How can we be more resilient?

5.08 - 5.41

My son, [who's 33 now, or probably 32,] so he's probably 25 at the time. I went out to California to visit him, he was going to Stanford Business School. And we were walking together outside, and he literally put his arm around me and said, "Hey dad, are you going to be okay?" And it was the first time in my life where I was getting parentalized by my kid. And I was like looking at him, "Relax, of course I'm going to be okay. Watch what I do with this."

But I really didn't know if I was going to be okay, and I didn't know what the path was

SW:

Many of us have had bad days at the office – even moments when we’ve feared for our jobs. But only one man has been fired by the 45th President of the United States after just 11 days as White House Communications Director. That’s what happened to American financier and LSE alumnus Anthony Scaramucci in 2017. Even a self‑described “smart aleck” from New Jersey might be crushed by this, but Anthony bounced back, returning to SkyBridge Capital, the successful investment firm he founded in 2005. He has since become a respected commentator on US politics, including co‑hosting the hit podcast The Rest Is Politics: US with Katty Kay, the BBC’s US special correspondent.

Not a bad turnaround!

Welcome to LSE iQ, the podcast where we ask social scientists and other experts to answer one intelligent question. I’m Sue Windebank from the iQ team, where we work with academics to bring you their latest research and ideas, and talk to people affected by the issues we explore.

In this episode I ask, ‘How can we be more resilient?’

I find out how you can stop caring about what others think of you.

I discover the secret to keeping a gratitude journal, especially when you don’t like journaling,

And why Anthony Scaramucci thinks getting fired from the White House was actually a gift.

1.57- 2.27

SW: You've just been sacked by President Trump's then chief of staff. What's the impact of that on you at that moment, in the days that are following? And at that moment, do you think it's going to be all right?

Anthony Scaramucci:

Well, listen, that was devastating. I think anybody that would like to color it otherwise or pretend otherwise is foolish. So I try to be very open about these things and very authentic.

4.29 - 5.08

....When the news finally got out there and you're plastered on 40 different global urban newspapers, you don't want to make the top of the broadsheet for bad news, you want to make the top of the broadsheet because you've won the Nobel Prize. You're fired after 11 days when the White House. So I got ripped apart by the late-night comedians in America.[SW2]

I got ripped on by the cable news pundits. And I think you learn a lot about yourself. Can you handle the heat? Are you going to internalize that or are you going to reflect that? But yeah, it was a hard time, I'm not going to say otherwise.

SW bridge: The reasons for Anthony’s dismissal are understandably contentious. But he says it wasn’t because of an interview he did with the New Yorker where he omitted to ask for his comments to be off the record. Exasperated by leaks he believed were coming from White House staff, Anthony made, shall we say, intemperate comments about Chief of Staff Reince Priebus and Chief strategist Steve Bannon. He also threatened to sack the whole of the White House’s communications staff.

6.19 - 6.31

I got fired because I was disagreeing with the pres.... I didn't get fired for the newspaper article. Trump liked that. If you know anything about Trump's personality, he laughed about that. He thought that was really funny,

6.41 - 6.50

.... I didn't get fired for that, I got fired because I was arguing with him over something that he wanted to do that I told him reasons why he couldn't do it.

He felt I embarrassed him in front of some members of the cabinet, and that was it.

7.14 - 7.21

SW: So what was it that allowed you to come through that difficult time? What are the inner resources that you were able to just deal with it in that way?

7.55 - 9.27

Anthony Scaramucci:

...... I've been fired, I've got five kids, I got to get up in the morning, and I got to go. But I think the central thing for people is you've got to be accepting of your own human frailty.

My grandmother had lots of great lines. I'll give you two of them. "What other people think of you is none of your business is a very hard thing to do because we do care, we're social organisms. But if you can condition yourself and practice that, you'll go a long way. Maybe you can reduce that by 50%, and if you're lucky, by 80%. Very few people can reduce that to a hundred percent." The second line is about human frailty. She was very Catholic. She used to say that, "The best among us choose not to judge human frailty so harshly." And when you think about that, it's not related just to other people, it's related to yourself. I made many mistakes in the White House, many of those that I illustrated in that b[SW3] ook. And I could take two choices of that.

I could wake up in the morning, have a millstone of regret on my neck, get up today. It's eight years later, I could kick myself in the pants this morning. "Oh my God, I made these mistakes, and I'm so regretful. Let me kick myself in the pants," or you can take the millstone of regret off of your neck and shoulders, and leave it behind you and go forward. The past is the past, not going to be able to change it. But what can you do today to affect your future, and what can you do today to learn from that experience? ........

SW bridge: As Anthony himself recognises, not worrying what other people think of you and being kind to yourself is easy to say, not so easy to do - especially when it feels like your life is collapsing around you.

But learning to roll with life’s punches – large and small - is essential to developing resilience. Professor Grace Lordan, an LSE economist who studies what makes people successful explains more.

2.42- 5.00

SW: what's the difference between someone who crumbles under stress and someone who can either thrive or manage to overcome it? Is it down to personality or is it something that can be cultivated?

GL 2:

It's something that can be cultivated, and it's called resilience[SW4] . Resilience is how we cope in the face of adversity. It is a trait that has been shown to be malleable, which means we can work on it. As individuals, we have, I like to think stores of resilience that allow us to be more or less resilient to the shocks that come at us, whether it's a colleague insulting us or something bigger on a day-to-day basis. And these stores can be replenished and we can also work on them to make sure that they are as full as they can be when something negative does happen.

SW: When something happens to us that we might find is deeply upsetting, is there a way to reframe it in a way that can help us cope better?

Speaker 2:

So for me, I think one of the most important things we can do to make sure we don't deplete our resilience reserves when something negative happens is really get familiar with our emotions. So when something negative happens, we are going to have emotions that run hot. We might get angry, we might get upset, we might need to withdraw, and we need to allow ourselves that time to process those emotions. I think the second thing that we can do, and some of us, this will be five minutes, some of us 15 minutes, some of us five weeks. I think when we have figured out that our emotions have calmed down, then we revisit what the issue is and we take control of what we can control.

And for me, anytime something negative happens, I think about what's my goal for life? I want to be happy, healthy, and safe. So okay, something negative has happened, my happiness is taken away. I'm still healthy. I'm still safe and conditional on being healthy enough to take action and being in safety, there's always something that I can do about a negative event. And just refocusing it and realizing the world hasn't ended. There's things that I can control is enough to keep my resilience reserves high and also make sure that I tackle the situation and that aligns perfectly with the academic research on this topic.

SW bridge: Resilience isn’t necessarily a personality trait, it’s something that can be developed and nurtured. But sometimes our resilience reserves run low and being aware of and managing this is essential, says Grace. As is reminding yourself to try to keep a sense of perspective.

And coming back to Anthony’s point about disregarding other people’s unhelpful opinions, how do we stop caring about what others think of us? Grace explains something called the spotlight effect.

9.32 - 10.32

Grace:

So in Think Big, my book, I write about the spotlight effect, which is something that I really hang on to. The spotlight effect tells us that people don't really care as much about us as we think that they do. So that means if I put myself forward for something, if I put myself forward at a public event and it doesn't go necessarily well, imagine me now at an LSE public event, there's 200 people there and I really mess up. It really goes badly and nobody can tell me any differently because they know that it went badly. The odds of people in the room actually remembering that in the future are really low, and actually most people in the room are going to be empathetic. So for me, if I'm putting myself forward for something and I feel nervous and I feel the anxiety and I feel my resilience starting to wane, I remind myself that I'm feeling anxious because it's important to me. But I also remind myself that if this doesn't work out perfectly, there will be other opportunities because people just don't remember and they're willing to give second chances.

SW bridge: So you messed up? Nobody cares, and they probably won’t remember anyway explains Grace. Nobody feels the glare of the spotlight as much as the person in it.

Some people seem to be born with the confidence to shrug things off, and some of us need to be prompted to try and find it in ourselves.

What’s Anthony Scaramucci’s secret I wondered?

12.39 - 12.23

SW: you come from a modest background. When you talk about going to Tufts and Harvard and Goldman, and either you're too flashy or your suit's too cheap, but you seem to have leaned into this idea of being an outsider.

Anthony Scaramucci:

Well, primarily because I am an outsider. You have to accept that in life. You're either a comfortable outsider, or you're an uncomfortable one. Donald Trump is an outsider. He's the president, but he's never been allowed into the elite. If you listen to the Christmas Carol Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, Trump is not allowed in the reindeer games. They won't let him in. And so he's an uncomfortable outsider.. .....

13.35 - 14.01

Speaker 2:

But you could have code-switched. So many people do. They alter their accent, they fit in subtly. You've chosen not to do that. Why?

Anthony Scaramucci:

Well, I like being me. I think I'm comfortable in my own skin. One of my mentors, 30 years ago, I was having lunch with him. He said, "Listen," he says, "You're at Goldman Sachs, you have a great job. But you're never going to be a partner there. You don't fit in. ...

14.10 - 14.50

.... You've got sharp elbows. Do you want to do that and get in a steel box of conformity where you lose the elements of your personality, or do you want to leave and go start your own business, because let me tell you something, Anthony, you're 30, you're going to blink an eye, you'll be 50 or 60, and you'll be out of Goldman Sachs because they don't like old people at those places. And you'll be wandering looking for a job. Why don't you go build a business right now, and by the time you're 50 or 60, you'll have your own business?"

And it was really, really good advice. And you have to have self-awareness. If you don't have self-awareness and you're disillusioned with yourself and you think you're something that you're not, then you start making really silly decisions for yourself.

SW bridge: Anthony’s mentor helped him realise that a career at Goldman Sachs would not be a good fit for him. He faced that reality and changed course onto a path with a huge amount of risk, but also reward. And he has enjoyed the success of that.

He’s leaned into being unapologetically himself.

But this doesn’t come easy for everyone. It can be particularly challenging for people who come from socially mobile backgrounds who may not have Anthony’s self-assurance. They have to be particularly resilient when faced with being the outsider. Grace explains.

12.18 - 14.02

Speaker 2:

....... it is true that individuals who are socially mobile need to either really take steps to embrace their identity. I will say that Anthony is among the small number of individuals, the small percentages. More often, people try to adapt and they find themselves navigating these dual type of identities as they conform to a company culture that doesn't feel quite right. And they will say that they have imposter syndrome. I don't think about this as in classic imposter syndrome because in this particular situation, the individual isn't going to battle with their own narratives, which are problematic, but the environment is actually unwelcoming of them. So they're trying to these dual identities.

Some people quit because it becomes too much having these dual identities. And lastly, some people go introvert, and they kind of fall rationally silent. So they'll think, if my accent isn't accepted, if my perspective isn't accepted because people don't view me as being part of the club, then I'm not going to rationally speak. I think the promising thing about our research suggests that while all those cultures exist and the need to put on a persona is there, you can actually be more Anthony now. There's lots of organizations that allow individuals really step into their true selves to their true identity. So I think if somebody were listening and they're navigating a difficult time because of the background that they come from, and I also, I'm from a working class background, so I can really identify with this, find a place where you do belong. Find a place where you do belong. There are places out there for you. Don't quit your job, tread carefully, get a new job and move towards a culture that really will appreciate you.

SW bridge: Grace encourages anyone having a hard time adapting to an organisation’s culture to move find somewhere they can thrive.

Changing your environment can make all the difference. As can changing your perspective – that's what Anthony did.

16.19 - 16.46

SW: In the book, you mentioned that your family or your background, people weren't particularly optimistic. I was surprised at that. How did you overcome that, because you clearly are an optimistic person?

Anthony Scaramucci:

They weren't optimistic because again, you have to have empathy for people. My dad was a super hard worker. The money was tight. I would never dishonor him or his work ethic by telling him I grew up poor, did not grow up poor........

17.13 - 17.35

.... But we had a ti[SW5] ght schedule, a tight, tight budget. And there was anxiety in the house.

And a result of which when you have anxiety, pessimism can creep in, because if you're worried about the future and you're worried about your finances, what happens to people? Anxiety usually stems from worry about the future. ....

18.24 - 18.55

..... I had to say, "Okay, you know what? I'm too short to see the glass anything other than half full. Let me start focusing on the fullness of my life, and let me start putting a gratitude list together. Let me get up in the morning." And rather than saying, "We can't do this," "Let's find a way to do this." And I think that was from sports. I think that was from good coaches, some good mentoring. I think that was from trial and error, I would say that I didn't always have that feeling.....

24.40 - 26.57

SW: when we found out we'd have the opportunity to speak to you, I was reading around the academic literature on resilience, and gratitude comes up. And I said to the rest of the team, "There is no way I'm asking Anthony Scaramucci if he has a gratitude journal." But in your book, you mentioned gratitude journals and you talk about the importance of gratitude. So how do you think of gratitude and resilience? [inaudible

00:25:06

Anthony Scaramucci:

So the first thing you have to do though is you have to understand the condition. So we're all living in the human condition. And so if you're a student of literature or western literature or even eastern European philosophy, we're all getting a package of things upon arrival. And some of them are more fortunate than others, but what are in the likely baggage of things, assuming that we have good health, is that we'll witness the deaths of our loved ones. We'll have to constantly deal with the attachment and detachment from material goods, people that we love, the society in general, or said differently and more beautifully than me by the American comedian Mel Brooks, who's celebrating his 98th birthday and is about to do Spaceball Stew. Now, Mel Brooks would say, "Relax, none of us are getting out of here alive."

And so if you accept, "Here are the trials and tribulations of my life," if you walk into the ancient Greek theater and there's one happy mask, and the mask is smiling. And then up against it in a juxtaposition is a sad mask, and you have comedy and tragedy. And you say, "Okay, my life is going to be imbued with comedy and tragedy, and so therefore I have to accept the bumps along the way. I'm not just going to get a smooth 45 degree ride." Now some of us like to lie about that. We want to tell people that our life is going well, or we want to post pictures on Instagram that are perfectly filtered and are precise about how great our lives. And we go into some level of denialism about what life really is.

And I have chosen not to do that. I would rather be open about the wounds. I'd rather be open about the scar tissue. I would rather be honest with myself

SW bridge: Despite the pessimism and anxiety in the Scaramucci household, Anthony chose optimism. And perhaps his father did too when he handed his son a cheque that would change his life.

19.12 - 19.32

AS: That was probably one of the seminal moments of my life. You're talking about core memories, I can tell you exactly how I was dressed, I could tell you the moment he gave it to me. And I can tell you exactly where I was standing in my mother's house, or my parents' house. And I just remember thinking, okay. Because I was a smart aleck kid. ....

19.37 - 19.46

and I was a little bit of a wise guy. I had a Camaro, I had gold chains, I had my hair blown back like Tony Manero from Saturday Night Live...

20.05 - 20.23

dad was a crane operator, my guidance counselor who I adored. Another mentor of mine, his name was John Zanetti, he came to my parents' house. He was smoking Cigarillos, if you just imagine these unfiltered, nasty Italian cigarettes that these old folks smoked.

20.40 - 20.46

.... And in Italian, John Zanetti told my father, "Don't send him to the public school." ....

SW bridge: Just to clarify for our non-US based listeners, John Zanetti was telling Anthony’s father not to send him to a cheaper state university, but rather to the private New England university Tufts – which came with a healthy price tag.

20.53 - 21.11

It was a good school. But Tufts was 24,000. That was six times the amount. And Zanetti sat there and said, "Listen, he needs to go to Tufts. Here are the reasons why. It's the best private school that he's gotten into. And he's a resourceful kid, he'll figure it out...

21.20 - 21.44

.....about 7, 8, 9 days later, my dad handed me a $10,000 check. He had cashed in his life insurance, the cash value of his life insurance from the union. And he said, "Look, this is what I got. So it's going to get you started and this will help you with the first semester. You're going to have to figure it out from here." And I just remember saying, "Oh my God, my dad is cashing in his life insurance. I really can't let him down."

SW: Thankful for his father’s faith in him, 18 year old Anthony decided it was time to buckle down to serious study – a decision which would set him on the path to career success.

Gratitude can improve our resilience, as well as having other benefits says Grace.

10.50 - 11.48

.....So having gratitude is absolutely linked to increasing resilience reserves, more successful marriages, more successful friendships, even higher levels of income. So practicing gratitude is something that we should all do in our daily lives. It takes the focus off of our losses. For me, I'm not a great journaler. So at 6:00 P.M. every evening, and I'll change the time if I happen to be doing something for work, but usually it's 6:00 P.M., an alarm goes off and I take a very short burst of time, sometimes 30 seconds, sometimes a minute, and I just start recounting all the things that went well that day.

If a negative event pops into my mind, I'll say, okay, that's for later. I'll schedule a time to deal with you later. I'm focused on the positive and I can really in the moment feel that lifts my mood. Again, this aligns with the research, but also I can feel myself putting into perspective just how my day went. And again, if something negative did happen, it's much less likely to deplete my resilience reserves and I'm much less likely to go to bed that evening thinking about the negative event.

5.50 - 8.50

Some of us fear failure so much that we never actually take the risks that might test our resilience. Do you have any advice for people who are perhaps highly sensitive in this way?

Speaker 2:

So I think the first thing is... So for me as an Irish person, we have a sport called the GAA, which I love watching. And I will tell you, I was crushed recently when my team quad lost in the final. They haven't won in 20 years, so we're waiting. So they're facing incredible failure. And the reason that I mentioned the GAA is that in the GAA, there's this thing where in the starting competition, if you lose, you can still go in what's called the back door. And I want people to realize that with failure. So if something doesn't work out for you, so if you're a student and you don't score enough on your A levels to get into your preferred university, there's other options for you. There might even be a back door that can get you into that very course and you should find out about it.

If you're somebody who fails at a promotion, there's another year that you can go forward again. Yes, it hurts for your ego, but you can definitely, definitely go forward again. Realizing that there's always other opportunities to get to the same destination, it might just take a bit longer, can be enough to remove the fear of failure. In my book, Think Big, I've written a lot about the relationship between anticipated loss aversion and the fear of failure. And for me, the anticipated loss aversion is where we start thinking about the costs and benefits of our choices. So for example, Sue, if I said to you today, I'm going to go forward for promotion of the LSE, and if it doesn't turn out, I might be embarrassed in front of you because it hasn't turned out. I'm also going to be embarrassed myself because I think my work is good enough.

But that anticipation becomes really real. I'll start imagining what it's going to be like to see Sue again and have to tell her that I didn't get the promotion. I'm going to start thinking about what am I going to feel like when I'm a failure and start thinking about that emotion. And the research tells us that that anticipation is a real physical exercise and it really impacts our resilience. On the physical side, we get higher blood pressure, higher cholesterol, we might eat more unhealthy if we tend to get caught up in anticipated loss aversion. On the resilient side, our stores deplete. So if I'm somebody who ends up in cycles of rumination about what might happen if I fail, I really affect my resilience reserves. And the most interesting thing about anticipated loss aversion is that human beings, we're really bad at realizing that we bounce back and actually we learn from failure, not just learning about how to make the cut in the next opportunity, but we also learn the failure doesn't sting as much as we might think, but also we tend to underestimate the people around us.

So in my story that I tell myself, Sue is going to really think negatively of me because I didn't get the promotion, but actually, Sue, I know you're a really nice person and probably you would be very high on empathy and very careful to realize that there's kind of ego attached and very supportive in that moment.

9.07 - 9.22

..... you start to learn who your social support is. And I think anybody who's been through a tough time, and I know that I have, you realize very clearly, who are the people that you want around you in that time, which makes you even more resilient and actually less fearful of failure.

SW: Grace points out that the fear of failure is often worse than failure itself....

Even so, I asked her if she had any advice for someone who thinks they may have made a career ending mistake.

14.10 - 15.00

There's no such thing as a career ending mistake. I mean, there really isn't. I would ask them in the world of artificial intelligence to go to Google, Gemini, Copilot, ChatGPT, whichever is your friendly AI aid, and ask them to give you a list of individuals who made career ending mistakes and look where they are now. I think the only thing that will make a mistake career ending is if a person isn't resilient and stops getting back up. And for me, I think the important part if and something negative happens to a friend or for a colleague is to give them the support to take the moment to find themselves and then get up and continue in the journey of their career knowing that that mistake is just part of who they are now.

SW: As for Anthony Scaramucci, we know that his career didn’t end on that fateful day in the White House. How would he suggest getting through the worst of times?

34.05 - 35.53

..... I always tell people, "Listen, if you are having a bad day, give me a call because if it's not a health issue, I could compare the 31st of July 2017 to the day you're having. Blown from the White House, skinned alive by the media, rolled in margarita salt by the late-night comedians, just tortured. And people telling me my career was over and this is that and that, and, 'You're finished, and you've destroyed your reputation,' and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Okay. All right, get up, dust yourself off, and go back to work. And by the way, don't let anything that's happening to you relate it to your own personal career mistake, or you're in a job where you get unceremoniously fired, or there could be a downturn in the economy, it's not even personally related to you.

They're letting you go because they have to make a size adjustment to the number of employees that the firm has. Whatever it might be, you can survive it. But you have to make the decision behind your eyeballs and in between your ears how you're going to deal with it. You're the one that has to make the decision. I think you have to also realize, nobody cares. You're worried about what other people think. Let me give you a newsflash, they don't care. They're on their own lives. They're doing whatever they want. Maybe they'll read about you in the tabloid for five seconds and snicker. But who cares? And you got to learn that the whole thing is impermanent." And if you're a Buddhist, which I'm not, I'm a Roman Catholic, but what did Buddhist say? We're in a state of ever change. The whole thing is changing.

What would Marcus Aurelius say? "You're experiencing many deaths in life." The five-year-old version of me and the five-year-old version of you unfortunately is gone. But my wife thinks I'm still five, but you get the point that I'm making, we're moving through life and we're changing.

36.05 - 36.50

.... And if there's a shortfall in your life or there's a come-uppance that you're faced with, deal with it. What else you going to do?

You're going to cry and go into the corner and say, "That's not my personality, I'm not doing that?" I'm going to go out there. And weirdly, the whole thing, it didn't feel like a gift at the time, that firing, but it was a gift because it gave me some standing to talk about what I saw, and to explain what is unfolding in a way that I probably couldn't have before. And it's given me a broader audience to share it with. And hopefully, it's fortifying some people in their own thought process in terms of how to deal with the current situation that we're facing globally.

SW bridge: This episode was written and produced by me, Sue Windebank with help from Anna Bevan and edited by Oliver Johnson. If you’d like to find out more about the research in this episode, head to the shownotes. And if you enjoy iQ, please leave us a review to help other people discover the podcast.

Join us next month, when Mike Wilkerson asks, ‘ Should animals have rights?’