Marston, Type R

Mother and daughter Stephanie and Ama Marston have teamed up to write Type R: Transformative Resilience for Thriving in a Turbulent World (PublicAffairs/Hachette, 2018). The authors specifically reject the model of “bouncing back” from misfortune, arguing that “there’s no going back to who or where we were before challenging times.” Instead, they focus on how to grow and create opportunity from adversity, to “leverage change and hardship into opportunity as individuals and carry that progress into the world as a contribution to the collective.”

The authors share stories of people who have demonstrated transformative resilience. They also analyze the six common characteristics and skills that allow for transformative resilience: adaptability, healthy relationship to control, continual learning, purpose, leveraging support, and active engagement. Most of these characteristics are pretty straightforward. I’ll look at only one, which often trips people up: a healthy relationship to control.

The Marstons begin by saying that “believing that we control the outcomes of our lives and our successes isn’t only empowering but also a starting point for creating Transformative Resilience. Yet, focusing too intensely on an internal locus of control and our ability to control has significant downsides.” If we believe that we alone are responsible for what happens to us, this belief can be “a huge source of stress.” And so, Type Rs learn “to assess what’s within our sphere of influence and what’s not. We realize that strength isn’t always determined by triumph over the outside world but sometimes by changing our inner world. As a result, we can respond appropriately, investing energy in areas where we have influence, acknowledging and shifting focus away from areas where we don’t, and redirecting our energy into cultivating Transformative Resilience.”

The authors apply their model first to individuals, then to organizations and leaders, and finally to families.