down and quit. A lot of times they drop out. They leave. And these are good academic … So they’re lacking that what we’re talking about, that ability to deal with life’s challenges which we would call … To be resilient you have to have something to bounce back from. But there’s going to be plenty of challenges in our lives but that’s what we’re talking about. How do we learn to deal and cope with those challenges?

Hans Magleby:
Yeah. Christian always talks about resilience is in the striving, it’s not like an end goal. And we’re not focusing on student success actually. We are just focusing on helping them understand how to foster their ability to find that inner motivation in those moments of struggle, in those moments of adversity, in those rock bottom moments so they don’t give up and they keep trying and they keep persevering through those challenges. Doing that puts them in the position for success but we can’t always control success. But we can control how we respond to our adversity. So that’s kind of our goal. That’s what we’re focusing on. One of the things that we talked about last Thursday, we did a little webinar talking about some of our tools in the WhyTry program. Today we wanted to share a little bit more of some of our tools in the Resilience for Youth program. Resilience for Youth is a little bit different. They come at the same end goal of teaching resilience from different angles.

Hans Magleby:
So WhyTry, we say, teaches the skills of resilience. We have a series of life skills that we’re teaching kids. There were some things that Christian had identified as he was struggling through college. He has a professor while he was working on his masters degree challenge him one day and said, “Christian, how have you made it though school this far? I’m amazed that you’ve accomplished what you have. You should write it down. Write down what you’ve done so you can share that with kids. Because I think it would be a valuable resource for you to share what you’ve experienced and how you’ve done what you’ve done.” And so he wrote down a series of about 10 different principles that range from understanding his decisions had consequences. He had to tear off his negative labels. He had to learn to control his impulses, his defense mechanisms, his anger management. He had to avoid the effects of negative peer pressure. He had to learn how to problem solve. He had to apply hard work. These were all really important skills and principles that helped him to be able to overcome some challenges and put him in a position where he could be resilient. 

Hans Magleby:
But then as we published this book, The Resilience Breakthrough, as we had been struggling, kind of looking at trying to pin it down, identify, what is it that enables people who are resilient to be resilient? What are the factors that are in play here? We know that teaching kids these skills in our WhyTry program, some of the outcomes are we see an increase in their resilience. But The Resilience for Youth program comes at resilience from a little bit different angle. It’s focusing on the sources of resilience. And kind of where resilience comes from and how everyone can tap into those things. And so whether it’s your high performing students, your low performing, your staff, everything from teachers, administrators, to all of the other support staff that we have in schools, they can apply these principles in their lives. And now we’re really trying to push more to provide resources for parents and families that reinforce what we’re doing in the school with them. And so our book, we wrote this targeting adults. 

Hans Magleby:
It’s kind of a crazy interesting story how we stumbled upon this approach but it was really trying to serve some people in the workforce with some of the things that we had been doing with kids in school. We focus so much teaching social emotional learning to help kids be ready to learn. And we realized that in a lot of workforce situations managers and leadership are trying to help employees, and many times it’s not what’s happening at work that’s impacting their work, it’s what’s happening at home. And the challenges in their life of health issues, of relationship challenges. So many other factors. The socioeconomic challenges. So many other factors that are having an impact on their ability to be ready to work when they come to work. And so we started kind of experimenting and Christian was thinking about what was it that has helped him to be successful and overcome challenges and difficult points of adversity in his life? What’s enabled him to not give up and to persevere and keep pushing through? And he was kind of identifying some things that he tapped into. And then he was thinking about me. We’re kind of polar opposite personalities. And he was saying, “What is it that makes Hans resilient when he experiences adversity?” And he identified a couple things that seemed to apply more to me. 

Hans Magleby:
And as he started kind of experimenting looking at different examples of sources of resilience, we narrowed it down to four universal sources that seemed to apply to everyone. There’s obviously many sources of resilience but there seems to be these four sources of resilience that we all in one way or another often tap into. Some of us naturally tap into just one. Others tap into more and people that are really resilient seem to tap into all of them. And Christian was thinking, “Man, if I do these two and Hans does these two, what if I started doing some of what Hans does and he starts doing what I do? We’d both become more resilient.” He started getting really excited and that kind of became the basis of this book. We started doing research and pulling together a lot of external information about this. And so I want to just share with you real briefly the four sources of resilience. The first one is what we call relational resilience. And that means that you are being resilient because of the knowledge that other people depend on you. Oftentimes we’ll do things because of that knowledge that our family depends on us or maybe you’re part of a team and your teammates depend on you or you work in a team in your job and the others that you work with are depending on you. 

Hans Magleby:
As educators, our students are depending on us. A lot of times we’ll do things that we don’t necessarily want to do or maybe wouldn’t do just for ourselves but we’ll do more, we’ll put more effort in at times to not give up when things get difficult and to problem solve and to try and figure out how are we dealing with things like this pandemic or how are we going to deal with the challenge that you guys have all been talking about? The worries that you have going into the next school year? A lot of times we will put effort into problem solving and go above and beyond what we would do for ourselves because of the knowledge that others depend on us. If you’re doing that, you’re applying relational resilience. There’s another half to relational resilience which is the flip side of that. Sometimes when we’re struggling, we’re in a rock bottom moment, people help us. We tap into our support systems. Into our connections. Your friends, your coworkers, your family. The support systems that you have help you to not give up in those moments and that also is relational resilience. So it’s either tapping into the supports or pushing through difficult things because of the fact that you’re supporting others or that others depend on you. That’s relational resilience.

Hans Magleby:
The second one we call street resilience. I think we’re seeing a lot of street resilience right now. Street resilience is, you take any form of discrimination, disrespect, any attack on who you are, your identity … If anybody’s ever told you you’re not good enough, you’re not smart enough, you’re not going to be able to do something, you have in any way been held back or been discriminated against in some capacity and it made you angry and you just wanted to prove them wrong. You took that anger and you used it as fuel to not give up. You’re applying street resilience. I think we’re seeing a lot of street resilience in response right now to just the issues of race and the issues of prejudice and a lot of the injustices that we’re seeing right now, you’re seeing a whole culture, a whole nation, a whole community speaking out about things that they’re angry about. And they’re taking that anger and they’re channeling it and they’re trying to use it to make change. And so they’re applying street resilience in those situations. And for a lot of people not giving up as a result of that, being productive. That’s street resilience. 

Hans Magleby:
The third one is called resource resilience. When you’re in a rock bottom moment you’re tapping into the resources around you. And we think of resource resilience as many things that you tap into. Sometimes they’re internal resources. Your skills, your abilities, your talents. You kind of do an inventory of what you’re good at and you apply that. There’s external resources and then there’s potential resources. These are things that maybe we don’t currently have but we could go acquire. And so when you’re struggling, people that tap into the resources around them to overcome their challenges, they’re applying resource resilience. 

Hans Magleby:
And then the fourth source it what we call, rock bottom resilience. You hear this term a lot. Especially when you’re seeing people going through the cycle of addiction. People will say, “They’re not going to change until they hit rock bottom.” But something happens when they hit rock bottom. It’s like they flip a switch and they start taking one step at a time, start moving forward. They realize that there’s nowhere else to go but moving forward and moving upward. And in some ways it’s kind of akin to the concept of grit. Grit in kind of a simple definition is being able to endure something difficult with a focus on a goal or something that you’re striving towards and kind of pushing through something that’s challenging. 

Hans Magleby:
Grit is an aspect of resilience but it’s not always just interchangeable. Resilience and grit are not exactly the same thing because resilience is a little bit more than grit. It’s not just enduring something difficult. It’s that ability to bounce back or return to form. And when you go through trial and adversity and you fall down like the balls that Bruce dropped and represented and you bounce back from it, you’re not the same. You have changed. You’ve improved. Something else has happened in your life that’s enabled you. So that’s rock bottom resilience. What if you didn’t have to go to rock bottom but you could apply the attributes of people that are at rock bottom and understanding what those attributes are is applying rock bottom resilience. 

Hans Magleby:
So in this book we have a couple of resources here. We have a self assessment and so it helps you identify where you’re strong and where you’re not as strong so you can look at, how would I like to improve my resilience? What can I do to increase my resilience in these other areas, tapping more into the other sources that you don’t naturally gravitate towards? And within each of these sections of the four sources in the book, we have what we call resilience boosters. These are practical specific strategies that you can follow that help you increase either your relational resilience, your street resilience, your resource resilience, or your rock bottom resilience.

Hans Magleby:
And so we do a lot of PDs, staff developments with teachers and educators where we teach these skills and the staff will use the book as a resource to help them see how they can apply resilience in their own lives and that’s something that we do a lot of. And we do those virtually, we do those in person. We’ve been doing a lot of that kind of stuff recently just virtually in workshops online. We’ve got two going on today where we’re doing workshops and training online virtually. But taking the book and everything you see in that book, when we created an approach to teaching this to kids, we took the same approach … If any of you tuned into our webinar last Thursday about the WhyTry program, where we use visual metaphors and we use activities and we use music and we use video clips and story examples to teach these important life skills, these principles to kids in a way that they can understand and remember that caters to a lot of different learning styles. 

Hans Magleby:
So I just want to share with you a real simple way how we teach this to kids. These are the four sources. So I’ll say, have you ever played with matches before? And of course ever kid … It gets their attention quick when you start talking about something like that. If you’ve ever lit a match, how do you usually put it out? Just a quick puff of your breath will blow that match out. But if you’ve ever had a campfire, it’s a little bit different. You can’t just blow out a campfire. It’s a little different. Actually if you blow on a campfire the opposite happens. It gets bigger, it increases. And so we talk about, what’s the different between the campfire and the match? The match just has a little stick of wood. The fuel source is just very small so the flame is small. Where the campfire has a larger fuel source. You have these four logs there that coming together are creating a much stronger flame. And it’s so strong that when that wind blows it actually doesn’t put it out, it makes it go bigger. It fuels it with oxygen. And those four logs there could represent those four sources of resilience. 

Hans Magleby:
For many people they often will just gravitate towards one of those. But just like a campfire, if you’ve ever had a campfire, if you put one log on a campfire, maybe you have some small sticks to get it started and you get a good flame and you put one log on it. You’ll notice that very quickly it will burn down the small sticks and that log will try and burn for a little bit but then it goes out. It doesn’t burn very well with just one log. You have to have more than one. Like two that will draw against each other or three or four. The more you add to it the stronger the base of that fire becomes and you have a constant flame that burns and those logs will completely burn. If you just have one log it usually goes out before the log even burns and you just have kind of a charred log sitting there. And so that kind of represents what we need to do with resilience. One source isn’t enough, you need to have more than one and bring them together.

Hans Magleby:
And so in this picture we have three main ingredients to resilience. First the fire which kind of represents our resilience. The four sources, which represent the fuel. The things that we tap into, those logs. But there’s one more thing. I don’t know if you noticed it. It’s the wind. If you think about it, you cannot be resilient without what that wind represents. The wind represents an adversity, challenges, trials, struggles. When you have adversity it challenges us to be able to apply the principles of resilience in our life and if we don’t have challenges, we can’t grow, we can’t become stronger. And so we’re not trying to take away the challenges that kids have. In fact, they’ve got plenty. Whether we try to take them away or not, they’re still going to have them. But what we can do is help them see how to look at their challenge differently, to see their challenge as an opportunity to show their resilience instead of seeing it as something that you don’t want. You want to be the fire that looks forward to the wind because it’s going to make you stronger, it’s going to make you bigger. So this is kind of a simple metaphor that we use to teach just the principle. Introducing the concept of resilience and the four sources. 

Hans Magleby:
Okay, I’m going to turn it over to Bruce. He’s going to share with you a little bit about a concept called flipping a switch. 

Bruce Bushnell:
Flipping a switch. In Christian’s book on page 26 it has this definition of what we call flipping the switch. It’s a key principle to help you look at your challenges differently and access those four sources. So when you flip the switch you stop for a moment and realize that you can turn your pain into power and move forward being committed to being resilient. And so that’s a skill that I … It’s changed my life as an educator. I say almost every day or at least every other day, my self talk is, come on … I call myself Bush. But Bush, you got to flip the switch. And what does that mean? Let’s just do a brief walkthrough just kind of giving you a sense of what that skill is. We have a whole lesson around this with activities, videos, journaling for our students. So when you first think of any switch, we usually think of a light switch. So what happens when you flip a light switch in a room? Well generally, the light comes on. It illuminates. And so you’re able to see things more clearly and it gives you an advantage with that light on. It illuminates. When the light’s off … I don’t know if you ever come into a dark room and you can’t find a light switch. You’re bumping into things. It’s just really a lot more difficult. It’s hard to navigate through. 

Bruce Bushnell:
Well the same with our lives. If the switch is off … We use this metaphor to kind of illustrate that all of us have a switch within us that we can flip on. We call it a resilience switch but we relate it to this light switch. And so if you’ve ever seen a cartoon character that’s kind of representing an idea, what do they show? They show a light bulb. Something new, something new is coming on. To illustrate that idea it’s illuminating. There’s something that coming on inside your mind or something that is allowing you to see something different or consider something different. So when you think of light bulbs, use this symbol for a new idea or a new perspective. So that’s basically what we’re teaching students and staff. That when you have a challenge, you have that within you. You can flip that switch to look at your challenge differently and turn it into a productive outcome. That’s basically what the definition is. So we have five steps to help flipping the switch. And again, we usually have a discussion and do the activities related to this. 

Bruce Bushnell:
The first step is, know you have a switch. You can’t flip something … It’s a huge advantage for students and for adults, anybody to know that they have that switch they can flip. So when you flip that switch it allows you to look at something different. Maybe look at that challenge and see a different perspective. The second step … So knowing you have a switch is a big advantage. The second step is you acknowledge and accept there is a problem, a challenge, adversity, whatever it is. And if you don’t accept that or acknowledge there’s a challenge, it’s kind of like staying in the dark. It’s keeping the switch off and it doesn’t allow you to do something different. So just acknowledging that there is a challenge, okay it’s here, now I’m going to flip the switch to do something different, see things more clearly to address it with a different perspective. So probably the key … This is what I ask myself every day. And I use my own language. It may not be exactly what we’re going to put up here. But we call it, ask the flip the switch question. How can I use this challenge to better my circumstances or create a productive outcome right now? And that’s really changed things for me. 

Bruce Bushnell:
Can you think about if a whole school, students understood that, what an advantage that would be? They’re going through something really hard, whether it’s the subject or peer pressure or something at home, but they could flip that switch and say right now how can I take what I’m going through, this challenge, and use it to do something good, productive, a different perspective of how I could deal with that challenge? We’re going through a major pandemic. We’re going through a lot of things related to like what Hans talked about. Inequality, discrimination. How can flipping the switch allow us to see something different and to produce something good? Number four, we pay attention to how it feels. We ask students to pay attention to how it feels when you flip the switch. And generally when you flip that switch I have found … We tell students, test it out. Find out for yourself. But I have personally found out I usually have more hope, more optimism, more energy, greater motivation and I’m more excited … I mean I just have more energy to deal with the challenge and I want to switch it again. Flip that switch again because of how I see the positive results that comes from it. 

Bruce Bushnell:
Doesn’t mean things are not … It’s still going to be hard. It’s not always easy. But it helps you to use it as fuel to go in a productive direction. It really helps you to think more clearly. When you have a different perspective, flip the switch, you look at different ways or strategies or options or thoughts or ideas of how you could handle the situation in a better way or a more productive way. We use the word productive or a positive productive way. And then when you pay attention to how that feels and you get positive results, you need to flip the switch constantly. It’s not something you do one time. We call that a resilience switch. So when the switch is on, it’s within you, you’re flipping that switch, you can visually see it. With flipping it on, you’re tapping into resiliency. You’re putting yourself in that resilient mindset. When it’s off, the resilience switch is off and you’re basically in a sense remaining in the dark. So that was very fast and brief but it’s a powerful concept. And I’ve seen it with my own grandkids.

Bruce Bushnell:
I just had an experience with a grandson, I won’t tell the story because of time, but his parents were shocked because he was kind of basically having a tantrum and doing some behaviors that were not really … Something they really didn’t want. All of the sudden he just got really quiet and they asked him, “What’s going on Luke?” And he said, “I decided to flip the switch and look at this differently.” And he was nine years old. Eight or nine at the time. Anyways, I’ve seen it happen in young kids’ lives and in older kids’ lives. It’s a great skill that we teach or principle we teach that helps access resilience. 

Hans Magleby:
I love that Bruce. Thanks for sharing that. I think when we’ve taught classes with students this concept has been probably one of the most memorable for them and applicable for them. Afterwards we hear them using this language a lot, we hear them applying it and see them applying it. And one thing that’s really important that we always try and emphasize with them look, just because you flipped that switch doesn’t mean now that you’re going to be resilient moving forward all the time. Things happen every day that cause that switch to go off. And every time you make that cognitive decision, I’m going to flip the switch, even sometimes it involves their self talk, their saying to themselves, like Bruce was saying, I got to flip the switch. This is hard, I’m going to look for a way to be productive in the face of this right now. And that’s flipping the switch. 

Bruce Bushnell:
I use it at work. I use it at home. I use it in my personal life. I use it out in the community. I use it all the time. So it’s something I feel really passionate about because it personally has helped me but I know it helps students. 

Hans Magleby:
We had a comment, somebody asked is this webinar going to be recorded? Yes. We should have gone through a little items of business at the beginning. We are recording this. We will send a link out tomorrow once we’ve got it up on our website with the recording of this webinar. So you’ll all get a link to this and you can check this later. 

Hans Magleby:
We wanted to just share a couple of resources with you today. There’s a lot more and we don’t have a lot of time to be able to go through a lot of other principles that we’re teaching. One of them is our parent guide for resilience. You can access it by going to resilienceguide.org. This is something that will cost money eventually. Right now during Covid-19 we had just completed this and were getting ready to roll this out with schools and using it where schools could do community outreach. We train staff on how to do parent nights and kind of introduce this to parents and then letting the parents have access to this while schools are working with their students on the same content. 

Hans Magleby:
It’s basically taking everything that’s in the book, simplifying it down to just some of the core elements of how this relates to parenting and how this relates to families, and being able to apply these principles to parents. And so we wanted to make sure that we were putting this in a way that they could use this and right now because of corona and the struggles that everyone are going through and the challenges we’re facing, both globally and nationally with this pandemic, we’ve decided to just put this out there and make it available as a free resource. And you’re welcome to still share this with anyone right now. Anyone who is using this, we will never require that they have to pay for it. We’re probably going to transition to a paid model here in the next few months as we start coming back and working with schools. But we’ll make it so everyone that has currently been using it and has access, will continue to have free access to it and then anyone moving forward’s going to have to pay for it eventually. But it’s a great resource and we encourage you to go check it out and share it with anyone that you want to share it with right now while it’s available for everyone. 

Hans Magleby:
I’m going to stop sharing this real quickly and just jump over to one principle in this that I wanted to share with you. This is this concept of … Whoops. Let me stop that one more time. Try that again. There we go. This is this concept that we call emotional fuel. And it’s another principle besides flipping the switch that in many ways, I would say this is the breakthrough. It’s kind of an overlying structure that has been different about our approach to resilience than most other books and most other theories and approaches to resilience is how we look at our emotions and how we’re tying into our emotions. So let me just share this with you real quick. This is a little short video clip and then we’re going to just open it up for some question and answer. We’ll share with you just a couple little other resources here. We’ll open it up real quickly for some question and answer before we wrap up here. 

Recording:
And important principle of resilience is a concept that we refer to as emotional fuel. Have you ever been in a car with a dead battery before? What happened in that situation? Could you describe what it’s like? Sometimes you hear a little clicking noise. That’s usually the sound of your starter trying to get your engine to start but there’s not enough juice or electricity. And at other times you might hear no noise and your car just seems to be completely dead with a drained battery. So what do you do in those kind of situations? Do you know how to fix a dead battery? In some cases if it’s an old battery you might have to replace it. But in most cases we can fix a dead battery by charging it. To do this, it just requires some jumper cables. You connect one of the jumper cables, usually red, to the positive side of the battery and the other jumper cable, usually black, to the negative side of the battery. Then you connect the other side of the jumper cables to a car with a good battery in the same way, positive to negative. As you run the car with a good battery for a minute or two, it will charge the car with a bad battery. 

Recording:
So what happens if those cables aren’t connected right? Can you charge a battery with just a positive connection? It won’t work. You have to have both, positive and negative connections to allow electricity to flow through your battery and complete the circuit. So you may be wondering, what does this have to do with our emotions and our ability to be resilient? If you think about it, we’re a little bit like a car battery. We have emotions daily that range from one end of the spectrum to the other. Let’s look at it this way. What are some emotions that people perceive as negative? They could include anger, stress, fear, anxiety, rejection, frustration and many more? What are some things that people do as a result of these emotions? It’s not uncommon to see people lash out or blame others, become a victim, turn to substance abuse, become a bully, tear down others and many more. So let’s look at the other side of the battery. What are some emotions that people perceive as positive? These can include love, joy, gratitude, acceptance, pride and many more. 

Recording:
So what are some things that people do as a result of these emotions? People often lead out, increase productivity, turn outward and serve others. They’re increasing in their confidence and others often say they’re more fun to be around. So which of these two lists would you say contains more productive outcomes? It may feel like that we’re more often productive when we’re on the positive side of that emotional spectrum. But here’s an important question, can we use our negative emotions to create productive outcomes? If so, how? Let’s look at some examples. Some of the most powerful and creative works of art or music come from artists who are driven by their negative experiences and emotions. We see athletes that are often driven from a moment of failure, a loss or times when they’re disrespected. The organization Mothers Against Drunk Driving was started by some women dealing with their own grief who started a movement to make changes. One of the doctors that invented insulin was driven to go into medicine by the loss of a childhood friend who had died from diabetes. So just like our car battery cannot charge with only a positive connection, we need both. 

Recording:
When we’re talking about resilience it’s important to recognize that our negative emotions can be fuel and they can be a resource in a similar way that we often use our positive emotions to be more productive. Thinking about it that way may require us to look at our emotions differently. And remember, all emotions are fuel. If you’re only tapping into the positive emotions in overcoming challenges, then you are only using half of your ability to be resilient. 

Hans Magleby:
All right Bruce. Do you want to just share with them a couple resources here in the parent guide? I can go through anything that you want to show them. 

Bruce Bushnell:
Let’s just do it really quick, we’re about out of time. You have a parent guide opening video that gives you an introduction of why resilience is important. That’s great to click on that. We won’t do that now. You look at the chapters, we start with the relationship and then we go into building resilient family and flip the switch, emotional fuel, which we’ve show you today. We do the four sources, which were the match and the campfire. Relational, street, resource, and rock bottom. Then we have the power of future promises. How to help our kids prepare for positive things in their future. Careers, college, whatever it is for them becoming great at something. But how to set a goal for something in the future. And then the last chapter is self grace. And that’s we’re not going to be perfect and it’s a great chapter. You need to read that because we make mistakes as parents and we all make mistakes and it just kind of puts things in perspective. If you’ll click on just to start with, let’s go to the relationship. Just click on … Or we’ll go to relational, that’s fine. And if you scroll down, just scroll down just a little bit it’s audio so you can listen to it, you can read it. There’s a video like you just saw on the battery for relational. How to maybe approach your kids on teaching that and the key concepts. 

Bruce Bushnell:
And then it has a variety of things and activities that you can do to build relational resilience in your family. If you’ll scroll all the way down to the boosters, because our time’s gone, but there’s tons of activities we’ll share with you. But we have right at the very bottom here, there’s a visual metaphor we use right here. We have relational boosters. And some of those things come from the book but there’s specific things you can do to build relational resilience in your family and in yourself. And that’s almost a separate chapter in itself and you go into these boosters that we have that’ll help you to increase. I just want them to see this because our time is gone. We have additional resources. We have activities. There’s activities up above. Suggestions, things you can do. But this is a specific activity. It has instructions and questions you can ask your children. We’re going to be adding to this all the time just like our curriculum. But we have circles, our time, team draw, great activities. And then we have a video that’s very inspirational called Rick and Dick Hoyt. It’s about a dad and a son and how they established a strong relationship together and how they depend upon each other and receive emotional support from each other. I watched that three Sundays ago and just sat there and cried. It was very inspirational to me. 

Bruce Bushnell:
That just kind of gives you a format and then also all this is translated into Spanish if you chose to do it in Spanish. And so, there’s a lot more to it but I know we want to stay as close as we can to our time and we’re right there. I would recommend you play with that. It’s free right now and everybody can get it. 

Hans Magleby:
Our curriculum materials for Resilience for Youth, so our program, this is where we take teachers through to kind of demonstrate how they can teach this. When we do training, so we’ll do an introductory training to this to kind of show an overview, demonstrate how to teach these principles and kind of cover some of our approach as well. We have sort of this toolkit and then we have kind of the WhyTry approach which is a series of skills and strategies that are in many ways just as important as the tools that we’re teaching. And so when we do training on this, we do virtual trainings, we do live trainings, we’ll go through and walk through how to use all these resources and how the tools that are here are available to you. Everything from the teachers manual with step by step instructions and videos to watch to help you see how to do that. We have PowerPoint resources. We have copies of the visuals. Because a lot of times you’ll be making copies of these. We have a large list of learning activities. These become so critical and what’s interesting is we’re doing the learning activities just as much in virtual settings as we do in a live setting. We have different ways of adapting and doing learning activities virtually that can be really engaging and fun. Using video resources, a lot of little video clips that we use.

Hans Magleby:
Many of them are things that we’ve kind of curated from popular media going on right now with viral videos and things off of YouTube that thematically tie to principles that we’re teaching and that can be sometimes really funny or that can be a really good emotional example to help engage kids. We have journals and just a lot of other resources in creating and building these lessons as we go through them and like I said, we do these virtually, we do them live, and so if you would like to … I’m going to stop sharing this and go back to our PowerPoint here for a second. If you would like to … And if you have any questions right now, feel free to chime in. Let me exit here. Go back one more time. All right, there we go. 

Hans Magleby:
If you would like to know more information about our resources … Can you see that Bruce? Are you seeing that PowerPoint? 

Bruce Bushnell:
Yes. I can. 

Hans Magleby:
Okay. 

Bruce Bushnell:
I’m seeing parent guide is what I’m seeing.

Hans Magleby:
Parent guide, yep. So if you would like to know more resources … Let me put this up here. Couple things we want you to walk away with. We want you to have a free sample lesson. This is the emotional fuel, the battery. And so this is kind of a sample out of our curriculum for youth, the Resilience for Youth curriculum. So if you go to that URL … I’ll leave that up there. We also would love if any of you would like to get an administrator and come schedule a demo where one of our program directors that’s over wherever you are located. We have program directors that have responsibilities over states all over the country. And they will take you through a demo showing you the materials, answer your questions. They can talk about pricing, they can talk about implementation and anything related to our training offerings and how those work and what we can do. If you would like to schedule a demo from that we can get you a free month trial copy of the curriculum to evaluate it. And anyone that wants to schedule a demo, we will send you and your administrator a copy of the book, The Resilience Breakthrough or the audio version of it. So if you fill out that form, request a demo, and we can schedule a demo with you, we’ll give you a free copy of the book. 

Bruce Bushnell:
Hans, can I say one thing? 

Hans Magleby:
Go ahead. 

Bruce Bushnell:
That could be a demo for WhyTry or for Resilience for Youth. We got some more questions, wanted to know if we recorded our WhyTry webinar last week and we did. What you’re saying would apply to either/or or both.

Hans Magleby:
Yeah. So either/or. If you want to do that, we can do a demo for either program. So those of you that didn’t see last week’s webinar, that’s okay. We can demo it for you live if you want. Have one of our program directors take you through that. We’ll also send the link out with this link tomorrow for this webinar. We’ll send the link also to the recorded version of the WhyTry demo that we did last Thursday. And then The Parent Guide to Resilience. So that’s a free resource right now. And there’s some really great tools and strategies and things that you can use to help as an outreach to your community. Bruce, do you see any other questions that are coming in there? 

Bruce Bushnell:
That’s it. I think we’re beyond our time and I really appreciate for everybody coming on and being on today. I’d like to emphasize one other thing that resilience is not a destination, it’s a process and sometimes I’m more resilient, but knowing these skills and these key principles have really helped me to increase my resilience. It does the same thing for students. But we should never compare our resilience to another person. We all have different experiences, different backgrounds, things going on in their lives, but it’s something that we really can foster and teach and that’s why we’re really passionate and excited about it.