Survivors are not so different from the rest of us
After covering the Asian tsunami in 2004, Sherwood developed an interest in survivors. "I wondered," he says, "what do these people know that we don't? What are they made of … and how can we, regular folks, get some of what they've got?"
This led him to his decision to write The Survivors Club. In his research, he interviewed hundreds of survivors all around the world.
He came away with one big surprise. He says "They're not that different from you and me. We're actually all made out of the same stuff. They've just been tested in ways that we haven't. Every single survivor I met around the world told me the same thing: that they found inside themselves strengths that they didn't know they had. Ambassador Bruce Langdon, who was the highest-ranking American diplomat in Teheran during that four-hundred-and-forty-day hostage crisis, said that we're like tea bags: We don't know how strong we are until we get into hot water. Survivor after survivor told me just that."
"Survival is an outlook, it's a mentality, it's a lens," Sherwood said.
Attributes of Survivors
Sherwood asks, "How do businesses and business leaders respond to shocks and surprises - traumas if you will - that happen every single day? How do they not just survive those challenges and shocks but how do they lead their organizations and thrive? I think that the same concepts that help some people overcome the worst adversity in life apply directly to the question of innovation and how companies, particularly in these difficult times, will seize the opportunity and innovate and change and become even more successful when things eventually turn around."
He says that the world breaks down into three groups in a crisis: ten percent are leaders; eighty percent become bewildered and fall into a stupor; and ten percent are troublemakers who engage in counterproductive behavior.
He has identified the following as attributes of survivors:
Situational awareness. "The most effective survivors, wherever they go and whatever they do … they have what the military calls situational awareness - they're highly aware of what's going on around them, so they're more ready to react appropriately."
Adaptability. "Adaptability means changing your behavior and your actions in response to a new situation." The "normalcy bias" keeps people from changing, he said - Too often we do not change our attitudes and actions in response to a changed situation, but rather wish that it would return to normal.
Resilience. "Resilience is the concept that you can reconstitute, you can rebuild yourself, you can bounce back after you have been twisted or torqued out of shape." Resilience is partly genetic, he said: 32 percent of us have the genes for it. It's also learnable: "It's like a muscle we can exercise."
X Factors. "I also think that survival depends on a number of 'X factors,' unmeasurable factors that are quite fascinating," Sherwood said. Among those factors he named faith - "without question the most universal survival tool that I encountered in my research" - and luck - "Experts tell us that … there is a lucky personality and an unlucky personality . . . Lucky people pay attention to things; they're open to opportunities; and they have [in the view of the leading researcher on luck] an uncanny knack of turning misfortune into fortune."
Community. "The correlation between isolation and mortality is as great as the correlation between smoking and mortality and between cholesterol and mortality," he observed. He said of the website he created, TheSurvivorsClub.org: "Our goal is very simple. We want to give people access to the best information on the web and help them sort through the blizzard of information that's out there . . . and we want people to know that they are not alone."
We all have the capacity for hope and resilience.
He cites researchers in North Carolina who are focusing on post-traumatic growth: "We focus so much attention, rightly so, on post-traumatic stress disorder … but less studied and less understood is that so many people who go through the traumas of life report that they have growth afterward - growth meaning a heightened sense of connection to friends and family, a closer relationship to a higher power, new priorities and new values in life.
The contention of these researchers in North Carolina is that while we focus, rightly so, on helping people through those sorts of injuries, not enough attention goes to this other side.
While in the general population the incidence of post-traumatic stress is around ten to fourteen percent, the number of us who experience events that could cause PTSD in a clinical sense - somewhere around seventy to eighty percent of us experience those in our lifetime.
And so their argument is that if seventy to eighty percent of us have events that could trigger PTSD and the incidence in the population is ten to fifteen percent, what is it about that missing group that doesn't experience it? How are they made? How are they wired? And, as many of them report, they experience growth from those problems.
To learn more about Ben Sherwood go to www.bensherwood.com
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