northernwomen

If you’ve been reading After Hours for long, you
know how often I write about the impact of stress,
and how important it is to become more resilient.
There are few things that affect the quality of our
lives as much as our ability to bounce back after
getting “knocked down.”

If there is one thing in this life I know to be true, and
that science continues to find new support for each
year, it’s that we can alter our responses to
“stressful” events and situations, thus improving our
quality of life, and ceasing to undermine our health.

A University of Alberta study shows us once again,
that we have reason to celebrate our ability to
change. Dr. Beverly Leipert decided to study a
group of women who have always had it “tough”;
she chose to conduct a study on resilience, studying
the women who had spent their lives living
separated form others, enduring month after month
of brutal cold …the women of the frozen North.

Each of the women in Dr. Leipert’s study had lived
much of their lives in the rugged terrain of northern
British Columbia. These women had lived with a
rather unique set of risk factors; the bitter cold,
attitudes regarding gender, threats posed by local
wildlife, and very limited resources. These were not
sporadic risks, they were simply a way of life, and
were present each day.

After Dr. Leipert had compiled her findings, she
discovered the three main strategies that were
responsible for their resilience: Becoming what she
called “hardy”, making favorable meanings or
“stories” about their situation in the North, and
supplementing what the North had to offer.

Each of these women had learned to become self
reliant, had followed various spiritual or religious
beliefs, had developed a liking for the outdoor
activities like camping, fishing and skiing, learned
indoor activities like painting, sculpture, or quilting,
and had decided to volunteer for community groups
and activities.

Notice that each of the actions or behaviors above
were learned, or chosen. The resilience they had
developed was not some genetic gift or
spontaneous phenomenon, they had taken active
roles in creating the experience of the life they were
living, and the level of resilience they had developed.

I’m often asked what I think about the role of DNA, or
our genetic makeup, and a propensity to have
certain “strengths” and “weaknesses” or traits. Make
no doubt about it; there can’t not be a genetic role
in our lives. Just being alive is genetic. However,
because at this point and time, there is very little we
can do to alter our genetic makeup, I have made it
my life’s work to focus on the parts of our
experience that we can influence.

What can we learn from these hardy women of
Northern British Columbia? First and foremost, we
can accept, or not, that the quality of our lives will
involve an active role on our part. When I work one
on one with clients who desire to make a change in
their lives, I use leading edge tools and strategies to
assist them in doing so.

As powerful as some of these tools are though,
unless I successfully convey one thing in particular
to each client before we begin, the tools will be
useless: each client is expected to work hard. The
legendary Green Bay Packers coach, Vince
Lombardi was a brilliant coach to be sure, but were
it not for the football players that were as dedicated
to carrying out the tasks he assigned, as he was to
creating them, the world would have never heard of
Vince Lombardi.

Know this: “Bad” stuff is going to happen. The
question is this, are you comfortable with the way
you have reacted to the “bad” stuff that has
happened in your past, and how long it has kept you
from being as productive as you can be?

We can stop reacting and start responding the
moment we decide to take an active role in how we
will interact with “life” in the future. To bury our head
in the sand and hope that nothing else “bad”
happens is not only ineffective, it’s downright
deceptive and dangerous.

Think about a Pin ball Machine; decide today to stop
being the “ball”, and make the decision to become
the “flipper.” The ball is at the mercy of everything
else around it, but the flipper, now that’s a different
story. While the flipper cannot control 100% of what
happens inside that machine, it can influence the
outcome to varying degrees. How do we alter these
“varying degrees” in our favor? Let me illustrate.

When I was in high school back in the early 80’s, we
had a local arcade with all of the popular video
games of this era, Asteroids, Pac Man, Space
Invaders, etc.

There was a kid that had his name in the number
one position on just about every game in the
building. Was John Barron the recipient of some
special genetic code for aracade game mastery?
No, John was a “master” for one very good reason;
anytime of day you walked into the arcade, John
was playing and getting better. John could smoke
me on Asteroids because he had played more; he
practiced every day of his life, and had therefore
refined his arcade game skills.

Realize that once you decide to become the “flipper”
in your life that you might “tilt” a few times at first,
but like any skill in life, you’ll get better the more you
“play.”

Look back through the article, and take some time
to discover how you can apply the three main
strategies used by the Northern women to your own
life. Just remember, whoever said that old dogs can’t
learn new tricks, was probably a pathetic trainer with
young dogs as well. Regardless of how you have
reacted in the past, know that you can learn to
respond in new and more useful ways.

© Copyright 2007, Vincent Harris- All Rights
Reserved.