The Survivor Personality by Al Siebert, Ph.D
Are you a survivor?

As you can see in my last posts, I’m more oriented on personal security and physical world security posts these days. There is another post on the subject. Are you computer security oriented? Then read these posts. You can learn things that will be applicable in your security domain. Security is a process, most people know it. Personally I don’t think that security is domain oriented. Security is a graph where each domain is nodes. You can travel each node but principles will follows in each of them. Technicalities are node dependant but principles apply to the whole graph.

A month ago I read a passionate book on survival personality wrote by Al Siebert, Ph.D. It’s a really interesting read. I wrote an excerpt of the book that resumes it in a couple of points. If you don’t understand some of them I encourage you to buy and read it.

“What you can do is create self-managed plan for acquiring qualities and skills that will improve your ability to handle change, unexpected developments, and disruptive crises that come your way. In you personal plan you may want to include some of the following:

1. Ask questions! Respond to change, new developments, threats, confusion, trouble, or criticism by asking “What is happening?” Develop a curiosity reflex. Practice reading each new reality rapidly.
2. Increase your mental and emotional flexibility. Tell yourself “It is all right to feel and think in both one way and the opposite.” Free yourself from inner voices from your past that say you shouldn’t feel or think a certain way. Develop many response choices for yourself.
3. Assume that change and having to work with uncertainty, ambiguity, and unknowns are way of life from now on. Learn to handle these with self-confidence. Practice making new developments work out well. In today’s world getting good results counts more than working hard.
4. Become useful quicker and in more ways than other people. Ask yourself, “How can I interact with this so that things get better for everyone?” You ability to find ways to be useful makes you valuable. In every situation make it valuable than anyone thought it could be. Consider such efforts an investment in yourself.
5. Develop empathy skills, especially with difficult people. Put yourself in the other person’s place. Ask “What do they feel and think? What are their views, assumptions, explanations, and values? How do they benefit from acting as they do?” Govern your actions not by your good intentions, but by the actual effect you have on others.
6. Learn how to learn from experience. That way you are always becoming more capable, effective, and employable. Practice thanking people who give you unpleasant feedback. Consider viewing difficult people as your teachers in the school of life. Instead of trying to get difficult people to change, ask yourself “Why am I so vulnerable? What are my blind spots? How could I handle myself better with such people?”
7. Resist labeling others; Practice observing and describing what others feel, think, say and do. Use negative nouns when you want to swear and positive nouns when you want to put someone on a pedestal, but recognize that the labels you put on others reflect your emotional state.
8. Pause occasionally to silently observe what is happening. Take several deep breaths. Scan your feelings. Be alert to fleeting impressions. Notice little things. Be alert to early clues about what might be happening.
9. Take time to appreciate yourself for the helpful things you do. Appreciate your accomplishments. Feelings of positive self-regard help blunt the sting of hurtful criticism. Your self-esteem determines how much you learn after something goes wrong. The stronger your self-esteem, the more you learn.
10. When hit by adversity, no matter how unfair it seems, follow the survivor sequence: regain emotional balance, adapt and cope with your immediate situation, thrive by learning and being creative, then find the gift. The better you become, the faster you can convert disaster into good fortune.”

Finally, I’ll resume another thought of the book with an excerpt of Children of Dune by Frank Herbert:

“Muad’Dib’s teachings have become the playground of scholastics, of the superstitious and the corrupt. He taught a balanced way of life, a philosophy with which a human can meet problems arising from an ever-changing universe. He said humankind is still evolving, in a process which will never end. He said this evolution moves on changing principles which are known only to eternity. How can corrupted reasoning play with such an essence?”