How to gain strength from your darkest moments

How to gain strength from your darkest moments

We all want happiness.

But we all have dark times.

That’s OK; because as this great article shows we can learn from our difficult times and become stronger and happier!

Read on…

via Inc.com by Leigh Buchanan

In 2015 Silicon Valley executive Dave Goldberg died suddenly while on vacation in Mexico with his wife, Sheryl Sandberg. Sandberg, the COO of Facebook, has spent the last two years struggling: to normalize life for her children, to get comfortable accepting the help of friends and family, to regain confidence at work, and to rediscover hope.

Adam Grant, the Wharton professor who is Sandberg’s friend and writing partner, has been by her side, offering the comfort of research into resilience and tools for emerging from grief. The two have just published Option B: Facing Adversity, Building Resilience, and Finding Joy, a book that draws on Sandberg’s journey, Grant’s research, and interviews with survivors of the worst. (You can read our review here.) Grant recently spoke in an interview about how to come back stronger on the other side of suffering.

This is a book about people in pain. How did that affect your experience researching and writing it?

It was definitely a more emotional process than with my last two books. When writing Give and Take and Originals the predominant emotion for me was curiosity. Here the flood of emotions was very different. Sadness… but I also felt incredibly hopeful, especially as I heard the stories of people who have gone through some of the worst things you can imagine and come out on the other side stronger, with a renewed sense of meaning and purpose.

Isn’t the way people experience grief very individual? Is there a universal path to recovery?

There was a psychologist, Gordon Allport, who said that every person is in some ways like all other people, in some ways like some other people, and in some ways like no other people. We wanted to capture a bit of each of those. Yes, everyone grieves in their own way and their own time. There is no question that it is profoundly personal. That does not mean there are not elements that are universal. The loss of control. The isolation. The intrusive thoughts. The loss of hope: being unable to imagine a future. And the loss of identity. If the person you lost was close to you, then that person is part of who you are. There is an element of, I don’t know who I am without this person…

…keep reading the full & original article HERE