Lessons - Post-Traumatic Growth Reality | Niyc Pidgeon - Award-Winning Positive Psychologist

In this lessons episode, explore how positive psychology transforms adversity into resilience and sustainable performance, discover how evidence-based tools build emotional strength and clarity under pressure, understand how structured practices unlock motivation and creative problem solving, and uncover how resilience-driven mindsets create lasting, personal, and professional growth. 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 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 a 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 a round of 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 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 it 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 that they've never 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 in 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. There's really, really big things and what positive, and it could feel 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 teachers is that you can build resilience and you can build your set of 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 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 top tail 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 the 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 a hundred percent on all of the time and I recognised through my personal challenges that no one can be a hundred percent 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 if 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'll be 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're feeling like you're lacking in motivation, that's a really good tool to go to. If you're feeling like you are overwhelmed and you don't have solutions and you're feeling 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 meditation or something that is like light or fluffy, it's all grounded in evidence and research. So positive psychologists have literally tried and tested these tools in various different ways to figure out which order things 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 to 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 share with or who you need to ask for support from in order to reach the goal. Beautiful so that now you these steps are incredible and and when you apply these to the person is just trying to get through life it makes a lot of sense why it would be helpful to incorporate this into your day today. But obviously entrepreneurs have an extra level of stress sometimes where I feel like these steps are incredibly useful because I find that entrepreneurship is very lonely and sometimes depressing venture to go on. Not to say that work is easy for anybody but I mean entrepreneurs find themselves alone and usually isolated and finding a hard time talking to people about the things that they're going through. And I guess my more of a point but also a question at the same time when you talk about positive psychology why did you in particular decide to build a brand in the business around teaching this to entrepreneurs was it a niche that you felt needed attending to was it and I also know you work with a lot of coaches as well like you probably could work with you know a venture back software somebody in SF but I mean you've chosen a certain avenue for the work that you do why is that why is this something that in particular a coach would need or a solo printer needs. For me it's the potential of the impact of the ripple effect. So there's been studied done specifically on positive psychology coaching where we look at the impact of a coach and a client having that relationship and what happens after that. So they found that every person that somebody who's received coaching comes into contact with they also increase their wellbeing. So it's really exciting for me when a student goes back into the home and they come back and tell me that their husband is now feeling better and their husband is performing better at work or their kids are coming and having conversations teenagers having conversations can you imagine it. So they're like super happy about that or there's like a five-year-old who practicing gratitude. So the power of that impact really excites me and it doesn't just stop that. So the study found that somebody who goes to like a positive psychology coaching and then goes out into their day-to-day life they will impact every single person that they come into contact with. So if they're going to stand in the line at the post office or waiting to go into the dentist the ripple effect extends far and wide. So I see it like an activation around the globe where the more people I can support to become positive psychology coaches the more people can receive positive psychology coaching and the more we can elevate the wellbeing and the performance of the planet because of that. So that feels exciting. 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.