Human Stories and Resilience

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“Rather than beings of flesh and blood, people are beings made of emotions that become a narrative.” Regina Freyman.

Teachers are mentors who accompany and train the heroes of the future. Every day, educators risk through a screen to motivate their students to be the best version of their own story. According to expert Regina Freyman, rather than beings of flesh and blood, people are made of emotions that become a narrative, which makes it possible for us to get up every day to write our life story. This is how Regina explained it in our webinar. If you did not get a chance to see it live, you could check it out here. Every second of this webinar is worth its weight in gold.

The COVID-19 pandemic and the confinement we are living “steal” our freedom to leave home to do the activities we like to meet with the people we love the most, family, and friends. We feel afraid of losing health or life itself. Today more than ever, we are clinging to living and understanding why a virus keeps us locked up. This makes us rethink life, work, and our role in this new reality.

If we learn to tell a story of unity and resilience, we will emerge victorious from the crisis that we are living by COVID-19 or any other. Humanity needs to recover the possibility of telling collective stories that help us understand that we are one with the environment and that we are linked with each other, like neurons in a large collective brain, Regina explained.

“The idea of storytelling gives us coherence by putting pain into words. Taking it out, you can see the pain with clarity and perspective, turning it into something manageable that has limits and faces. Narrating a traumatic event helps us overcome the agony.”

Here is a summary of the main concepts that Regina shared with us in the live session. You can also review them in more depth in the video.

Resilience is a concept that comes from physics. It is the ability of metals to conform to the structure that contains them easily. In this sense, resilience is a person’s ability to adapt to new situations.
A story is the only way to rebuild and bring order to indescribable pain. Without being aware, every day, we recount something that helps us get ahead and make sense of the situations in which we live.
A teacher is an explicit tutor of resilience. That is why their work is so important.
Three factors impede resilience: affective isolation, absence of feeling, and shame.
Types of resilience: null, recovery of capacity to live, and compensatory.
Before recounting something, a thousand ideas flutter in mind and a thousand signals in the body; that is called a pre-verbal story. What do the pre-verbal stories of you and your students tell you? How do the body and nonverbal language manifest the story to come?
Once the ideas are sorted, and we listen to our bodies, an inner voice emerges that is expressed; that is called the single story. Teachers, families, and leaders can significantly influence the construction of this story.
Once we externalize the story of who we are, of our dreams, and longings, we feel ourselves capable of sharing them. We all need to tell a story. These are called shared stories.
Culture is a murmur, thousands of voices that settle to tell our social story, that of the family, of community, of the country, even the whole world. These are called collective stories.

Relive this webinar that helped us discover why emotional intelligence stands on the ability to tell the best possible story every time we face a conflict or a crisis. A story is capable of changing the world. In fact, it is the only thing that has ever achieved it.

Regina Freyman is addicted… to stories. She knows from the experience of her parents’ divorce to the painful death of her sister that stories save. In search of words, she studied letters at UNAM, specialized in stories at IBERO, and has 15 years narrating life from TEC.