On May 1, 2015, Dave Goldberg died suddenly while on vacation in Mexico. His wife, Facebook’s Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg, found her husband lying face down on the hotel gym floor, unresponsive and not breathing.
He was 47 years old.
Consumed with grief, Sandberg sought support from her close friend, Adam Grant, who shared with her the growing body of research on mental toughness, otherwise known as emotional resilience. [1]
A mere one year and thirteen days after her husband’s death, Sandberg stood before Berkley’s graduating class of 2016 to share the insights gleaned from her talks with Grant, which had helped her cope with her loss.
“After spending decades studying how people deal with setbacks, psychologist Martin Seligman found that there are three P’s—personalization, pervasiveness, and permanence—that are critical to how we bounce back from hardship,” said Sandberg. “The seeds of resilience are planted in the way we process the negative events in our lives.” [2]
The first P is personalization—the belief that we are at fault. In Sandberg’s words, “This is the lesson that not everything that happens to us happens because of us.” After her husband’s death, Sandberg blamed herself. “What could I have done? Should I have done more?” But it wasn’t until she reviewed her husband’s medical records that she realized there was nothing she could have done to prevent his death. She was not at fault for what happened.
The second P is pervasiveness—the belief that an event will affect all areas of your life. Ten days after her husband’s death, Sandberg returned to work to attend a meeting. Her mind wandered to thoughts of her husband, until, for a brief moment, the discussion caught her attention, and she forgot about her grief. In her own words, “That brief second helped me see that there were other things in my life that were not awful. My children and I were healthy.”
The third P is permanence—the belief that the negative feelings will last forever. For months, no matter what Sandberg tried, she struggled to cope with her grief. But in time, with much practice, she learned to accept her feelings and recognize that, while painful, they would not last forever.
We all have a way of explaining why we experience what happens in our lives, or explanatory style, as it’s known. But as Sandberg and countless others can testify, we change our explanatory style from that of a pessimist to an optimist. In doing so, we can bounce back from negative events, quickly, with more resilience than we ever thought possible.
Footnotes
[1] Sheryl Sandberg and Adam Grant went on to co-author a book together called, Option B: Facing Adversity, Building Resilience, and Finding Joy.
[2] For more on the three P’s, I recommend reading Martin Seligman’s book, Learned Optimism.
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