Episode 122: ACTIVE ENGAGEMENT: THE PATH FORWARD

The Survivor's Guide to Life

We revisit "Type R: Transformative Resilience for Thriving in a Turbulent World", by Ama and Stephanie Marston, focusing on the skill of Active Engagement. When we started our podcast three years ago, we spent several episodes sharing key concepts from "Type R". Transformative resilience, according to the Marstons (and we agree) stresses that the kind of resilience we need to thrive in these challenging times is not the ability to "bounce back" but to "learn, grow, and spring forward". Active Engagement is the willingness to take on our difficult challenges and troubling emotions, work through them, learn from them, and act on what we've learned. It takes courage, objectivity to assess where we are and what changes to make, openness to new possibilities, patience to respond rather than react to people and events, emotional hygiene to clear away negative emotions, and hope to enable us to see adversity as a source of opportunity rather than threat.