The Undefeated Mind

When we moved my son into the University of Chicago a couple of weeks ago, one of the speakers at a session for parents was Professor Alex Lickerman, author of "The Undefeated Mind".  Professor Lickerman was discussing Student Health and Counseling Services at the University, but he also spoke about his"Resilience Project", a training program offered to all students that has been correlated to greater success at school and better results in several measures of well-being and happiness.

Because Professor Lickerman was a great speaker who even made College Health Insurance sound fascinating, I decided to buy his book.  I love it.

The core idea is that we can remain relatively happy as we experience the ups and downs of life if we never allow ourselves to be defeated.  If we never stop trying.  If we never stop looking for a new strategy to overcome adversity, even when every other strategy has failed, then we have not been defeated.

I've had some hard times at work in the last year.  I've tried different strategies to manage the people who are making my job so difficult and unpleasant.  Every new approach has failed.  At times I think I let myself feel defeated, as if with some of these people nothing was ever going to work.  But then I'd try a new strategy until I finally found something that seems to be working.

As I've read "The Undefeated Mind", I realize that I was most unhappy when I gave up hope, when I allowed myself to think that there was no way around these people, that I'd have to cave in and do work that was less than I was capable of and deliver results that were less than what mattered.  I was most unhappy when I was close to having a "Defeated Mind".  But when I kept thinking, "What if?" and kept brainstorming up more ways to get around the people who were holding me back, I eventually found some techniques that started to work.  I can see that this is what it means to have an "Undefeated Mind".  As long as I keep struggling, I haven't been defeated.

As Lickerman writes, "possessing an undefeated mind means never forgetting that defeat comes not from failing but from giving up."