An Interview with Linda Hoopes, PhD
Interview by Gila Hayes
The Network’s educational efforts focus on proactive preparation to better cope with the aftermath of using force in self defense. This month, I had an opportunity to learn how to build and practice resilience not only for life and death emergencies, but to move more easily through life’s little storms. Because that’s an attribute from which we could all benefit, I asked Linda Hoopes to share some of her knowledge and experience with our members. Linda is a psychologist, author of several books about proactive resilience and the head of the Resilience Alliance. Some years ago, she combined the concepts of proactivity and resilience into a single word, “prosilience,” that I think also describes the mindset we’d like to build in Network members.
Our conversation follows, and for members who prefer streaming video, please browse to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gjuCbk0PeyI to learn from Linda in that format.
eJournal: I’ve got a lot of questions, Linda, but we should start by learning about your professional work, as well as how you came to walk our parallel path of self-defense preparation.
Hoopes: My background is in the field of industrial and organizational psychology, which is the application of psychology to workplaces and practical things. It got its start way back in the first World War as we were trying to figure out how to match people’s different skills and abilities to different roles. It is a very research based, quantitative field.
My work has intersected with this world of armed citizens because of my husband, who is a retired psychology professor as well, but also has become very active in the world of armed citizens. He was involved in the National Tactical Invitational (NTI) years ago. I got to know a number of people and participated in some of the events there and did some training.
I got my doctorate and was a professor in organizational behavior, statistics, and research methods for a few years. I then went into the consulting world and worked as research director for a company focused on organizational change. I got started looking at resilience by trying to understand why some people seem to move through change more easily than others. I started learning what differentiates people who seem to move smoothly through upheaval. Over time, the model I built added what we know about the different kinds of challenges people face, including all different kinds of challenges, not just organizational change. Armed citizens are a set of people for which I have great respect. I’ve gotten a chance to look at the kinds of challenges that we armed citizens face that call on our resilience.
eJournal: That’s a big topic. In 2017 I read and reviewed your book, Prosilience. It covers a lot of ground and more than anything, it taught me so much about how, faced by an emergency or a challenge, we may get caught in a reactive, emotional loop and make trouble worse. I was intrigued by the positive, structured responses you wrote about. I hope we can talk more about those today.
The big question, I think, is how to prepare our minds for adversity. Our members practice physical skills a lot, draw and fire, move off the line of force, and other life-saving skills. While mindset is a very complex issue, we have fewer opportunities to build our mental skills. One thing I value about you is how, when the challenge is so big that we don’t know how to resolve it, here’s Linda with Challenge Maps!
Challenge Maps teach us about issues that seem too big to get around. Could you tell us a little bit about Challenge Maps, how they work to get us “unstuck” and moving toward solutions.
Hoopes: They do that, but they do something else, as well. I have found that when the topic of resilience comes up these days, a lot of people roll their eyes and they say, “I don’t want to hear about resilience. I don’t want to be any more resilient so just stop throwing so much stuff at me.”
There’s a lot of evidence that says that resilience is not an attribute or a characteristic we have. Resilience is a set of things that we DO as we encounter the different kinds of challenges that we face. Resilience is actually a verb.
I’m really glad you brought up the Challenge Map because many times we think of resilience just in terms of the bad things that happen to us, but the idea behind the map is that we face a whole landscape of challenges: some we choose, some are short in duration, and some are long. If resilience is a verb describing how we navigate all these challenges, it cannot just be one thing.
The Challenge Map basically has two parts. On one side, we look at how long a challenge lasts. Some are very short, right? You’re driving in traffic, and someone cuts you off and you get your brain back online and everything’s fine. You moved through that quickly.
Other challenges last longer. Imagine being in a shoot house at NTI. You face a challenge that lasts for some period of time and then you get through it and on the other side you get feedback and learn. There are other challenges that last months, years, decades, or the rest of our lives. Those include things like having an aging parent or a child with special needs or a physical challenge and last longer periods of time.
This is important because we use different tools at different stages. When a challenge is short, it’s really much more about bringing ourselves back to a state of center and breathing through it. As challenges get longer, oftentimes they involve more thinking, problem solving, and figuring out. Even longer challenges often become questions of energy sustainability. How do we keep our energy going over the long haul? That’s one dimension of challenges. We need all different kinds of tools, the short-term tools, the medium tools, the long tools.
Challenges come from all different kinds of places. Some challenges come to us because there are bad people in the world who are out to harm us, but there are others, too. There are challenges that come to us because we get older. There are challenges that come to us because hurricanes come and blow down our houses. There are challenges that come to us because we choose them. I have a cousin who ran a mini-Ironman the morning of his wedding. Well, that’s not a challenge that somebody made him do. He did it because it was fun. There are people who do other extreme sports.
There are challenges that come along with the things that we choose. Imagine someone who’s chosen to go into the Special Forces. Maybe they didn’t do it because it was challenging, although I think some do. They’ve chosen this path, and it brings physical and emotional challenges. There are many challenges that are part of what we’ve chosen to do.
I think becoming an armed citizen is a challenge that we take up because we believe it’s the right thing to do. It brings certain challenges with it, including some of the things you talked about – training and mental preparation.
To me, resilience is a verb. It encompasses all different kinds of challenges that we might face. The challenges that we choose are a great place to practice.
eJournal: The alternative to practice, I think, is having a challenge thrust upon us and not knowing what to do. We could have had all these great practice sessions. What if all it took was a little bit of daring to say, “I’ll take on this task that seems like too much and I’ll see how I do with it?”
Hoopes: The small challenges are a great place to practice for the big ones. It’s like going to the range, right? Those little things we practice make habits automatic, train our minds and our hearts and our bodies to be in the right place, so we do better when things come to us. Prosilience work is advanced preparation that builds the mindsets and the muscles that we use when we encounter challenges.
eJournal: We need to stop thinking, “It’ll never happen to me,” and think instead, “Well, maybe it will, so what will I do?” That stops the thought, “I was victimized. I couldn’t do anything about it.” If we can say, “I prepared for this danger. I did as I was trained and I made the best result I could,” don’t we come out on the other side a little less damaged than if we were just swept along out of control?
Hoopes: Absolutely, and I think being able to anticipate the challenges that we might face lets us have a realistic picture of what those might look like. I was reading some of the interviews you did with William Aprill about getting into the mind of some of the people that we might encounter. Somebody else might have completely different motives for what they’re doing.
We often think of resilience as being tough, as fighting our way back. Actually, resilience shows up in three ways. Sometimes we are resilient when we stay alive and keep harm from getting worse. We may not bounce back immediately from some situations where, if we are resilient, we get through and protect our loved ones and take care of ourselves. Then, sometimes resilience is about getting back to the way things were or feeling like we recovered. Sometimes challenging experiences allow us to grow as an outcome of resilience. We go through a tough time, we become a better, stronger person because of it, and then we can turn around and help other people and bring that strength into the world in a new way.
eJournal: Massad Ayoob uses the analogy of scar tissue when he says that people who have suffered bad things come out stronger. I’d rather not get stronger that way, so your idea of using minor challenges as training makes me interested in specific work to exercise armed citizens’ resilience. Didn’t you draw us an armed citizens’ Challenge Map when you and I started talking about an interview?
Hoopes: Yes, and I continued to evolve it since sending you a draft. What are challenges that people in our part of the universe face? Let’s just take a simple challenge: de-escalating a conflict.
If we walk into a situation and something starts to spin up, we need to be in a position where we don’t see shooting somebody as the first option, right? We need to have the skill to think, “How do I de-escalate this? How do I calm myself down?” That’s one example of how we anticipate and practice and prepare for a challenge. There are a number of other challenges; we could make a whole list.
Here’s another one: I’ve had some great dialogue with Claude Werner about how spouses and partners work together to plan. If there are multiple people in a household, they need to have agreements about how they’re going to respond if there’s a home invasion or if something happens when they go out to dinner.
There’s a whole list of challenges that we could come up with. It would be fun to brainstorm with the community about what folks see as the main challenges that armed citizens are likely to run into.
One challenge, of course, would be the aftermath of a violent encounter. I know that this organization is really designed to put some resources in place to help people who might find themselves in that situation, so they’re not going it alone.
I think that training for real life situations is a really important challenge that we need to put in front of ourselves. For me, I race sailboats and that’s my resilience gym. You can’t control everything: things come up, you get surprised, the weather’s not what you thought it was going to be or some other boat comes along. For me, sailing is a great place to practice resilience, because I get to practice resetting myself. I get to practice using a bunch of different muscles.
I use sailing to notice how I respond in stressful but not life-threatening moments and then use that to build my sense of how I respond in those situations. If you want, I can talk a little bit about what I see as the resilience muscles that we use to deal with challenges.
eJournal: Yes, and first, let’s highlight something important you mentioned when you said, “calming yourself.” You used a de-escalation scenario as an example, and I’ve worked with people who did not have the gift of lowering the temperature in the room, who amp it up, who talk back, who pick at people until there is a real fight. I’ve always sought to bring the temperature down. I’m always looking to learn from people who have that skill. How do we deal with our internal dialogue? How do we model de-escalation so others feel calm, too?
Hoopes: There’s actually a word for that. It’s called co-regulation. That’s the skill set we use to bring ourselves to a state of calm. As humans, we are built to co-regulate. Have you ever seen a squalling baby that calms down when its mother picks it up and it sees her face? We are built to co-regulate. It almost doesn’t matter who it is, if we are in the presence of another person who is calm, that has a calming effect on our own central nervous system. You always have the opportunity to be that calm person.
Are you familiar with the term self-regulation? If you can be the person who knows how to breathe, take a deep breath, and get your shoulders down out of your ears, you actually have a very positive ripple effect on the people around you.
eJournal: Does self-regulation depend on knowing yourself?
Hoopes: Absolutely. Sometimes you get feedback from other people about how you responded to stressful situations, too, and you get a chance to learn.
eJournal: Dithering is a failing that John Farnam has done a good job of defining. When we dither, we flit from one thing to another, and we resolve nothing. Can resilience prevent dithering?
Hoopes: When we encounter a challenge, we can choose from three different strategies. One strategy is adjusting to what’s happening. We can recognize that maybe we’re not in control and we just need to figure out what to do, how to adapt ourselves to that situation.
There’s another strategy that’s about changing things. In it, I’m going to act and I’m going to influence this situation. There’s a third strategy that I’ll get to in a minute, but I think sometimes we go back and forth between “should I adjust myself to this situation?” or “should I decide to step in and change it?” That could be one of the dithering zones, right? Moving more quickly to that place of decision is the solution. None of us likes to be in a situation where we’re not in control. We need to be responsive to the situation rather than trying to influence it.
Sometimes, it’s important to recognize that just rolling with it, at least for right now, is going to be more effective than trying to fight. Who was it that said, “When they get out the duct tape, it’s time to make your move?” You need to have those mental triggers about when it’s time to move, even though you’re not sure that you know exactly what you’re going to do. Some of dithering is just knowing what your trigger points are for deciding to move or deciding not to move, to just wait and let things play out.
eJournal: I’m reminded of Jeff Cooper’s writings about triggers: you pre-decide, “if they do X, I will do Y.”
Hoopes: Reframing is the third strategy. Here we tell ourselves a different story about what’s going on. Let me give you an example that doesn’t come from the armed citizen world. I play Irish music with a band sometimes. When I get ready to go on stage, I get the butterflies and I feel really nervous. Sometimes I feel that way before a sailboat race, too.
One day I talked to a professional performer who said, “Look, what you’re feeling in your body is just adrenaline. You are labeling it as fear, but it’s actually just the same as excitement. The same process is going on.”
How you interpret a situation changes if you tell yourself a different story. You can say, “Okay, this is just adrenaline in my body, and I can interpret it as excitement, or I can interpret it as fear.” That changes the available responses. Sometimes reframing changes a problem into an opportunity and you see a door that opens. In really tough and difficult situations, the door opens in ways that we can break through, then we can get on the other side of the challenge and come up with better and stronger responses.
Practice seeing a situation from multiple sides and in multiple ways helps, because it’s very easy for our minds to get stuck about what’s wrong. Being able to take different perspectives, to see different points of view, also enables us to reframe more quickly and take advantage of hidden opportunities.
eJournal: Reframing works when taking tests. I’ve heard Mas Ayoob tell shooters getting ready to qualify, “When you’re nervous and have the tremors, think of it as getting your supercharge. You’ve got your supercharge.” That adrenaline is just giving you power. To some degree, surviving a critical incident is similar. You need that supercharge to be superwoman for a few minutes.
Reframing for longer term problems reminds me about your structure of Six Challenges. For example, maybe we get transferred to a different job where we have to use public transit and there’s lots of crime on the commuter train. Still, everybody in that community uses the train to get to work. Can we reframe that?
How do I plug into others who are facing the same challenge? Am I going to end up the richer, not in terms of money, although hopefully the job is worth it, but is my life going to improve if I embrace this challenge? Unlike response to an attack, this challenge might be very long-term, so the timing matters when I choose solutions.
Hoopes: In the example you just gave, there is a longer-term challenge. Is there a way to turn this into an opportunity? It may feel difficult, but is the possible outcome being more on the ground in my community? Is it a chance to learn some things that will be helpful in my work and in my situation?
I also like your idea about reaching out to other people who are in similar situations. Resilience is a team sport, and we don’t have to do it alone. As we are resiliencing our way through situations, we have different strengths. One of my husband’s strengths is that he’s a self-described defensive pessimist. He can look at a situation and figure out all the things that could potentially go wrong.
I’m an optimist. I think about all the things that could go right. As we face different kinds of challenges, we can leverage each other’s strengths. When I’m feeling down, he can bring in his positive energy. There are muscles that we can team up on as we work our way through challenges.
These are some of the tools that are in the Prosilience book. Let’s walk through some that we use. The first muscle that we use is positivity, but not stupid positivity. This is not pretending there are unicorns! The Army resilience program talks about spotting the good or even embracing the suck. In the midst of challenging situations, are you able to see where there’s an opening? Where there’s some hope? Not pretending that things aren’t what they are but choosing deliberately to not waste energy in worry and rumination. See if there’s something that’s worth stepping forward into.
Then there’s a confidence muscle we use to know that we have what it takes to survive, to master challenges and move through situations. Be careful because it’s easy to overuse some of these muscles.
Then there’s a muscle that’s about priorities. Maybe this is a partial answer to your question about dithering. We need to know what’s most important to us. We need to know whether the money in our purse is more important than our life, right? Do we care if somebody steals our car versus the risk of being dead? People versus things is one of our priorities. Another priority is making sure we take the time to practice, making time for the things that are most important. We use the priority muscle to align our time and energy with our greatest, highest values and to make sure that we’re doing what we believe is most important.
There’s a creativity muscle. This is the muscle of being able to open up your mind and think of different options, of not getting stuck in one way of thinking about things. Moving off the X is an example of exercising creativity. We need to continually be okay in the ambiguity of not having a right answer, of being able to keep the brain moving. Creativity also is the muscle that comedians use. If you’ve ever watched improvisational comedy, the comedians don’t use the word “but.” They use the word “and.”
“And” is the muscle of “many things might be possible at once.” “But” shuts things off. When we have a place in our mind that we can go to that says, “This might be true, and that might be true,” we open up options that we might not have seen if we believed that there was only one way to see it.
Then there’s the muscle of connection. Connection is the muscle about reaching out to other people. When we are “sheepdogs,” we see ourselves as protectors. The people who feel this responsibility sometimes don’t do a very good job of knowing when to ask for help. Other people often have resources, information, a hug, whatever we might need. If we see asking for help as a vulnerability, we miss out on a lot of resources.
There are two more muscles, and then we can play with these a little bit. There’s a structure muscle that we use to plan, to anticipate, to put processes and systems in place. Do we have our go bag ready? Do we know what the steps are if the fire alarm goes off? That is an efficiency muscle to use our energy more efficiently on predictable things, so we have more energy available to deal with the unpredictable. All of our planning work and all the scenario-based training build that muscle.
The last muscle is about experimenting. That’s trying stuff. That’s getting out there and doing the force-on-force training and seeing what happens, seeing what we can learn. Exercising experimentation is really just putting ourselves in situations where we may look like a fool so that we can get the experience and learn and cycle that knowledge back in.
I see these as a set of muscles that we can practice and build, that help us move through challenges with more ease and grace.
eJournal: I’m intrigued by the experimenting muscle’s willingness to be wrong or play the fool. We sacrifice so much when we have to be right, or in charge, or won’t seek help. There is a wealth of tools available – creativity, experimentation, or community, as examples – to us that I fear our pride keeps us from using. That’s a great pity.
Hoopes: It is. It absolutely is. Something that comes to mind as we’re talking is Vicki Farnam’s work about women learning to shoot and talking with her about the work she does. Sometimes we get into a spiral where one thing leads to another. We feel awkward and then we shoot badly and then we feel hopeless and then we tell ourselves a story that we’re no good. These cycles of energy can get into a really negative spiral. This happens to guys, too, not just women, but I was thinking of how many women go to class with the gun that their guy gave them because he thought it was the best gun for her, but it’s too big. I remember being in a class and I had my M&P 9 with the small backstrap on it, so it fits my hand. Somebody else picked it up and shot it. She said, “Wow, this is so much easier!”
Little things can cause us to start to doubt ourselves and get into a negative spiral, so to me – and there’s research that supports this – resilience is about anything that allows us to stop and keep that spiral from happening. Resilience can cause us to say, “All right, I’m going to stop and take a minute. Here’s how I’m feeling. Is what I’m feeling true? Is there another way to look at this?” Take a deep breath and try again, rather than getting into the spin that can lead into anxiety and depression, that just keeps on spiraling down.
eJournal: I wonder how that applies to giving away our choices to someone else. The lady who liked your M&P had someone else say, “Here, this is the gun you need,” so off she goes to class, and her growth is stifled. Compare that to having an attitude of experimentation, creativity, and lust to find truth for myself, not just saying, “The ‘authority’ said this is how it should be,” which probably is true for the “authority,” but is it true for me?
I don’t know how we wake up to those possibilities. I don’t know how we realize that we’ve got these muscles, all we’ve got to do is hit the resilience gym and build them up. How do we get that vision?
Hoopes: The kind of conversation that we’re having helps people recognize their muscles. A lot of times people think either they are resilient or they’re not; they’re an optimist or a pessimist; an introvert or an extrovert. We start putting ourselves in boxes, and yet every single one of these are muscles that we have inside us to practice, strengthen and build.
Coming right out of the gate, my structure muscle is not super strong, but now I know how to team up with people who bring that strength, and I also have learned how to use my own structure muscle better. Some of the solution is intention and some of it is small exercises. The “bicep curl” for priorities might be taking five minutes in the morning to think about the most important thing I’ve got to get done today.
Bicep curls for your connection muscle might be sending an email to someone you haven’t talked to in a while. Any little thing that you do that starts to rewire your brain, that starts to change your thinking, makes that muscle more available to you when you need it.
eJournal: We may be called upon to do things that we never thought we could do. Many years ago, my niece was an au pair in France. She was on public transit trying to get back to her family’s home, but some sketchy people were also on the train. She asked another woman on the train, “Can we ride together?” Reaching out can be really difficult for introverts, but she saw the necessity and did it. Those two young ladies did each other some real good that night. Neither would probably have spoken to a stranger under other circumstances. Wouldn’t it be nice, before you’re scared you are not safe, to know it’s okay to ask a stranger to team up?
Hoopes: Absolutely, and I also think we need to trust those feelings when something doesn’t feel right. Oftentimes we try to talk ourselves out of what we feel because there’s no logical reason to feel weird or awkward. Every time I’ve paid attention to that little voice that said, “You don’t want to be here right now,” it’s been right, even if it didn’t make any sense. We need to practice recognizing that and not being afraid to speak up.
eJournal: In rereading Prosilience in preparation to talk with you, I was forcefully reminded how much capability we have that we don’t realize we have. We need to prevent self-talk that says, “I could never do that.” Well, you know what? We might surprise ourselves.
Hoopes: I was talking about the negative spirals. Conversely, we can actually get into upward spirals where we try something and have a successful experience. It emboldens us to try the next thing and we get stronger as we go. My husband’s granddaughter just ran her first half marathon. She built herself up and of course, she had setbacks, but she went, and she ran it successfully.
I want to take a minute to talk about energy. Energy is what fuels our resilience muscles. Our physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual energy are all part of what we bring to the challenges that we face. Some take more physical energy, like running the 5K. Some take more mental energy, like learning and practicing things. Some take emotional energy, so when we’re working with our own emotions or other people’s emotions that are tough, we draw down our battery. Spiritual energy is used to deal with questions of ethics and values, to stay connected to something that’s larger than us. We call on our spiritual energy when we’re having to make tough decisions about who lives and who dies and choosing the right thing to do.
All of those energies are interconnected, so if we start to feel emotionally drained, sometimes we feel physically tired, too. If we’re feeling physically exhausted, sometimes our brains don’t work as well, or we start to feel a sense of hopelessness. We need a place to start. Starting with emotional and physical well-being is good to replenish our energy. We can’t fire those resilience muscles very well when we’re really depleted of energy.
eJournal: An interesting facet of replenishment that seems counterintuitive, and yet I’ve seen it work too many times to discount, is reaching out instead of withdrawing and resting. Some years ago, I interviewed a police officer about a really awful post-shooting experience and lawsuit. Shortly before the interview, his counselor had advised him to start telling others what he’d endured. I learned when your spirit is as low as you think it can be, just making things better for somebody else is an amazing boost up.
Hoopes: I think it goes to the side of resilience that is about growth. It’s about putting ourselves out of our comfort zone in the service of growth. I also think it’s about spiritual energy. I think that desire to give back to the world, that sense that we’re part of a larger community and that if we can turn around and use what we’ve learned to strengthen other people, that’s part of our spiritual quest to bring our best selves to the world.
eJournal: Resilience is a big subject. It’s just huge. What would you like us to take away from our time together today?
Hoopes: The idea that we can intentionally build our challenge readiness. That we can be aware of and practice and strengthen a set of mindsets and muscles and strategies that will be useful no matter what kind of challenge we face, and that it’s actually the small challenges and the challenges that we intentionally put ourselves in that are the best training ground. Take the time to learn from them.
eJournal: Your expertise is so far outside of the world that I live in that I don’t know if I failed to ask you the things that you wish I’d asked. What should we have talked about that I didn’t think of?
Hoopes: What a great question. Okay, I’ll give you two. One is, “What are you working on next, Linda?” And what I’m working on next is taking sets of challenges that particular groups of people might face and adding the Prosilience framework on top of it to help them.
I co-authored a book that’s called, Embracing Another Normal, that’s written with a woman who is the mother of a profoundly disabled adult child, who also does a lot of work for parents who are raising kids with disabilities. In the book, we laid out some common challenges that parents in that situation might face and told some stories and overlaid some of the resilience framework that I talked about here. It’s very helpful for people facing that particular challenge. I’ve got a series of those books going. I’m working with a woman who’s a 25-plus year stage four pancreatic cancer survivor. We talk about challenges facing people with significant medical illnesses. That’s one thing that I’m working on.
The other thing that I’m working on concerns things in our environments that affect our resilience. Think about the culture of an organization. Think about the experimenting muscle. Imagine you’re in an organization and you want to experiment with something, and you might fail. In some organizations, failure is punished; others see failure as an opportunity for learning. Guess which one’s easier to practice strengthening the experimenting muscle in.
There are some environments where it’s not okay to ask for help. In other environments, teaming up with people is considered a great strength. Leaders can create environments that let people stretch and flex and strengthen their muscles. That’s another important thing I’m working on, because at the end of the day, I want to help people spend as little energy as possible on little challenges so that we can spend more energy on the big challenges that we’re in this world to take on. The world needs people who are ready to take on big challenges.
We only have one supply of energy, so the more energy we waste on challenges that are not meaningful, the less energy we have for bringing the world what it really needs, which is people who are ready to step up to challenges.
eJournal: I should have asked, “What are you going to do next, Linda?” and you would have told me, “I’m going to change the world,” and you know what? You’ve given us the tools to come right up beside you and see what we can do, too.
Hoopes: I look forward to hearing stories from people, because this is a dialogue that we could carry on with input from the community, as well.
eJournal: Now you’ve got us thinking, I’m sure that members are asking, “Wow, what can I do with my resilience muscles?” Thank you for sharing a little bit about yourself. Thank you for sharing your work. Going in, I had no idea the depth and breadth of it.
Hoopes: Thank you for inviting me. This has been really fun.
_________
Linda Hoopes is an organizational psychologist who writes and teaches about resilience, organizational change, and team effectiveness. She’s also a sailor, musician, photographer, and family historian. You can learn more about her and her work here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lindahoopes/