Parental bereavement is widely acknowledged as the hardest of losses / to bear. // But I can tell you now / five years on / what I already knew from the research. // That you can rise up / from adversity. // That there are strategies that work. // That it is utterly possible / to make yourself / think and act in certain ways / that help you navigate / tough times. // There is a monumental / body of research on how to do this stuff. // Today I'm just gonna share with you / three strategies. // These / are my go-to strategies that I relied upon / and saved me in my darkest days. // There are three strategies that underpin all of my work / and they're pretty readily available to us all. // Anyone can learn them, / you can learn them / right here today. // So number one: / resilient people get / that shit happens. // They know / that suffering is part of life. // This doesn't mean they actually welcome it in. // They're not actually delusional. // Just that when the tough times come, / they seem to know / that suffering is part of every human existence. // And knowing this / stops you from feeling discriminated against / when the tough times come. // Never once did I find myself thinking / why me? // In fact, / I remember thinking / why not me? // Terrible things happen to you just like they do / everybody else. // That's your life now. // Time to sink / or swim. // The real tragedy / is that / not enough of us seem to know this any longer. // We seem to live in an age where we're entitled to a perfect life where shiny happy photos on Instagram are the norm / when actually / as you all demonstrated / at the start of my talk, / the very opposite / is true. // Number two: / resilient people / are really good at choosing carefully / where they select / their attention. // They have a habit of realistically appraising situations / and typically managing to focus / on the things that they can change / and somehow / accept the things / that they can't. // This is a vital, / learnable / skill / for / resilience. // As humans, / we are really good / at noticing / threats and weaknesses. // We are hard-wired / for that negative / - we really, really good / at noticing them. // Negative emotions / stick to us / like velcro, / whereas positive emotions and experiences seem to bounce off like teflon. // Being wired in this way / is actually really good for us / and served us well from an evolutionary perspective. // So imagine for a moment I'm a cave woman and I'm / coming out of my cave in the morning and there's a saber-toothed tiger on one side / and a beautiful rainbow on the other. // It kind of pays for my survival for me to notice this tiger. // The problem is / we now live in an era / where we are constantly / bombarded by threats / all day long. // And our poor brains / treat every single one of those threats / as though / they were a tiger. // Our threat focus, / our stress response / is permanently / dialed up. // Resilient people / don't diminish the negative / - but they also have worked out a way / of tuning / into the good. //