Lessons - How She Transformed Trauma into Strength | Niyc Pidgeon - Founder of Unstoppable Success

In this lessons episode, delve into practical evidence-based tools rooted in positive psychology to navigate adversity and heal from trauma. Learn how to build resilience, manage stress, and find clarity even in the face of life's toughest challenges. Discover how cultivating positivity and meaning can help you overcome obstacles, set impactful goals, and unlock your full potential. And when you're actually, when somebody comes to you, and I want to highlight that you are an exceptionally positive person, at least we're talking right now, you seem exceptionally positive, but the topics and not the topics of things that have happened to you over the course of your life are not light things. So I have notes here and please correct me if I'm wrong here, but you've obviously been bullied, you attempted at one point to take your own life, you lost three friends to suicide and you were a victim of sexual assault or end or rape. Is that correct? These are all correct. So when you adopt a positive psychology mindset, these are horrendous things that you're still functioning, you're still excelling and obviously operating at an exceptional level. So what are the tools? What are some of the tool kits, the tool sets that you use to overcome some of these things? And I want to highlight the things that have happened to you and occurred in your life because if you think about what somebody in the business goes through, the large not everybody, but the large majority of people have not had these many horrible things happen to them. So if somebody is struggling because they lost an RFP or they didn't raise around a funding, it almost seems trivial now compared to the stuff that has happened in your life that you're still very capable of overcoming. So if I can apply the tool set to somebody who's struggling in their business and stressed, because a silly reason like maybe they shipped the wrong product or something like that, obviously when you look at how you've applied it to your life, it's very useful and very practical and obviously very much works skill set that you should take on and understand. So what are the tools that you've included in your life and what you teach over? Well, I feel like I could literally sit and talk about this all day. It feels like very fulfilling for me to be able to both share the science, but also share it from a perspective of not just being a person that's used to go from good to great, but to use it from going from really being very, very stuck and scared and uncertain, and being able to go on and perform better than ever before. And I always say it's not in spite of challenge, but it's because of them. And I think something that's important to recognise is that everybody experiences challenge and adversity in a different way. So the bias that we have in our brains means that some people really do feel things more and some people experience small things, and there's really, really big things. And what positive side it feels like it's choking, even if it to someone else, it doesn't seem like a big thing. It could feel like maybe that raise was actually something that kept you up and caused you to get stressed out and anxiety and lack of appetite and all the horrible things that come with massive amount of stress. Yeah, exactly. And I think it's one of the things that positive psychology teaches is that you can build resilience and you can build your status psychological resources so that you can weather the storm and you don't just have to feel like you get beaten up by life all of the time, but you feel like you really do have a higher level of capability. So to get super specific and super granular, I'll tell you about that theory, first of all, and then I'll go into some of the tools. So the theory or one of them that I'm talking about is the theory of positive emotions and the ability that positive emotions have to broaden and build. So when we experience the tactile end of emotions like joy, like excitement, enthusiasm, gratitude, love, we open up our thinking. So let's say someone's doing a raise and they're super stressed out, what happens is your cognition shuts down. So it's like very, very hard for you to come up with creative solutions or for you to see the bigger picture. So what would benefit is actually practicing a positive psychology intervention and they're super simple, really easy to do, reaching for a tool so that you can create a shift and you can feel that at first so that it opens up your mind ready for the intake of information. You build relationships more quickly and you reach your goals faster as well. So that is the broadening, the building area of positive emotions. It says that when you experience more positivity or positive emotions, you're then able to almost like put those the effects of positive emotions into a bank. So let's say you experience more humor or more laughter, you're able to put those resources into a bank. So your psychological toolkit, when you need it, your bank account, you can actually reach into it and you can make a withdrawal, which is the resiliency that actually gets you through the hard times. So some of the things that I've reached for when I've been really struggling. So let's say I'm having a, I'll give you a few examples. So let's say I'm having a really, really bad day because positive psychologists still have bad days, okay? I used to feel like I had to be like 100% on all of the time and I recognised through my personal challenges that no one can be 100% happy all of the time and it's actually not about that. So what I might do, let's say I'm feeling overwhelmed or I'm feeling like I don't have motivation to do my work, I might pull a tool out which is like the gravestone exercise. So it's a couple of minutes, you can do it as a meditation, you can do it as a written exercise, both ways are super powerful and it asks you to consider a time where you're at the end of your life and you're looking back on everything that you have done. You are at your own funeral, you see your own headstone on your grave and you're seeing and witnessing what people are saying about you and what you're being remembered for. So the intervention asks you to consciously create what it is you want to be remembered for your legacy and to really connect with that and write it down and it's such a powerful exercise. We deliver it within some of our coaching sessions and it's the real tear jerker. It's the one where people remember the meaning and the purpose or they connect with it for the first time and when you connect with that meaning and purpose, it really energises you. So if you feel and like you're lacking in motivation, that's a really good tool to go to. If you feel and like you are overwhelmed and you don't have solutions and you feel and like you don't know the way through, you might pull a tool like the hope map. So the hope map gives you a six step process to follow when you want to reach your goals and the good thing about positive psychology is even though it sounds like it's a soft science and it's like an adaptation or something that is like light or fluffy, it's all grounded in evident and research. So positive psychologists are literally tried and tested these tools in various different ways to figure out which order thing to work in and what you must do in order to create the result. So the hope map has got six steps. They tested it with four, they tested it with five, they looked at what it is that makes people reach their goals and it's actually the last two steps in the process. So step number one of the hope map is to decide on what the goal is that you want to focus on. Step number two is to apply something called divergent thinking theory which asks you not to come up with the number one solution, the goal, but instead to come up with five or ten and get creative and play with the pathways that could be possible to help you get to that goal. Step number three is to identify any obstacles that might get in your way. So what happens when we set goals is we get into optimism, we get into excitement and that can actually prevent us from reaching our goals because if we get thrown off track and we're not prepared for it then we can get disheartened or we might give up. So if you can identify the obstacles and then consider what the pathways might be through those obstacles that can actually help you reach your goals faster. But you then need to lock it in with the final two steps. So step number five is to consider what the why is behind the goal in the first place. And step number six is to consider who you need to shower or who you need to ask for support from in order to reach the goal. Thanks for tuning in. If you found this valuable don't forget to hit that subscribe button so you never miss an episode and if you want to dive deeper into this conversation check out the links in the description to watch the full episode. See you in the next one.