Given this scary place that we're in, especially in terms of emotional and mental health, we need to be talking about purpose and resilience. Since this MOOC, this massive open online course, is about purpose in work, let me show you a couple of fairly extreme examples of purpose and resilience in work. I'm going to show you a couple of studies here, just really simple, making it easy. Both of them are fairly recent studies, and this is a study of resilience among West Point graduates. Remember, West Point is a military university that trains people who end up by enlarge going into the military. Here's what they did. They took a look at factors that were most associated with psychological resilience. Here's what they found and I'm just quoting the abstract here, "Purpose in life was most strongly associated with psychological resilience. Interventions that may help enhance purpose in life for high-risk populations exposed to stress and trauma include using meaning-based or purpose-based therapies." Now let's take a look at what they found. On the bottom here are different experiences that these West Point graduates had over decades. In terms of negative experiences, they might have had horrible war experiences, maybe going through the Gulf War. They may have a psychological or psychiatric history. They may have had even positive military experiences. They may have had substance abuse, they may blame themselves. There are all sorts of factors that these guys started looking at. They also looked at how they might cope with stress like venting. They looked at religiosity, but they also looked at things like connectedness. They looked at whether they accepted themselves. They looked at whether they could engage still in humor. They looked at whether they slept well, but they also looked at purpose in life. They looked at all those factors put together in what's called a multiple regression or multivariate regression, and they looked at which ones tended to be the most important. If we look on the right-hand side, we can see that the factor most strongly associated with reduced resilience is negative military experiences. In other words, if you've gone through a military experience that was horrible, traumatic, those things often would reduce your resilience. But look on the left, the number 1 factor associated with building resilience was purpose in life. Look at it. It's by far. It's far greater, far stronger than all of these other things that we might think are very important, things like grit. Grit is really important. Grit is a really important construct, but it doesn't seem to be nearly as important to resilience as having a strong purpose in your life. Now it's associated with having a purpose in life and purpose gives you more grit, but grit doesn't seem to be nearly as relevant or important. Sleep is important, not nearly irrelevant or as important. You see all of these factors and you can look at them yourself. Go through these and take a look at all of those factors from education to whether you're married, to whether you're religious. All of these factors and you see of all of them having a strong purpose in life, incredibly important. Now let's look at another interesting study. I just loved the title of this, Healthcare Kamikazes during COVID-19 Pandemic: Purpose in Life and Moral Courage as Mediators of Psychopathology. Really interesting study. It took place in Spain and in Mexico. They were focused on people who are taking care of those who were sick with COVID. Now this is a really dangerous thing, especially in Spain and Mexico when this study was being done because they didn't have all of the personal protective equipment or PPEs that were desirable among healthcare professionals. They didn't have all this stuff. They were going in and treating these patients who had COVID and often dying of COVID, and they were often getting COVID themselves. They were hugely stressed out, as you might expect. Just remember the early days of this pandemic, no one knew exactly what was going to happen to these healthcare workers. Many of these healthcare workers just bravely dove into those hospitals like kamikazes going, okay, I don't know if I'm going to live or die, but you know what? I'm going to treat these patients. Why? Because it's my purpose in my life. It's my purpose at work. Now some people felt that this is their purpose in work and other people felt like, wow, I'm lost here. I don't know what I'm doing here. Here's what they found. They took a look at the degree of COVID exposure. In other words, they were looking at the amount of time these healthcare professionals were working with patients who had COVID and they looked at their mental health outcomes. They found out that if you had a lot of COVID exposure, it tended to drive down your mental health unless you had a strong purpose, unless you felt that being a healthcare worker and dealing with difficult cases was your purpose at work. You see the difference there. There's some healthcare workers who were going, yeah, I didn't really sign up for this when I became a doctor or when I became a nurse. I didn't expect they have to do this. This is not really my purpose and there are others going, this is what I was meant for, this is what I was put on this planet for, this is my purpose. Those people ended up doing very well and it buffered the impact of the COVID exposure among those people.
