Inspirations: The Basic Trust Principle & Believing in Growth

I was very scattershot about podcast listening, but have recently discovered them while traveling (no eyestrain during turbulence!) which means with my work travel I'm becoming a regular.  Have a long car ride to Palm Springs? Finally caught up on the entirety of Serial season 1.  So over this past weekend, I went through a number of the TED Radio Hour podcasts, and this one about Crisis & Response had a great mention of something I had never heard before.  One of the segments is about a man who lost all of his money in the Madoff ponzi scheme.  He spoke about how he finally connected with others who lost everything who had decided to think about it differently....they had embraced with gratitude that the experience had made them more connected to others than ever before.  He ultimately learns as well to overcome the blaming and shaming of the experience, determining that just because he lost all of his money to Madoff, he didn't want to surrender who he was as a person as well.  

When pivoting towards advice for others to "prepare", he says two things which I agree with whole-heartedly:

1. Know that you will have a crisis in your life.  That the concept of living a charmed life free of crises is not possible for anyone, so that when something does take place that unbalances you, you only experience the shock of what your are actually losing or dealing with...not the amplified shock of "I can't believe something like this could ever happen to me".  Ummm...YES. 
   
2. He quotes a principle called basic trust, which I had not heard of before and am already 200% in support of:

(Read more after the jump)

"...what it says is you believe that whatever happens in your life is exactly what needs to happen to make you the person you need to become.  It means that whatever happens to you, you can grow from it, you can learn from it, you can get stronger from it.  And if you take this idea that you can grow through adversity, and not just through adversity, certainly what's going to happen to me is that I'm not going to be the same a couple years from now as I am now.  Most people, the way they make the biggest changes is when life pushes back."
   -Matt Weinstein,   "What Lessons Can We Learn from Losing our Life's Savings?", TED Radio Hour

I've experienced a lot of tumbles the last few years, both personal and professional, and this right here is the best advice I've ever heard, and the advice that made a big "unlock" for me.  I spent so much time fighting the changes that were happening to me.  Internally I thought that I could ignore life giving me pushback...that I could redirect it, rise to the challenge, overcome, etc.  But sometimes when you're getting pushed around and kicked down, you have to take a step back and realize that insanity is continuing to do the same thing and expecting a different outcome.  I had to learn the hard way that the change that needed to happen was within me.  I had to get knocked down, dragged out to realize that I had become the problem, my unwillingness to look and think differently.  But what has been so amazing and wonderful is that when I finally did embrace the change, when I finally went with the current and let it take me where it needed me to go instead of banging my head against the rocks....that a whole new world of experiences and warmth and love were waiting for me.  Spot on, Matt Weinstein.  Spot on my friend.

So the basic trust principle is actually from a psychologist named Erik Erikson who was a contemporary of Freud, but instead of going for the sexual phases of development, oriented his stages to social (aka psychosocial stages of development).  I'm going to spend a LOT more time with this theory because I think it's really onto something (rather, I've finally grown enough personally to see that it was onto something before I'd ever heard of it....haha. You get the idea!)

Since I like to end with fun and keep it light, kind of enjoyed this look at Erikson's eight stages of development through the lens of Pixar films.  Nice work interwebs!