How are we facing adversity, building resilience, and finding joy today? Option B by Sheryl Sandberg and Adam Grant focuses on sharing stories which help us grow these valuable life skills. I read the entire book and attempt to share 80% of the value I got out of it here for you to use as an alternative to spending the 5 to 10 hours I did reading the book. Would you join me in learning about how to better comfort others in grief and become more faithful that we will get through any challenge in our lives by reading this post?
First, we begin with the purpose of this "Shortcut" which hopefully offers much more than a summary and review of the book! Second, we enjoy a quick book summary of Option B: Facing Adversity, Building Resilience, and Finding Joy by Sheryl Sandberg and Adam Grant. Third, we review the skills Option B teaches effectively which are resilience and asking for help. Fourth, we hear powerful stories from Option B which help highlight what we can do today to become more resilient, courageous, and full of joy. Fifth, we look at the context of my life as I read this book. Sixth, we learn what actions I took and what results I got out of reading Option B? Seventh, we see what challenges I faced reading Option B as a young man with a family and a history in recovery. Finally, we are grateful to be here together and think about what next?
Would you prefer to watch the video? The first half is available on YouTube below and the full video class is available free with this coupon on The University of Jerry Banfield at http://u.jerrybanfield.com/courses/optionb?coupon=steem.
Purpose
Would you like to shortcut Option B: Facing Adversity, Building Resilience, and Finding Joy by Sheryl Sandberg?" Thank you for starting this book with me. The point of this shortcut is to give you the value of the book that Sheryl Sandberg wrote, describing the skills in the book, and the actions I took out of reading the book. I usually listen to books on Audible, but unfortunately Sheryl Sandberg didn't narrate it on Audible. I hope that this will give you the majority of the value, at least 80% of it in a very short format. Why? Because I know I'm impatient. I skip ahead in videos and if you are watching the video version of this book, you probably have already put this on two-times play to make it play faster so it'll get over faster.
The point of this shortcut is to give you the very best of what I got out of the book, and the context I used it in, and how it impacted my life. I hope that if you love reading what I've shared, it will motivate you to get the actual book or to go forward and take the same actions that you might have taken otherwise.
Why do I listen to or read self-help and business books? What I'm hoping to do is make small adjustments to my thinking that will help me have the happiest life. Small adjustments to my actions that will help me be the most unconditionally loving in every circumstance, and to feel empowered today to be of service to you. That's why I sit and read all these books, so I hope to share the majority of the value I've got out of "Option B." I loved reading "Option B," by Sheryl Sandberg, and I hope you'll have the same experience here with me.
Summary
What is a quick summary of Option B by Sheryl Sandberg and Adam Grant? Sheryl Sandberg is the Chief Operating Officer at Facebook. According to her Wikipedia profile and Forbes, she's worth about $1.6 billions, and she's around 47 years old depending on when you read this. She had a husband named Dave. They both went to Mexico on a trip to celebrate and while they were there, Dave went to the gym and got on the treadmill to exercise.
While on the treadmill, he appeared to have had some kind of massive heart failure. He then fell and hit his head, and died. He bled to death right there in the gym. Meanwhile, Sheryl was on a vacation, and all of the sudden she realized that her husband had died, he was not even 50 years old yet.
She was now a widowed mother, with two children under 10 years old to take care of, facing the world. This is what she shares, her experience, strength, and hope on, in Option B.
I loved reading this book because grief is such a difficult subject for many of us to deal with. She goes through and shares her journey one step at a time, along with lots of related stories of the grief and trauma by others. She tries to reach the most broad audience possible by bringing in all other different types of victimization in the book. She brings in Adam Grant as a psychologist to help her match up his professional experience with her personal experience, to make a book that is of the highest impact.
What she emphasizes is that you take back joy, and you build resilience that you might not have decided that this is how your life should have gone. The fact is that it is how it went, and there are good opportunities to learn and grow no matter what happens in your life. I like these three things that she talks about in processing grief: personalization, pervasiveness and permanence.
She hits on these a lot throughout the book and you feel like the grief is a part of everything. When you're at work, with every little situation you're in at work, or at home, the grief is just pervasive. It's a part of everything. Also, the personalization, "Why did my husband have to die like this? Why did this happen to me?" This is shared especially in stories from other people feeling the same way.
Then, in the permanence that I'm always going to feel like this, that life is just going to consistently be this awful and painful struggle. I like how she starts with an introduction talking about the story of Dave's death, and then processing the grief through these three P's.
Then, at chapter three, four and five, according to my notes, she discusses building friendships through loss, developing a self-compassion, and viewing tragedy as an opportunity to bounce forward into new opportunities, like getting kicked in the butt and you're forced to go forward and make some progress. Just trying to sit there and take that kick in the butt over and over again is really painful and it encourages a leap forward into learning new skills.
She wraps up the book with taking back joy and raising resilient kids, with having mentioned her biggest fear was her children being traumatized essentially by this. She notices how resilient they are. She strives to be as resilient as her children are, and to raise children who continue to be resilient throughout life's challenges.
I know with my father having passed away, that I related a lot to this book, and I'm very grateful that Sheryl took the time with her position and audience to share this message with all of us.
Skills
What skills are at the heart of the value of "Option B?" What skills can you learn and build by reading "Option B," and I hope getting out from this shortcut as well? The skills Option B teaches effectively are resilience and asking for help.
Resilience is the number one skill. It's a tricky one because you might think, "What is resilience?" Resilience is the ability to essentially take a punch and get back up, and to not just have this grim determination you're going to get punched again, but to get up and be excited about life again, to find a life filled with joy.
This is resilience in my opinion. My 20-month-old daughter falls down lots of times and bangs her head. She cries and cries, and then resilience, she feels her pain and she's excited about life again. She's ready to keep running around and playing. She's happy to be alive. That to me is resilience. It is to take things in my life like my father dying, my grandmother dying, my mother falling off a horse and nearly dying, and to rise up and be excited about life again.
In my notes, I specifically wrote while reading the book: using setbacks, trauma and struggle to advance. Now, this might seem really counter-intuitive at first. I hope that this is a really powerful skill to develop because in my life, resilience has been essential to me learning and growing.
Asking for help is the key part of resilience because you can't just sometimes do it on your own, like when my daughter falls down, then she needs help. She needs someone to pick her back up and hug her after she's had a painful fall. Lots of times we feel like we have to just pick ourselves up. Asking for help in "Option B" is repeatedly communicated as essential for building resilience. Also, a huge skill with Option B is being able to help others. A lot of us have horrible conditioning when it comes to helping others with things like trauma, setbacks and grief.
What I wrote in my notes specifically: seek to appreciate and understand, instead of saying, "I'm sorry for your loss." "I'm sorry for your loss" just sucks. I hate it. I hope I never say that again. If I got one thing of Option B, it's never to say that phrase again. The intentions behind it might be good, but the actual wording is horrible.
Instead of saying, "Oh, I'm sorry for your loss. Your grandma died, that must've sucked. I don't know anything about my grandma dying." Say, "I know your pain. My grandma died, and it sucked." I know about having a grandma die. I know about having my father die. I would hope I'd never say, "I'm sorry for your loss," because having your father die, who you loved, is horrible. And yet, I've learned and grown a lot out of that. The key skill for building resilience is to see what each of our struggles have in common. Yes, I've had my father die, but I haven't had my mother die.
If your mother dies, then it makes sense for me to translate that into my father dying, and to understand your exact emotions, which may be a bit different from my exact emotions from my father dying. But overall, we're playing the same sport. We're in the same league. We're in the same game. I can appreciate the pain of another instead of distancing myself and saying, "I'm sorry for your loss. It sucks to be you, but I'm having a great day."
That's a huge skill I got off this book. I tried to reach out to my sisters because their grandmother just passed on their mother's side. Instead of saying, "I'm sorry for your loss," I said, "I appreciate your pain." My one sister responded well, and the other one didn't respond, so I don't know. Sometimes, trying a new skill is not always pretty to build and develop right away. Now that I know a better way to go consciously process and deal with the grief and drama of others, I think I'm a lot more loving and understanding instead of keeping my distance and not knowing what to do.
Sheryl said that one of the worse parts of her grief was that other people were afraid to bother her when she was so depressed or crying at work. They were afraid to even come close to her and would kind of try and safely keep their distance. What I see that each of our struggles has in common is often that feeling of loneliness, of uselessness and self-pity. That's something we can understand and that we don't have to say from afar, "Oh I'm sorry about your loss," but to say, "Hey, I understand what it feels like to feel useless, to feel like poor me, because my father died, and this is wrong."
You might feel the same way and say, "I'm welcoming you into my world to feel how I feel and I will share and feel how you feel." One last skill I got that was really good out of this book is for having a healthy relationship, it's critical to say yes to the other people's call for attention, especially when there's grief or trauma around. If you've had someone in your family that's going through something shameful or painful like suicide, going to prison or some addiction, you might find the desire to not answer the phone when they call and not call them up or find out how they're doing.
A lot of us have this programming that if something bad happens, it's contagious: "Oh God, his son committed suicide, I don't wanna ever talk to him. Eww, I don't want my son to do that. There must be something nasty about him that this happened." The skills that Sheryl points out really well in the book and maybe Adam wrote this in, I don't know, is that when we have a great relationship, it's a relationship for each person's calls for attention to be responded. If your wife is sitting on the couch and says, "Honey, will you come here and look at this?" In a healthy relationship, the husband or the partner, goes and looks at it. In unhealthy relationships predictable of divorce and any other negative relationship context similar to that, when the other person says, "No," or "Whatever, I don't care, maybe later," rejecting the other person reaching out for help is one of the most critical ways to destroy a relationship.
I hope that compacting these skills into a very short amount of time helps to communicate some of what I learned in "Option B" to develop these skills in my own life.
Four powerful stories from Option B.
What are the most powerful stories, shared in "Option B," that are extremely helpful for building the skills of resilience, connection, dealing with trauma and grief successfully, and maintaining healthy relationships?
First, the story of Dave's death was quite powerful. It helped me to appreciate each moment I'm here with my wife. Sheryl didn't expect, after 11 years with her husband, that he would suddenly pass away. They were on a trip together and they didn't have their kids with them. She had said something just average like, "I'm falling asleep," or something like that, the last thing she ever got to say to him, and then he goes to this gym to workout and die. She was in the middle of this vacation, which was exciting, and all of a sudden, she was then in the middle of a nightmare without her husband.
Not only that, but she's a huge public figure who's likely to get a lot of people inside and curious about her life now. She has lost her lifetime partner and that's a lost that I can't even imagine, although my brain tries to prepare me for it all the time. Dave's death was a powerful story for me in this book and I am grateful that she had the courage to share such a painful story so that each of us can learn and grow from it, as I hope I've done. Sheryl and Adam collaborated to frequently share stories in the book that aren't their own, that have been shared by people in their community, Adam's patients or people following Sheryl online, and this is another powerful, but awful story in the book, warning upfront.
This story that was shared in the book left a huge impression on me: Two parents took their daughter out to celebrate with her, maybe to see a movie or something like that, and they left their six-year-old and three-year-olds with their nanny. They come back and the nanny has killed their two children.
Now at first, they were obviously horribly struck by grief and what Sheryl got out of it, or Adam, is that the parents went forward in gratitude that they still did have one child left. They were grateful that the nanny hadn't killed all of their children, but they did still have one child they could raise together, and that they were motivated to continue growing their family again. As a parent, this was just a heartbreaking story to me. I can't even comprehend how you would feel to come home and find that your youngest two children have been stabbed to death by the nanny. And yet, in a world where these things happen, it tells me that there's work to be done in this world, to help others and to find gratitude for each day you have with your children, even if they cry or they're upset, or things don't go to your plan, because you do get to have that day with them.
Another powerful story shared was about the survivors of a plane crash in South America who literally ended up eating the dead bodies of their following crew mates to stay alive, and the one thing that kept them going was telling a positive story about it, of setting up expectations that they would be able to survive. They made an amazing journey out of the mountains from their plane crash in order to get back to civilization.
The final story that really stuck with me from Option B was a billboard that was put up in New York. I believe it was a big chalkboard that was put up to highlight regrets. It offered people to share their regrets. Most of the regrets were failures to act rather than failures of action. Now sure, some people cheated in their relationship and put on there, "I cheated on my boyfriend," but most of the regrets were things like, "I didn't follow my dreams. I didn't go back to school. I didn't ask him to marry me. I didn't do this. I didn't give enough hugs. I didn't try to fix a broken relationship."
What a lot of us think in our lives is that we're afraid to do things, but actually, when we look at our regrets, according to this billboard, we often most regret the things we didn't do. Very few of the people who wrote down their regrets, wrote things that they regretted doing, extreme things like using heroine. Most of the regrets were things like regretting not going after joy, not going after the love of your life, not following your dreams, and sitting there working a job you don't like being content to just pay the bills and give up on your dreams.
I'm grateful for these stories in this book. Some of them were hard to process and yet, I feel much empowered after reading them, and I hope that what I've gotten out of this is clearly communicated here to you.
Context - What did my life look like as I read Option B?
Thank you for continuing this journey with me through a shortcut of "Option B." What follows is my experience with "Option B" because I feel to most effectively teach "Option B," to shortcut it and to communicate the skills, one of the best things I can do is share with you the slight adjustments in thought and actions I took in reading the book.
Ultimately, I read books like these to help me make adjustments in my own life. First, what context did I read "Option B" in? Where was I at relative to whatever I learned in the book? I read this book with most of the time my wife's sitting on the couch next to me, and I read about a chapter or two a day. It took me a week or a couple of weeks to read the entire book, most of it looking over at my wife as I'm reading about how Sheryl's husband died. I felt a lot of gratitude, I cried several times in seeing my position out of the normal context.
I've been married four and a half years nearly now and it can be easy. Our brains are very good at adjusting to circumstances because then it's easy to notice if something is out of place, which if it's millions of years ago and there's a lion or a tribe of wolves coming to attack your people, then you want to notice if something is out of place.
Noticing those little wolf eyes in a distance might save you and your family's lives. Today, this usually works against us. I will sit on the couch the rest of the night, and I won't notice my beautiful wife sitting there because she's there every night. With this book, I really noticed. I looked in and I found so much gratitude just for the exact situation in my life, that nothing in my life is lacking, and that I won't get to have all of the eternity in this body with this wife, that today is sacred, that I do have this day in this time with my wife. That gives me gigantic patience, love and understanding.
Even a couple of nights, my wife wished I hadn't read this right before her because I was so emotional, that I wasn't available to then have sex. I was like, "Oh my God," I was so emotional, I just wanted a hug. I wanted sensual contact, instead of sexual contact. This book also helped me a lot to understand that when my wife opens up and asks for my attention, it's important that I drop what I'm doing. It has helped me to be more responsive, because as a man, lots of times it gets easy to feel that my work is more important, or that a video game I am playing, or working on my car is more important.
Reading this book has helped me to respond immediately, "Yes, what do you need?" instead of saying, "Oh, I'll be there in a minute," or, "Yes, maybe later." In the context of grief I've been through, it doesn't feel that much to me, but I lost my father at 29 years old. I'm an alcoholic who goes to Alcoholics Anonymous every day, and I have a little over three years of sobriety now. I related a lot with grief and trauma. I think I've been through a good bit of mostly self-imposed trauma in my life and grief.
I know about grief. I cried and struggled for at least a year and a half with my father dying, much of which was before he even died. Then afterwards, it's still years later of moments of loving or forgiving my father. As my daughter is growing up, she does things that remind me of something I did, and then this anger comes up with my father, "Well, how could you spank me for doing that? This is horrible."
Then there is this love and understanding, forgiveness, to realize that it was better or similar to what my father got getting in trouble for the same kinds of things when he was a child, to love and understand that what my father did was best, and to realize that I carry all of what I love about him in my heart at all times.
That's the context I read this book in. I've got my own shares, as all of us, of grief and trauma in my life, and I'm grateful that this book helped me isolate the skills which I've mentioned, things like appreciating. What I am grateful for reading this book, is that it gives me a concrete way to go forward and to open my heart whenever another person is in pain, has been through trauma, and to love them instead of trying to be afraid that I'll catch their disease.
Actions - What did I do as a result of reading Option B?
In my experience, learning hundreds of skills online, being self-taught, and studying, reading book after book, the critical part of learning is taking some kind of action. Would you like to hear the actions I took in the process and the result of reading this book because I hope this is the most effective way to show what practicing the skills shared in this book looks like?
The first action I took, besides just loving and appreciating my wife who was sitting on the couch next to me, is I sent what I hoped was a better text message than I would've sent otherwise to my sisters who live in Michigan. I don't get to see them, but once a year, and I don't get to talk to them that regularly. I'm available if they want to talk. I sent them a message that I hope was better than what I would've sent without reading this book. When I first heard from my aunt that my sister's grandmother had died, I didn't know how to respond. There's often that tendency to just leave someone who might be in grief alone to essentially let them deal with it, because when it's on the other end, we often feel when we're grieving, "Well, I just don't want to bother anyone with my grief, I'll just handle this myself."
I reached out to them after reading this book realizing that I don't need to keep waiting and waiting, but just send them a text message. My one sister prefers just a text message, and I called the other one after sending her a text as well. I said, "Look, I appreciate your pain. I'm here for you and after my aunt just told me about your grandmother's loss, I appreciate your pain. I'm here for you, and I'm excited to come visit in a month or so."
I think that was a lot better than whatever I'd written before, because I might have said something like, "I'm sorry about your loss," before this, which is totally useless. However, my one sister didn't respond. I don't know how she felt about the text, maybe it didn't work for her. I gave it a try. I made an attempt to try something a bit new when it comes to dealing with grief.
I also, as a result of this book, reflected on my own actions relative to my own mortality and my family. I'm living today as if it's both the last day of my life and the last day of eternity. That helps even now, I can reflect well. If I only had 10 minutes to live, then sure, I might drop what I'm doing writing this book, and walk across the street to hang out with my wife and her family on mothers day.
However, if I have all the rest of eternity to live, I'd certainly want to keep working on this book to make what I hope is useful for the rest of the world, that I'm spending all the rest of eternity with, and then go hang out with my wife later in the day. My aim is to converge what I'm doing today in both as if it was the last day of my life and the first day of forever, to live the exact same way and love it.
I am grateful for the chance in "Option B" to reflect on these things. Another step I took was to have a more loving and honest conversation with my mother, who has been struggling with Dad's grief for years. As a result of this book, I made an offer to help my mother move because she lives 600 or 700 miles from where I live. I said, "Mom, I will be happy to help you move if you want to live next to me. However, you live so far away that it is such an encumbrance upon me. I have to miss out on all the other time on my family, all of the work I do, when visit, and I am not likely to come visit very often because you live all by yourself there." I added, "As your health continues to deteriorate, if you allow me to help you move and come near me, I will be happy to assist you, but if you remain where you are at, I will not be available to assist you." These are the limitations of my life right now.
The gifts in my life, my wife and my daughter, also are limitations in that I am here to spend time with them, and I will not let my marriage and my parenting, my relationship with my family and my work all suffer, to essentially go help my mother, unless I'm willing to help her make a transition to an ongoing solution where I can be available to her on a daily basis as needed.
Even, it inspired me lots of times, to just love my mother and listen unconditionally, and try not to essentially say anything that might offend her. This time, I found a way after listening to "Option B," to tell her, "Look, Mom, your health is pretty bad. I'd be scared in the position you're in. I felt how you felt lots of times from drinking." She's feeling dizzy, having headaches, it's just awful. I said, "I felt like that so many times and it motivated me to seek help." That's why I go to AA every day, it is because I realize that I still think drinking is a good idea even though it's made me sick so many times. I have to have help from other people, or I won't be able to make it It was a tough conversation with my mother to bring all these things up that often I just don't say anything about, and to not essentially try and beat her over the head or punish her with them, but to bring them up out of love and honesty.
I feel that the most important thing I can do with family and friends, is to be able to love them unconditionally and honestly share what things look like from my point of view when it's needed. Not all the time, but when it's needed. I'm grateful that reading "Option B" inspired me to take these actions. I hope discussing them has been helpful for you.
Challenges I faced reading Option B.
What were some of the challenges I experienced in reading "Option B?" The biggest single challenge for me in reading "Option B" was the feelings of separation in my identification with being a man throughout many stories where there's a woman victim and a male perpetrator. There are a lot of stories in the book about rapes and stories where men have committed these horrendous acts of violence, and Sheryl frequently shares context about what women need to do, and gathering women together in groups for women.
As a man, I felt separated lots of times reading this book. I felt the pain, as being a man, as the perpetrator of these wrongs against, not only women, but the whole world generally. That was a bit tough for me and I realized that the reason it was tough is because of my identification as a man. If I let go of identifying that I'm a man as a part of who I am, then I just see that Sheryl is simply describing her world as she sees it, and there's nothing for me personally to take offense to.
That was a consistent struggle throughout the book as from start to finish, there are similar stories and there is a language setup that often involves gender separation. I'm grateful that Sheryl had the courage to reach out directly, maybe it was challenging for me to read because I rarely reach out specifically to men, almost everything I do is gender, race and religion neutral. Almost everything I create is shared essentially for anyone. Maybe I felt like I should be drawn more to call out specifically to men who've been through certain things and to identify more as a man in the world. I don't know. Whenever you have a challenge, it's funny to see the ups and downs of it.
Another thing that was challenging for me in reading the book was the consistent policy suggestions. Maybe because I feel like I don't contribute enough to politics, I don't care about political parties, I have almost no political cause I care about, specifically because I can see the ups and downs to everything. Yes, I can see how awful abortion is in some circumstances, but there are many valid arguments why it's good, when we've got all these people, many of which are starving and struggling, then you can make an argument for each side.
I don't generally get into almost anything political. Maybe that's what was challenging for me reading the book and feeling like I ought to do more and be more participative in the political system. I'm really apathetic about the political system though. I guess I do have a belief that the US has made an alliance with some form of essentially extraterrestrials, but they look a lot like us, and they're the ones who really rule things with the secret government. So what difference does it make if you participate in politics because all the real decisions essentially have been made and dictated to the politicians?
From my point of view, I guess I feel pretty disempowered, I feel pretty helpless politically like it doesn't matter if I take action. Maybe that's why it was challenging for me reading this specific book. I also found it challenging to see so many policy recommendations and suggestions for what other people should do. I prefer personal stories because I really relate, like when Sheryl shares her grief and her husband dying. My mind shuts off when I see things like, "Well this is what everyone should do," or, "We should change this policy," and it starts disregarding that and starts to skip ahead.
From my point of view, if all of us simply share our personal stories and take care of our own lives with each other in mind, we don't need any policies or external controls, each person, like each ant does on the anthill, will simply operate for the collective good. These were the challenges I experienced in reading Option B by Sheryl Sandberg and Adam Grant. I loved the book and I hope the experience I've shared here with the book is helpful for you.
Thank you and what next?
Thank you very much for finishing my shortcut of Option B by Sheryl Sandberg and Adam Grant. I hope this has been helpful for you in your life for facing adversity, building resilience and finding joy as it has been in my life.I read books like this on a daily basis and I realize that you might have a busier life than I have, that you might want to get all the value out of the books I read in a fraction of the time, and then if you hear something youlove that I've read, then I hope it motivates you to take the time to read the entire book. I hope this shortcut is helpful for you in sharing my journey through Option B.
I'm grateful you're here today. I love you. I hope you have a wonderful life, why? Because when I love you completely, it makes loving myself completely a lot easier as well. I seek to serve and be useful for you in your life on a daily basis and I hope this is part of a lifelong journey together.
Thank you and I hope you have a wonderful day today. Would you please upvote this post if you found it helpful? Will you leave a comment if you would like me to continue making more shortcuts like this available here for you on Steemit with suggestions on the next books you would like me to do?
Love,
Jerry Banfield