Resilience

Resilience

Transcript for Resilience (full episode)

From Stanford University and KZSU, this is the Stanford Storytelling Project.

We're just supposed to look hot, like in your bikini, you weren't supposed to actually go in the water and swim.

But I did because I wasn't hot.

So, so I was, thank you.

On January 6th, 1912, almost exactly a hundred years ago, a young German meteorologist stood up in front of a European conference of geologists and declared that the continents of the earth were all once upon a time, a single landmass and that over the eons, they had broken up and drifted apart like a slowly separating jigsaw puzzle.

The young meteorologist told the crowd that the continents were in fact still moving, that the very land they stood upon in Europe was slowly gyrating away from other land masses like North America.

He had taken careful calculations and found, for example, that Greenland was a mile farther from Europe than it had been a hundred years ago.

Paris and Washington were separating by more than 15 feet per year.

Terra firma was in fact terra mobile, everything.

Even the continents were at sea.

This young man was Alfred Wegener, now known as the father of continental drift theory.

And he was essentially laughed off the stage.

Like Kepler and Galileo and Darwin, Wegener proposed a theory that countered almost everything people believed at the time.

Today, it seems utterly obvious that the continents were all one landmass.

How can anyone look at the map and not see that, right?

But when Wegener gave his presentation in 1912, the prevailing view of the earth was that it had formed in a molten state, cooled and contracted.

Its geologic features were the result of the contraction, like the wrinkles formed when a prune shrivels up.

This had created the ocean basins, mountain ranges, and other geologic features.

If the coastlines of some continents seem to eerily match the coastlines of other continents, that was seen as simply coincidental, namely because no one could imagine the earth moving.

And this view of the fixed earth, of fixed land masses, was just as entrenched as the earlier views of the earth as flat, or being orbited by the sun.

So it's no surprise that Wegener was so profoundly rejected.

What is surprising is that Wegener kept going.

In the few years after the 1912 conference, Wegener published his theory and was rewarded with reviews that called it a fairy tale and utter damned rot.

He was labeled a crackpot, a fraud, even a danger.

He was denied academic posts, research funds, and vilified by specialists in every field his theory touched.

But Wegener didn't care.

He voyaged all over the earth collecting data, followed and combined data from scholars in fields that barely acknowledged one another.

And despite overwhelming repeated abject rejection by nearly everyone that could matter, he kept going.

Mostly alone, mostly in the cold, far reaches of the earth, until he died on an expedition to Greenland in 1930 at the age of 50.

He didn't care that despite the vast amounts of evidence he compiled, people could not let go of their fixed worldview.

He kept going.

He was, in a word, resilient.

This is State of the Human, the radio show of the Stanford Storytelling Project, and I'm your host this week, Jonah Willihnganz.

Resilience is our theme this week, and we have five stories of people discovering resilience and how to become resilient.

In Wegener's day, people usually spoke of character, and just as most people felt continents were fixed, they'd also felt that character was fixed.

So you were either a resilient person or you weren't.

Today, we speak less of character and more of personality, something more malleable, and psychologists think of resilience as something all of us have the capacity for and that all of us can cultivate.

We can, in short, all become Wegeners.

In our first story today, a woman finds resilience at a young age in an unexpected place, a country club swimming pool.

In our second story, we visit a crucible of resilience, a call center where employees spend all day asking strangers for money.

In our third story, we visit with an academic advisor who shares her experience helping students develop resilience.

In our fourth story, we finally go to Burning Man and learn about the powerful kind of resilience one young man finds there.

And in our fifth and final story, a Stanford student decides to develop her resilience through a program its creator calls Rejection Therapy.

Stay tuned.

In our first story today, a Stanford student who we're going to call aimless focus recalls the moment in her childhood when she discovered her resilience, that she was a resilient person.

This story was recorded live at the True Stories series that is produced by Daniel Steinbach.

I guess this story is about self-knowledge.

When it really helps that you sort of like, you have a story that you can tell yourself about who you are, right?

And you go like, I'm that guy, right?

So like, that's right, that's who I am.

I know what I'll do now because I'm that guy, right?

So this is my story.

This is my story about that.

So I grew up in this area.

And when I was a kid, my parents had this membership to the Los Altos Country Club.

It's called the Fremont Hills Country Club.

But it's actually in Los Altos Hills.

So that's the really posh area where like the rich people in Silicon Valley live, in addition to Atherton.

And so it's a tennis and swimming and horseback riding club.

And it was a little, paying for the membership was a little bit outside of my parents' price range.

It was a little bit of a strain on the family finances.

And so we were definitely like, we were definitely like the poor sketchy people compared to the people at the club.

So like we weren't, we were really not able to make good use of the membership because we could swim in the pool, but it's not like we owned a horse.

So we couldn't do any of the horseback riding.

And I wasn't like waspy enough to play tennis.

So we didn't do that either.

So the only thing I did was swim.

And I was actually really good at swimming, but being good at swimming was like not really very cool.

Cause like, so the pool was like the meat market of like the Los Alves Country Club.

You weren't really supposed to go in the water.

You were just supposed to like show off how you got plastic surgery and you were like some rich guy's second wife and you were hot or whatever.

You're supposed to like parade by the pool.

Or if you were like my age and you were like a teenage girl or whatever, you were just supposed to be like, you were just supposed to look hot like in your bikini.

You weren't supposed to actually like go in the water and swim.

But I did cause I wasn't hot.

So I was, I was, thank you.

So I was, yeah, I was actually a really, really, I was actually a really, really awkward teenager.

I was kind of overweight and nearsighted, right?

And sort of hairy.

I think the worst story about puberty is the story that I heard from like vegan propaganda, which was like they inject turkeys with so many hormones that their breasts get so big that they can't get close enough to have sex.

I feel like this story just.

Sums up everything that's bad about puberty.

I was kind of hairy, but I was also sort of curvaceous and I had a lot of hair.

And the mean girls who were hot and wore bikinis, they said that I looked like Fabio with boobs, because it was kind of like all this puberty stuff going on at once, but my body was going crazy and couldn't decide whether it was male or female, so it had like hair, but it also had breasts.

And I also, because I was swimming so much, I had a lot of muscles, because I was actually a good, I was actually a really good swimmer, it's the only sport I've ever been any good at.

So like here, I can show you.

So I'm told, like I'm all, the grad student life has made me all scrawny now, right?

But like, I'm told that I still kind of have it in the shoulders, so suppose I go like this, right?

I used to have these giant shoulders from all of the swimming, and I could like blow anyone out of the water.

This was the age, this was like early teens when girls were kind of ahead of guys in their growth, right, so I was faster than all the guys.

I was faster than all the girls.

I was both male and female, so that was good.

I was good that I was faster than both, right?

So, but the thing was, of course, it was like not cool to be good at swimming.

It was not cool to like be able to get in the water and win races when we had meets with other clubs.

We lost every time, but we lost in this like genteel rich person manner, which was, I guess, what we were supposed to do.

I don't know.

So I was a really, really bad fit, and some of the girls, all of the girls, in the club were really mean to me.

And it caused stress in the, it caused stress in the family because I guess my dad kind of always thought that it was like my mom's job to like talk to me about fitting in with other girls, you know, and like becoming a woman, you know, and that kind of thing.

Because it was really awkward for him to have to say stuff like that.

So my dad told me many years later that at a swim meet, he walked past this group of girls and they were gossiping about me because I was wearing a bathing suit because it was the meet and I didn't shave yet, but I kind of needed to because it was past puberty.

And so I kind of had like tufts of hair everywhere.

And my dad heard them snickering at me and he felt really bad, but he felt like he couldn't say anything.

He was like, well, it's a mother's job to do this.

Like it's a woman's job to like take her daughter's, I can't talk to her about that kind of thing.

But it was hard.

I mean, I think it was awkward for my mom because she was the only not white person in the whole club.

And the first time I ever saw my mother cry was actually at this club because there was this other little girl.

This was when I was littler.

And she said something like, well, that woman can't be Melissa's mother because she isn't white, because I look like I'm white.

And her mother, who she was talking to, was like, well, honey, that's because she's adopted.

And so my mother started to cry.

Because I guess I was swimming so much that the chlorine bleached my hair so I looked like I was white.

I don't know, it's really hard to imagine now.

But anyway, okay, so yeah, I was on the swim team and I was the only person who was good.

And so I won all my events at every meet, always.

And it was kind of like, it was sort of a foregone conclusion.

Like it wasn't even exciting.

And nobody thought I was cool because I won.

They were just like, Melissa's perverse.

She always wins.

And so, but then one day we went to the club and I was with, my mother took me.

And I realized when we got there that I had forgotten my swimsuit.

So I guess my mom thought I brought it and I thought she brought it.

And so my event was just one of my events because I was in all of them and I always won all of them.

But my most important event, the event that I needed to qualify for Junior Nationals was like in five minutes.

So I had to borrow a swimsuit or I was in a position where I needed to borrow a swimsuit from one of the other girls.

And there was no way they were gonna lend me a swimsuit.

Because I was like disgusting and like hairy and gross and probably had a penis and stuff.

And so there was no way they were gonna lend me a swimsuit.

That would just be like, yeah, just no, right?

So I asked and they were like, yeah, forget it.

So I was like, well, and so my mother was like, I'll run home and get it.

And so she ran off and I was like, yeah, there's no way she's gonna get back in time.

So I was like, well, I really want to swim the meet.

I guess I could swim naked.

But I really, all of a sudden, I was just filled with this desire.

I was like, I always win.

I will win.

And it's just a matter of getting in the water because once I get in the water, I know I'll win.

So I went into the Lost and Found.

And the Lost and Found was really, really gross.

It was like this pile of stuff that people, it kind of smelled like an accident in the kiddie pool because there was a kiddie pool.

And so for years, people had been piling up stuff and it was like a little kid would have an accident in the pool and then his mother would just be like, oh God, and just take off his swimsuit and kind of throw it into the Lost and Found.

So this pile of stuff in the Lost and Found had been like marinating like for years.

And it smelled really, really bad in there.

And I had to dig to the bottom of the pile until I found this lady's swimsuit that was a little bit too big for me, but I knew I could get it over my large body.

Yeah.

So I was like, and it was kind of slimy, and it had been there for a long time.

It smelled really bad, and I knew that none of the other girls or really anybody in the whole world would ever put on that swimsuit, because it's like having, I mean, wearing a swimsuit is really intimate.

It's like a tongue on your skin or something.

And who knows where it's been, right?

But I was like, okay, well, I have to wear the suit in order to win, and I know that if I put it on, I'll win again.

And so I was like, I'm that guy or girl.

I'm the one who will do anything to get in the water and to swim and to beat you guys.

So I'll put it on, like I'm the guy who will put on the disgusting suit.

I will do it.

So I did it.

I put it on and it was gross.

And I jumped in the water and I won, of course.

So my mother and the other girls were like.

Because by then I was just like, well, I'm gonna still live it up, right?

So my mother came back and she had my suit and I had already won, right?

And I was still in the suit.

And I was just like, yeah, I don't need it anymore.

I'm just gonna wear this.

When I put on the suit, I don my true nature.

I know what I am.

So yeah, that's my story.

We often discover our resilience through rejection that is visited upon us.

But another way to get resilient is by putting yourself quite intentionally in the middle of lots and lots of continuous rejection.

In our second story today, producer Christy Hartman takes us to a place where rejection is the norm, where it can happen literally every minute, over and over and over.

This is the Stanford Call Center.

It's run by an independent contractor and staffed by Stanford students.

Their job?

They ask people for money.

When was the last time you called someone and asked for money?

How'd that go?

But believe it or not, some people do this for hours, every single day.

In this story, we'll meet Jessica and Jordan, two students that work at the Call Center and even seem to enjoy it.

They expect people to say no, and to avoid it, they've come up with a few strategies.

My name is Jordan Raymond, and I'm a junior graduating in June 012.

My name is Jessica Talbert.

I'm a senior graduating in June.

I'm very chatty, and I actually tend to be a lot more vulnerable because I guess my tactic was more to make myself vulnerable.

I remember my first boss.

This is a technique that I never forgot.

He was like, he'd ask them, so would you like to get involved with us for a gift of $500 tonight?

And they said, no, I can't do that because we're remodeling our house, and I just don't have any extra money.

And he would go, oh, you're remodeling your house.

That's great.

I'm glad that you're able to do something that you've dreamed about and that you really love.

And just like that, a lot of these students are getting to do something that they really love here at Stanford.

So maybe you can't get involved with us for a gift of $500, but how about a gift of $250 to help out these students who want to go abroad?

See how it links around?

It's called ALASC.

Actually, I don't remember exactly what ALASC stands for because it is an acronym.

Yeah, listen, acknowledge, support, and continue.

ALASC is all well and good when you're dealing with someone who is just remodeling their house, but a lot of students end up facing callers with even more intimidating reasons not to talk.

There's also quick little things that you get that are pretty funny.

You'll call, be like, hello, is Mr.

Richard there?

I'm having sex with my wife right now, what do you want?

My name is Michelle Powers, and I was the program manager at the Stanford Calling Center.

We had a few instances when students would call an alum, and we had a few people who would break down on the phone crying because they'd lost everything in the stock market.

So, I mean, what a burden to put on a 17-year-old.

Michelle doesn't work there anymore, but she was the one who'd come over with a Snickers bar and a sympathetic ear when rejections were worse than just no.

I called this man who graduated 1960-something, and he said that he didn't want to give to Stanford because it was too liberal, so I gave my normal spiel.

Giving to the Stanford Fund really doesn't support our politics here in any way whatsoever.

He was like, well, I'm mad that they have other histories, and I was like, what do you mean by other histories?

And he's like, they should never teach African history at a university.

And I was like, I tried to do my call center appropriate answer.

I was like, well, you know, we like to give our students a global level of education, so they're prepared to work with anyone that they come up to.

And he continued on saying, the only history you should ever teach in a school is European history or American history.

And I was like, you know, well, Stanford is one of those places that really appreciates diversity.

And he goes, I hate diversity.

And I just, I had no words.

There was nothing.

So I just said, okay, thank you, sir, goodbye.

And that was the only phone call that I've never been able to continue with.

Rejection is hard.

People quit.

Attrition is high at the call center.

Jordan, who you heard earlier, has seen most of the people she started with quit.

Most people can't hack it, but some people can.

Some people are good at being rejected.

Another supervisor who worked there while she was still a caller was talking to someone and it was a similar situation where the person was upset because he felt all these spaces for students were going toward minority students and he felt that it was just wrong that that was happening and that he felt that scholarship money shouldn't be directed toward minority.

It was just, like she dealt with it beautifully, but I mean, she was a student of color and she was here on full scholarship and her mother was disabled.

So it was just like, it couldn't have been more personal, but the hard thing is, again, being able to tell students, no matter what people say, you have to be professional, you have to be polished, you can't let it get to you.

So it turns out, rejection in these situations isn't just a rejection of giving money.

It can be, or it can feel like, a rejection of who you are.

It's really easy to tell on their first couple of phone calls, so you know, when everyone's in that awkward stage, you can kind of tell who's going to excel out of that awkward stage and who might stay there, and it just continues to get nervous.

It's very easy to tell the kids that have never had an actual job before, because they take it a lot harder to begin with.

It's very hard for them to adjust to that type of situation, but the kids who have had other jobs seem to do better and stick around longer.

Especially young girls who have been really happy and talkative, but they also have got this fierce competition in them.

They will be optimistic about their next call, and maybe they will suffer some losses, but they are looking for the win, the overall win.

So, part of the job is learning to defeat rejection, learning to turn no into yes.

But even for the best callers, no is what they hear over and over again.

No, no, no, no.

Why do it?

Why go through that?

What's the payoff?

Michelle has some ideas.

I spend a lot of time trying to convey to them how much this job will help them in the future.

Even if they don't go into sales, even if they don't go into marketing, even if they are in school for another 15 years, this will help you.

Rejection happens, and it's going to happen for the rest of your life.

If you can learn to deal with this now, I promise you this job is going to help you.

Please believe me that the skills you learn here, whether or not you're conscious of it, are going to benefit you in your life.

Please don't quit.

We deal with hundreds of little rejections every day, whether or not we know it.

I mean, just, you know, missing the toothbrush when you're squeezing toothpaste onto it.

I mean, that's a little rejection, in a way.

For Jordan and Jessica, Michelle's advice has proved right.

They say working at the call center has made them tougher.

Oh, my goodness, in so many ways.

The ability to take rejection is, like, it's rare, and I'm so happy that I have it.

Not only can you, like, hear no and quickly think of reasons why it actually should be a yes, convince them that it's a yes, but also when things are, like, are final, like, you can be okay with that.

Just like in your calls, like, maybe someone said no, okay, hang up, dial the next number, and then there's another opportunity right there.

I remember one of my friends told me once that we were talking and she told me no, and then I just kept talking to her about it until, like, until she said yes, and she's like, you think you just use call center tactics on me?

And I just, I didn't realize how much it, like, it permanates, like, how I, like, relate with my friends as well.

Maybe it's weird to think of working in a call center as training for life, but that's how Michelle sees it.

These kids are the trophy generation, you know, these are the, oh, you participated, here's a sticker.

And that's what they've been raised with.

And their parents have shielded them from this.

Parents shielded them, school shielded them, now college is shielding them.

And I forget the exact title of the book, but it's on my reading list, something about a generation of wimps.

And as unfavorable as that sounds, frankly, I think when you're not preparing people for this, that is what it breeds, you know?

And I have known people who went to the top schools who would become paralyzed when rejected because they were just so, it was just so beyond them that that could happen.

We focus so much on giving kids the best experience in academia, the best experience with research, the best professors, all the resources they need.

And I think we don't think about these soft skills that are a part of life that most other kids deal with fairly regularly, like rejection and resiliency.

So, you work at the Stanford Call Center, you've been dissed, rejected, you've eaten a lot of Snickers bars, but you've also found triumph, success.

When you look at the numbers, you've done pretty well.

Last year, Stanford raised over $700 million from donors.

So, you come into work every day.

You don't mind hearing no.

You know it's only a yes waiting to take shape.

Jessica Talbert graduated last spring in 2011.

Jordan Raymond is currently a senior at Stanford, Michelle Powers currently works at the business school.

Resilience is, in fact, getting a lot of attention these days in schools, mainly because educators have noticed that this quality is as or even more important than specific aptitudes.

No matter how well a student performs, at some point, they're likely to experience limits, and when they do, how they cope can powerfully affect both their work and their happiness.

In our third story today, we hear from an educator at Stanford who has created a new program to foster resilience in students.

What I know about our students is they're in a bit of a bind.

My name is Adina Glickman, and I'm the Associate Director for Academic Support at the Center for Teaching and Learning.

The world view that they've had to have to get here requires absence of failure.

You have to do super well in everything that you're doing, and failure is not an option, because then you won't get into Stanford.

So now they're at Stanford, and we're trying to impose on our students a very different mindset, which is try, fail, try again, explore, for the purpose of helping them develop intellectual richness and perspective, and they're not good at it, and well, why should they be?

There's a beautiful, I don't know where I've heard it, but I'm sure you've heard it, the story of the kid who sees the chrysalis trying to emerge as a butterfly, and the kid just feels so terrible looking at this struggle, so he peels back a little bit of the shell and helps the butterfly out a little bit, and it's still pushing and still struggling, so he tears a little bit more away and helps the butterfly come out, and the butterfly eventually struggles I mean, it's a story that actually struggles and plops out and then can't fly.

Because the muscle that it takes to fly is the one you develop while you're pushing yourself out of the prisonless.

And I think that's our kids.

They've been drinking air their whole lives, and now they're thirsty.

The Resilience Project, right now it's a collection of stories.

The focus of the stories are things people wanted that they didn't get.

Efforts to publish something, or efforts to get a job, or wanting to get a good grade in a class, or in one case we have a story about efforts to get funding for a startup.

And the resilience is manifest in what these people did with those rejections or setbacks or failures to get what they wanted.

At times where you feel like you've made a mistake, or you're in the process of doing something that's not going the way you want it to, there are always doors you can't see.

And sometimes it's a leap of faith to just say, okay, I know there are doors, but I have to be willing to proceed without knowing what's behind them.

I had a boyfriend in college that it was not a healthy relationship, but I moved in with him after college, and we lived in San Francisco, and broke up with him.

He's not a part of my present life, but boy, if I hadn't moved in with him and had this unhealthy relationship, I never would have discovered that San Francisco is the place, you know, this part of the country is where I want to live.

Never would have gotten there.

The way I met my husband was that my best friend at the time had a sister who lived in New Hampshire, and had a friend who she wanted to set up with me.

So I drove all the way up from New York to meet this guy, and he didn't show up, because he chickened out.

But my future husband was there, and that's how I met him, because I was supposed to meet somebody else.

I've been through enough experiences where the door got slammed and a window opened.

So chances are that's going to continue to happen.

You know, just sort of faith in the patterns of life.

You know, tomorrow will bring a different experience than today did, but it's not going to be unrecognizable.

My reaction to Sedbeck is almost always to try and find the meaning in it.

I had a good friend whose father died very suddenly when he was in his 40s.

She was in her 20s.

And she said, you know, when that happens, it's a tragedy.

But if you don't find the meaning of it, if you don't find what it means in your life and what to do with it, and how it is a meaningful, painful thing, it remains a tragedy.

And I think that that's how you get to feel about setbacks.

You know, it is a tragedy, but if you don't learn about it, if you don't figure out either, well, I went about that in a way that yielded not success.

What can I do differently?

Or what's the universe trying to tell me by setting me in a different direction?

Then it remains a tragedy.

A big part of my approach with students comes from being trained as a social worker, who the mantra of which is begin where the client is at.

You know, don't be all pulling them someplace that they're not ready to go.

Don't start in a great space when they're in a, because they won't feel like you get it.

So, definitely I start where they are.

And try and show them opportunities.

I remember, at one point, realizing that when I was feeling bad, I didn't want anybody telling me it was going to be okay.

Because that was trying to move me through it too fast.

First, I want people to say, you're right, it looks dark, it looks bad.

And when I'm ready, then I can see that it's going to be okay.

But it always felt like someone was trying to talk me out of it.

Very often, I will say, you know, imagine future you, or if it's someone who I think connects with themselves as a nurturer.

I'll say, imagine your child in college coming to you.

What would you want to tell them?

In the first part, imagine future you.

You know, really what's going to be important?

When you think back, what will you want to have gotten from this?

Adina Glickman is Assistant Director for Academic Support at the Center for Teaching and Learning at Stanford.

In our fourth story today about resilience, we go to Burning Man.

Now, if you don't know what Burning Man is, chances are you're not from the Bay Area or even California.

It's an annual event held out in the Nevada desert that incorporates music, food, and is a kind of temporary community devoted to experiential learning and growth.

Michael Zeligs takes us there.

This was recorded live at True Story and produced by Dan Steinbach.

Hello, beloved Palo Altons.

It's a pleasure and an honor to be back around here.

I'm going to tell the story of the first time I did mushrooms at Burning Man.

So my life was falling apart and it had been for a long time, many months.

A friend of mine got shot in Mexico.

Another friend of mine was terminally ill with cancer in the hospital all summer long.

I was sitting with that, I was in a relationship with Jess, we talked on the phone a lot.

We decided we were going to go to Burning Man because, hell, what else could we do?

We'd heard about it.

Jess meets up with me in Colorado and we make our way there and she's kissing me and like really it's just not good.

You know, I love her, but like I'm just not feeling that.

And by the second day of Burning Man, there we are in this massage workshop where I'm learning about Thai Massage.

And there I am kind of working on her.

And I have this breakthrough.

I'm like, oh my God, this is how I can love this person.

You know, here's a way that doesn't have to be this weird sexually binding partnership.

You know, the way that I can express truly how grateful and amazed I am at this person's existence.

Here I am thinking this and massaging her.

She gets up after and she says, oh my God, my chakras were pulsing.

And I look at her and I say, I want to break up.

So that was day two.

And I didn't really see her much after that.

And I proceeded to dip into Burning Man.

And my entry point was not the partying.

My entry point was not the music.

My entry point was this temple in the middle of it all where the people would go and openly cry.

And I kind of first went out there and saw that and was just really touched.

It was safe.

It was safe for me to feel that I had been living a wreck for six months, and that I didn't know where to go.

Thank you And they write on the walls, everything, everything that's ever been lost, everything that wants to be let go of.

And I got to write, I got to write to my, got to write to my sister, asking her to eat better.

Got to write to my mom, asking her to let go of all that.

Got to write to Jess, saying how sorry I was and how much I loved her.

Got to write to Alec, saying, I hope you get better, brother, got to write to David, and I'm sorry you died, I know you're there.

The night before the burn, I had a dream that a storm was coming.

I saw it.

It was dust ripping through all of Burning Man.

And I woke up at dawn, and I was like, I gotta do something.

And I opened up a cooler, and it had some mushroom chocolates in it.

And I ate them.

And I started walking.

And I went and sat near this huge American flag as the sun was rising, just feeling the wholeness of this experience unfolding and knowing that something needed to roll through.

And as I continued walking, kind of on this aimless journey, I realized that yet again I was going to the temple.

I walked up that year, it was built, there were these octagonal platforms, and maybe seating for eight or nine people, and I sit down and start meditating.

As I'm sitting there, it starts filling in.

And before I know it, there's a whole circle of maybe ten people sitting in a circle with one man who has an instrument I've never seen before in my life.

It's called the Hong Drum.

And it's this brass disc with these nipples on it, and it creates the most cosmic, incredible sounds.

We were all there.

We were gathered.

As the sun was coming over the horizon, we knew without speaking that there was some service to be done.

And I look to my right, and I just gasp.

I see this man, and it just hits me.

It's like, this man is sick.

This man sitting next to me is really sick with something.

And it just feels like, okay, touch him.

Reach out and touch this guy.

And so I do.

I put my hand on his thigh.

And then the person on my left grabs me.

And for I know we're all holding hands in this circle as we sit listening to this music.

And right then, you know, it's when the psychedelics kick in.

And I felt myself connecting with these people, with these perfect strangers who had all gotten the call for this appointment.

And holding their hands, I closed my eyes.

And before me, real as day, was the whole network of everyone who had been touched just like I had from a tragedy rolling through my life.

I could just see it.

I was holding on.

I was the one kid from my hometown that made it to Burning Man that year.

I was the one kid who was suddenly here at this service, who could seal the deal for, you know, a year of collapse.

And I looked, and right there, you know, there was David.

My poor friend who got shot.

There was Alec, who was sick in the hospital, white walls.

His life.

And I got to say, hey, brothers, welcome.

I'm glad you made it.

I'm glad we got to, you know, glad I got to be this anchor standing here for you.

And then going out from there was everyone who had ever been touched by these things.

And I got a chance to look at that, to look at the whole situation and say thank you.

Thank you and goodbye.

Thank you.

I've had enough.

Thank you for your lessons.

Thank you for showing me the skillfulness required to be conscious that a storm is roaring and to allow it to tear through everything, to destroy all the buildings, to flatten and raise an entire country so that the soul can be clean and swept again.

I'm saying that I let go and we let go and we opened our eyes.

We, the nine to twelve sitters in that circle in that morning, wanted a time quietly standing up and leaving.

And I knew, I knew right away, as soon as I just stepped in that it was over, to that time of this storm rolling through me had run its course.

And that I had offered the payment that was necessary for those experiences, the gratitude for those lessons.

And all those bearers of the lessons, all those pains, I was able to say, thank you, but I check you at the doorway of this next step of my life.

And I'm walking back to Burning Man, okay, it's burn day, I guess people do lots of things, I know I'm done, I feel complete, I'm done doing drugs, I'm just going to go to a yoga class and be real kind to myself.

And as I'm walking away, that's when the wind picks up.

And right before my eyes, the most outrageous storm comes in and just starts rolling and ripping through everything.

And for the next two days, you can't see a thing.

Michael Zeligs graduated from Stanford in 2010, and is currently a business and media designer for organizations facilitating peaceful global transformation.

Resilience is often defined by psychologists as the ability to adapt to adversity.

In her final story today, a Stanford student decides that this is not an ability she has in abundance, and decides to put herself through a program that she finds on the internet called Rejection Therapy, Jane Reynolds.

Rejection Therapy is, it's really a game.

The object of the game is to get rejected every day.

The five objectives of Rejection Therapy are, one, to be more aware of how irrational social fears could smash the tyranny of fear and reap the treasures.

Three, become resilient to seek out, learn from, and even enjoy.

Four, to not be attached to outcomes, especially.

Five, permit yourself to fail, fail, fail, fail, fail.

I wasn't planning on doing Rejection Therapy after I looked it up.

I dared my friends to.

One of them responds, ha ha ha, yeah, I'll do this.

And I decided, you know what, Jane?

I would like to see you try to do Rejection Therapy.

Some people, the fear that they're trying to overcome is of the feeling of rejection.

Because it feels bad to have someone say to your face, no, for me, I was over that.

I don't mind that feeling so much.

My problem is that I expect rejection everywhere.

I got a small coffee at Stella Bakery on Columbus in North Beach.

It's like late winter, but in San Francisco, so kind of a nice day.

And after I drank the small coffee, because I was sitting down reading in the cafe, I decided I wished I had gotten a large coffee, and I looked at the prices, and it would have been only like 20 cents more to get a large, but to get another small, it was going to be $1.50.

And so I asked the lady.

Which I never would have done if I wasn't self-consciously going through rejection therapy.

I asked if I could just get a refill, the difference between a small and a large, for 20 cents.

She was not amused.

She was so mean.

Just cold, stony face.

No, you ordered the small, so it's too late.

So I have my note from that date.

Seemed reasonable, felt hated, harder than expected.

I really wished I had gotten that free refill, and even by my first rejection, was fed up with being rejected.

I started off with small challenges, I think because I was afraid to try anything bigger.

It was later as I started thinking about the game more and its potential that I started to actually respect it as a self-help tool, which is how I think it was developed.

I went through the Craigslist gigs list, looking for silly things I could get rejected from, and I saw an audition call for a film that some students at the Academy of Art were making, and they'd pay you 75 bucks, and I thought, well, I'll go audition and I'll get rejected.

There was one part of my brain that laughed at it and said, this will be a great story.

And then another, maybe deeper down part of me was actually doing it because I really did want to be in a movie.

Like, I used to love acting.

I acted when I was a kid.

And then got to high school, I auditioned for the ball musical, and got into the chorus, it was My Fair Lady, and I didn't get the.

So no one told me in high school like you like to act, Jane, but you're really not, you're good, but you're not that good, so you probably shouldn't pursue this any further.

I told myself that.

I invented a rejection, and I never even tried to pursue it any further.

I thought I was being rejected when in fact, it was an honor, there's a hierarchy and you pay your dues.

Only now in the rejection therapy am I revisiting it, because I gave myself permission again to go out and see if the possibility was still there.

And I auditioned, and then I got an email a couple days later saying I had gotten the part.

So I'm gonna list that on my resume now, professional actress.

Then my question is, what rejections are inevitable?

What's a real rejection then?

If there's invented rejection, then there has to be real rejection.

I guess what I needed to work on, which I found out through actually doing this, was my tendency to invent failure, not rejection.

So maybe I need failure therapy.

I decided that I wanted to use the game as a way for me to kind of drive my life forward.

I'm at a point in my life where I could use a little push.

I submitted some poetry I had written to a literary magazine.

That was one of the things that I delayed on.

I kept wanting to edit the poems, or I had to wait for one other person to look at them before I was sure that they would be ready, because in my heart of hearts, I really wish that they'll be published.

I believe they will be rejected.

But it was so easy at the time, I didn't have to look anybody in the face and say, here's my poem.

That rejection will be hard for me.

But I'll just say to myself, rejection therapy, and then everything is a win-win situation.

If you're not rejected, then you're not rejected, and if you are rejected, then you won the game.

Thank you The fear of rejection is a much greater enemy than rejection itself.

There's a lot of acceptance waiting for me out there, and if I simply asked for it, I could have it.

Jane Reynolds graduated from Stanford in 2011.

She currently lives in San Francisco.

Today's program was produced by Christy Hartman, Charlie Mintz, and myself.

We'd like to thank our contributors, Jessica Talbert, Jordan Raymond, Michelle Powers, Adina Glickman, Michael Zeligs, and Jane Reynolds.

We'd also like to thank for their generous financial support, the Stanford Institute for Creativity in the Arts, the Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education, the Center for Teaching and Learning, the Hume Writing Center, and Stanford Continuing Studies.

Remember that you can find this in every fabulous episode of the Stanford Storytelling Project's radio show on the, on Stanford iTunes and on our website at storytelling.stanford.edu.

There you can also find out information about our undergraduate research grants, our live events, contests, and other fabulous happenings.

Tune in next week, where you'll hear stories about seeing oneself.

How we understand ourselves through various kinds of maps, from the genome to the astrological natal chart.

For the Stanford Storytelling Project, I'm Jonah Willihnganz.