Part 3 I think many people know the quote from Nietzsche: “What does not kill me makes me stronger.” In the case of learned helplessness, it doesn't work. Anything that causes learned helplessness doesn't kill us, but it doesn't make us stronger either. This leads to apathy and lack of independence. Moreover, with the development of learned helplessness, not only the motivation to achieve, but also the motivation to avoid disappears. In other words, a person not only does not strive to improve the existing state of affairs, but also does not avoid unpleasant events. This is clearly seen in the research on learned helplessness conducted by Hiroto in 1974. Let me remind you of the essence of the study: Three groups of people were invited. The third group rests and will join at the second stage, and the first two receive a single instruction: “The loud unpleasant sound can be turned off by pressing a certain key combination.” There was only one difference. The first group had the opportunity to turn off the sound, but the second did not. After a series of attempts, the second stage of the experiment began, to which the third group joined. All groups received the same instructions: “The unpleasant annoying sound can be turned off by touching one of the objects in the room.” In the second stage, all groups had the opportunity to mute the sound. The first and third groups looked for the object and found it, but the participants in the second group did not even try to turn off the sound. That is, people who have experienced the impossibility of influencing their lives in any way have learned not to take any steps towards change, even if they really have such an opportunity. German psychologist Julius Kuhl continued his research on learned helplessness. For the experiment, Kuhl asked students to solve problems. The peculiarity of this experiment was that not a single problem had a solution, and everything was accompanied by negative assessments from the examiners. And the more students tried to solve them, the more negative marks the students received. In the second part of the experiment, students were given a simple problem that had a solution, however, the students could not cope with it. In the book “Motivation, Conflict and Action Control” (Motivation, Konflikt und Handlungskontrolle), published in 1983, he writes that learned helplessness is this is a violation of the ability to overcome existing difficulties, a refusal to take any actions that could lead to a resolution of the situation, because in similar situations this was preceded by failures. Learned helplessness is one of the forms of violation of volitional behavior. That is, behavior responsible for: Setting a goal Starting an action Continuing an action (maintaining an intention) Overcoming obstacles In the first and second parts, I wrote what learned helplessness is and how parents can form it. Using the example of an experiment conducted by Kuhl, you can see how learned helplessness can form in schools and universities. And now we are coming to the point where a person with developed learned helplessness gets a job. Learned helplessness is of a general nature and extends to various areas of life. This means that its manifestations do not depend on the situations in which a person finds himself; rather, helplessness begins to spread to an increasing number of situations in a person’s life if it is not worked with. Learned helplessness at work Work, as a rule, involves the need to understand what and how you you will do. And also in what time frame you need to complete your task. This relates to the area of ​​goal setting. After planning, it’s time to start working. And completing it for some time, which is necessary to bring it to completion. But besides this, there are difficulties in any work. To solve them, efforts must be made. A person with learned helplessness often cannot understand what he wants to do and what needs to be done to achieve a result. Instead of starting a business, you can hear phrases from such a person: “Not now”, “I would like to, but...”,“Sometime later,” “It’s hard to start.” We can often perceive this as laziness or excuses. However, the reason is something else - learned helplessness, which prevents a person from even thinking about starting a task, let alone actually starting. There is a similar difficulty in continuing a task and bringing it to the end. The main reason for interrupting something started is a lack of interest: “something has become uninteresting,” “I changed my mind.” And indeed, sometimes the matter may not be interesting or the person decides to do something else. But in the case of learned helplessness, this will apply to all activities that a person is engaged in. But the most common reason for stopping work and quitting halfway through is obstacles. Overcoming obstacles requires strong will. They are needed both in order to understand what exactly is hindering, and in order to develop a program of action that will help overcome the obstacle and to implement actions. That is, overcoming obstacles is in itself a separate new task, which needs to define a goal, start doing it and achieve a result. And then the circle closes, and the person with learned helplessness retreats. An additional “bonus” for a person with learned helplessness is internal suffering. He sees and understands that he does not start things, abandons them halfway, and does not take seemingly simple steps. But when he tries to do them, everything returns to its place and things get off the ground again and again for Anna. So what to do about it? I think you understand that there are simply no universal tips for all occasions in nature. So these tips are the direction of action. A person with learned helplessness needs to learn to do complex simple things: Plan and achieve Start a new business and continue it Stop generalizing as an excuse (we are all like that) Learn to believe in your own strength Learn to overcome the inner “I can’t” and learn to do something new. If you notice learned helplessness in yourself If you notice many of the signs described in yourself, then the best thing you can do is see a psychotherapist. Even though asking for help is difficult. Despite the fact that each individual case does not look scary, and their series does not seem so, because each time the reasons are different. But to clarify the situation, I will still give some advice and courses of action. In order to improve the situation with learned helplessness, you need to learn to notice these manifestations. This, for example, could be a protracted conflict that you refuse to resolve or a difficult subject that you just can’t begin to study. In this case, the type of excuses will be approximately the following: “Everyone in my family is like this,” “what’s the point of starting? It won’t work anyway,” “There are people smarter than you, but they didn’t succeed either.” The words may be different, but the general tone of these phrases remains the same. Once you have learned to notice them, you need to begin to resist them. For example, you can remember times when you took on tasks and completed them to the end. When difficult situations were resolved. Find your desires and needs. Understand what exactly you want and don’t do. Start doing this. Start winning with simple things. Just as it is impossible to start playing sports on Monday or on New Year’s Day, it is also impossible to win by taking on a difficult task right away. In order to run a marathon, people learn to run, breathe, place their feet correctly, train, train and train some more. So you need to start with simple things. The most common ones. Arrive on time, do household chores as soon as they are needed, start doing something regularly (reading, walking, running, doing exercises, watching a movie in a foreign language, etc.) Small victories make it possible to move on to big ones. The main difficulty that people face in such situations - every new business needs to be started, overcome difficulties and finished. And since this is difficult, there is a tendency to give up new things, adding a twist to