W
hen Katherine Pranic got
cancer in her first year of
university, it turned her plans
upside-down. Surviving Hodgkin’s
lymphoma also cultivated skills for
dealing with challenges that would
prove crucial in later years.
Like Katherine, who is now 40 and
working as a freelance copywriter, most
of us experience unexpected trials –
with our health, relationships, finances
or career. While most of us probably
prefer smooth sailing, life rarely works
that way. Some things even benefit
from disruption and thrive when
exposed to change.
In 2012, scholar Nassim Nicholas
Taleb released a book detailing why
things benefit from randomness and
risk. Called Antifragile: Things That
Gain from Disorder, Nassim’s
work describes antifragility
as beyond resilience
or robustness. “The
resilient resists shocks
and stays the same;
the antifragile gets
better,” he writes.
“The antifragile
loves randomness and
uncertainty, which also
means – crucially – a love
of errors... Antifragility has a
singular property of allowing us to
deal with the unknown, to do things
without understanding them – and do
them well.”
The idea of ‘antifragility’ has
been applied to various fields,
including economics and engineering.
In psychology, it describes a way of
thinking and living that, in an uncertain
world, allows people to recover from
mistakes and grow stronger because
of them.
Benefit of taking risks
Taking risks is how we grow, says
clinical psychologist Dr Heidi Heron.
“If we never got outside our comfort
zone, we would still be crawling around,
eating baby food; we wouldn’t have the
technology that we have,” she explains.
“Nobody that I know of that’s highly
successful has ever stayed in their
comfort zone. Even though it might
be uncomfortable for a while, being
outside of our comfort zone is how we
create a new level of comfort.”
For Katherine, coping with discomfort
continued when she purchased property
in her late twenties. Although she’d
learned meditation and positive
thinking during her cancer recovery,
she says, “I was almost naively positive
to the point of not acknowledging
the things that were going
on for me.”
Getting a mortgage
meant that her
“maladaptive coping
tool” of shopping was
no longer an option.
She started yoga,
which “trains you
to be comfortable in
the uncomfortable”.
This helped Katherine
through a second bout of cancer
and an unplanned career change when
her dream legal job was “sucking the
life” out of her.
Psychotherapist Charlotte Stapf
notes that doing anything new entails
risk. “If we can’t live with uncertainty
and a certain amount of risk, then we
will live in a very tiny box,” she says.
“We have the choice of living in a
controlled environment – knowing that
you’re going to be disappointed because
no environment can be completely »‘Antifragility
has a singular
property of allowing
us to deal with the
unknown, to do things
without understanding
them – and do
them well’be informed
be nourished
simply be
be energised
be inspired