Dr. Michael Ungar has a small excavator. Yes, a real one set in his suburban home. For a middle school professor, this is already amazing, but it becomes even more amazing when you hear why he bought it.
Ungar describes himself as a white, upper-middle-class, educated male, which coincidentally puts him in one of the most lonely and socially isolated places. He didn’t think golf or a group of men would fix it. So he bought a truck. His neighbors always needed a ditch to be dug or a stump to be hauled, and the car was what would take him to their yards and to true friendship.
I came to my talk in search of research. Instead, he gave me parables, one after the other, about what each stubborn thought was about. stability really takes.
He has spent four decades studying resilience across cultures and contexts. I watched him speak addiction medical conference, a room was set up to think about the neurobiology of addiction, and he got up and talked about everything he was sitting under.
Excavator is all his theses in one picture. What restores one person may have nothing to do with what another person needs.
What exactly is resistance?
Most of us assume that resilience resides within the individual. You’re either tough or you’re not. It’s the all-American idea that the outcome is yours alone and you’re the only one in control (you know… bootstraps).
Science tells a different story. Ungar defines resilience as the process of navigating the resources you need and then negotiating to deliver them in a way that truly fits your life (Ungar & Theron, 2019). His motto is two Rs: rudeness and resources. Rudeness is internal. problem solving, self regulationand some belief that tomorrow is worth showing. Resources are everything outside: a stable home, a job that makes sense, a boss who isn’t toxic, people who get you. None of them just do anything. Rudeness makes you reach for opportunities; good resources is what you optimistic enough to reach. Take one away and the other will starve.
A mistake almost everyone makes
When people leave a will story, they tend to overcorrect. If it’s not all internal, it must be all social. So give a struggling employee a high salary or a yoga mat, and something is bound to stick.
Ungar told me that this is the trap he’s seen people fall into the most. career. Data does not support the whole social story any more than it supports the whole internal one. Dropping every intervention you can think of on a person is just guessing with a bigger budget.
What evidence rewards is concrete. Whether a given factor is relevant generally depends on the individual’s risk profile, context and culture (Ungar et al., 2012). In his field, there is a principle called equality: many different paths can lead to a healthy place.
So there is no universal gear. For this person, in this situation, there is something right today.
Here are two examples he gave me about being far from each other.
Imagine being an emergency room doctor. High pay, brutal days and some kind of pain: moral damagethe care of moving patients so quickly, you can’t give any of them the care you were trained to give. What gear helps here? No raise and no more rest time. These doctors were burned because stress the job allowed them to truly care for patients the way they wanted to. What helped was almost embarrassingly simple and human. Doctors made a deal: When someone got a case that really deserved it attentioncolleagues slowly absorbed the volume and management agreed not to penalize a single person in these efficiency figures.
Then there is the mother of three children who has done everything right. Night school. Retraining program. Encouragement save He was ready to get out of years of poverty and couldn’t move, and what was holding him back wasn’t his mindset, and he didn’t have the time. He didn’t have a car. The case worker talked a dealer into losing an old beater as a bill, and a rusty car restored his independence. parentsand the entire arc of her family.
Give that car to a half million dollar doctor and it makes no sense. Give mom more time and you’ve solved a problem she didn’t have. From a distance, two struggles rhyme: despair, burna life that works well below capacity. Recently, they needed the opposite.
Personalization requires attention, care and empathy
Resistance to reading
My second book, Canceled, He argues with the same bone as Ungar. People fall into addictions and compulsions because something hurts underneath. I call that under the hook. Drinking, heavy porn use, the forced 70-hour work week are the only exits that reliably soothe the pain. We look at the exit because that’s the part we see. The hook is where the work really is.
Everyone wants to kill their behavior. But behavior is smoke, not fire.
Here it maps to Ungar’s data. Addiction is treated as a syndrome, not a disease. Disease has a cause. A syndrome is a cluster of symptoms that can come from completely different places, so a one-size-fits-all protocol fails. Two people can come in with the same behavior and need opposite things to recover.
I have been watching this game for almost 20 years. One person anxiety traces of A childhood that never sits still and the drug is stable. The next guy’s anxiety looks the same on paper, but it stems from burying every creative instinct they had in pursuit of success, and their drug is restoring the guitar.
This is what personal care is. Not a workbook that tells every struggling person to exercise on Monday and meditate on Friday. Yes, there are patterns. A large number of them are often found. But the patterns only tell you where to look. The thing is that a specific person is directed to a resource that really means something to them and targets their specific hooks. And it almost always takes an outside set of eyes. We’re all terrified of looking down on our lives.
The leaders I work with would never put themselves in a sentence that is in addiction treatment. The cars are the same. Every year the same note hits 360 and they still can’t get over it. Standard advice: be more accessible, throw a team barbecue, book a workshop. For some of them, it is completely backwards. They are a type of excavator that works shoulder to shoulder in a joint problem better than any other activity designed to produce a joint.
What to do with it
The move is not to try everything. It’s finding one or two things that will ruin the rest.
If you are helping someone, map the entire system before you touch the sign. In fact, what is the barrier in each layer? Internal capacity, relationships, environment, resources, meaning. Anything they complain about is rarely the real thing.
So go gear hunting with gear. Move one factor just right and it will spread and fix things you’ve never put your finger on. The car raised her mother’s upbringing and her optimism at once. The coverage agreement restored the confidence and engagement of physicians. You’re not looking for the biggest deal. You are looking for the one who advises everything. Big domino.
For more information on hidden drivers behind patterns that we don’t change, see my book Idle.
