Today:

6.30pm: I leave the office, down­town San Fran­cisco, and take the train.

6.44pm: just before arriv­ing in my sta­tion, I remem­ber I have an appoint­ment with my hair­dresser, which means I have to walk in a dif­fer­ent direc­tion than usual.

6.48pm: I find myself walk­ing towards my house, oppo­site direc­tion from my hair­dresser.

You may have had a sim­i­lar expe­ri­ence. You walk towards where you parked your car. Except that the car is not there. Then you real­ize that, on that pre­cise day, you couldn’t park your car in the usual place. And now you have to walk to a dif­fer­ent cor­ner of the park­ing lot. What corner?

Now you may feel dis­ori­ented, not only about where your car may be, but about why we are talk­ing about this…

Well, this story is a good exam­ple of how our brains work. When we do any­thing a num­ber of times, the rel­e­vant neu­ronal net­works get more and more strongly con­nected. “Cells that fire together wire together”. We develop auto­matic habits, from which it is not easy to escape. We get used to just get­ting out of the metro sta­tion and walk­ing home. We know where we always park our cars.

You may also try an enlight­en­ing exper­i­ment on our habits.

Let me now make a brief detour. Over the last few weeks, I have had a num­ber of con­ver­sa­tions where the same con­cept has appeared: resiliency. Resiliency can be defined as “the abil­ity to recover from a fail­ure”. Resiliency is a crit­i­cal Men­tal Mus­cle to train.

I  learned the word 6–7 years ago, at an Ashoka event in Buenos Aires, Argentina, orga­nized by social entre­pre­neur Alberto Croce. Richard Barth, CEO of KIPP Foun­da­tion, used it last week when we were dis­cussing sev­eral Brain Fit­ness pri­or­i­ties for teach­ers and stu­dents. My friends at the Insti­tute of Heart­Math pro­posed using “devel­op­ing resiliency”, instead of “beat­ing Stress”, when we were brain­storm­ing options to part­ner with pro­fes­sional asso­ci­a­tions and bring proven anx­i­ety reduc­tion pro­grams to edu­ca­tors and health care pro­fes­sion­als. Mark Katz, when we met with a num­ber of school super­in­ten­dents, empathized how impor­tant for all stu­dents to develop the exec­u­tive func­tion of resiliency, and how that would help them over­come obsta­cles such as ADD? ADHD and other aca­d­e­mic problems.

In the Neu­ro­science of Lead­er­ship post, we saw too that resiliency is a crit­i­cal atti­tude, and skill. To not spend too much focus and men­tal energy on try­ing to double-guess hid­den mean­ings, and the past. To focus, instead, on what we can do next. On what is on our scope of influ­ence. On, as we dis­cussed before, being pos­i­tive .

Let’s sum­ma­rize. First, we have seen that some behav­iors become habits and thereby mind­less habits. They become us. What we call our per­son­al­i­ties. Then, we have seen how impor­tant resiliency is.

So, what pre­vents us all from devel­op­ing the habit of resiliency and let­ting be part of our behav­ior, habits and personality?

Brain and Mind Fit­ness are impor­tant. We can improve mem­ory, atten­tion, stress man­age­ment, decision-making…Now, in a holis­tic way, Brain and Mind Fit­ness includes the exec­u­tive func­tion, or habit, or atti­tude, of resiliency. If you know of Brain Fit­ness Pro­grams that allow peo­ple to develop it, please let us know. We are work­ing on that too.

Maybe a first step is to re-read the clas­sic <a href=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man” onclick=“javascript:_gaq.push([’_trackEvent’,‘outbound-article’,‘en.wikipedia.org’]);“s_Search_for_Meaning”>Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search For Meaning.