Before and After’s

Hi. This is Andy Bernstein. This lesson is text-based instead of video-based, and in a minute you’ll see why.

The Resilience Academy teaches you to harness the power of Active Insight© to transform crucibles.

Part of this is done through learning (which you’ve been doing, and will keep doing); part of it is done through practicing (which you’ve also been doing, and will keep doing); and part of it is done through sharing stories of change and being inspired by the stories of others. That last part is what this lesson is about. I want to explain why this matters.

The Power of Story

Stories are how our brains give meaning to our experiences.

Insights can change that meaning — we thought someone should see things our way, and then we realized why (in reality at this time) they shouldn’t. That lets us tell a different story, one with an arc of positive transformation and growth.

The more hardship we see in the world, the more attractive we find stories of positive transformation and growth. There are many ways to center and celebrate these transformations — in music, in art, in movies, in literature.

Here in the Resilience Academy, we celebrate it through something called “Before and After’s.”


Before and Afters

“Before and After’s” are stories of crucibles where you struggle, and then a clear shift takes place:

You argue with someone for weeks, months, or years, and then you have an insight, and it stops.

You hate your body for weeks, months, or years, and then you have an insight, and it stops.

You resent your coworker, or blame your parents, or get frustrated by your child for weeks, months, or years — and then you have an insight, and it stops.

Maybe it doesn’t stop forever (crucibles often recur over time), but after each successful Active Insight© worksheet, there’s a felt difference — there was BEFORE (anger, resentment, conflict) and AFTER (clarity, understanding, an empathetic conversation). Hence the name.

Why This Matters

Before and After’s do two things:

First, they help you celebrate the transformational power of this crucible in your life. You tell the story of what life was like Before, the insight you had, and what happened After, and you record it so that future-you can see the gift that past-you gave them. This gets stored in your account.

The second thing Before and After’s do, if you give us permission, is change the world. You can opt not to share your Before and After (then it will just get saved to your account), but I encourage you to share your story because for people struggling with their own crucibles, seeing someone on the other side of the worksheet is inspirational. And this inspiration doesn’t come from me. It comes from you and other Resilience Academy members sharing their Before-and-After experiences.

How to Change the World

At the most basic level, societies don’t change through laws. They change through people. More specifically, they change through people repairing their relationships, strengthening their marriages, healing their families, re-setting the broken bones of their pasts, and moving forward more whole.

We’ll talk more about this in Level 5, where we look at social change, but here’s a sneak peak — your story of change helps heal the world. Because your breakthrough inspires someone else to sit down, face their crucible, and do that worksheet. Nobody gets excited about doing a worksheet. We get excited about the potential outcome, the potential for change, the Before and After.

We don’t want pictures of caterpillars. We want butterflies.

Telling your Before and After takes just a few minutes, and gives us all the inspiration we need. It follows a simple format. Here’s how it works. (As a demonstration, I’ll share a true Before and After from my life, before I was married.)

1. Describe the Before (what was happening):
For years, I thought my girlfriend should be more expressive. I judged her. I prodded her. I lectured her. I was convinced that what I wanted was completely normal and in her best interest. I was trying to help her! Of course she should be more expressive. My job was to help her open up like the flower she really wanted to be.

2. What worksheet topic did you do:
“She should be more expressive.”

3. What was the negation:
“In reality, she should not be more expressive at this time.”

4. What did you realize:
Holy crap! I realized what an asshole I was. I realized that, in reality, she should not be more expressive at this time, because of so many things: her family (who weren’t very outwardly expressive); her past relationships (not very expressive); my constantly needling her (which made her want to express herself even less). I realized that all the years of judging her and prodding her were not just ineffective — they were deeply disrespectful and unkind. I realized that she wasn’t a flower avoiding the sun. She was a human — with autonomy! And the absolute right to share, not share, express, not express, and be however she wanted to. I also realized that she WAS expressive, but in ways that were different from mine. I realized that my job wasn’t to diagnose or fix her. It was to love her, and to talk about our needs honestly but blamelessly, and to not push love away.

5. Describe the After (what happened next):
I apologized. I promised I would stop trying to change her. I stopped lecturing and started listening. I became aware of the ways she WAS expressing herself. We talked openly about how our styles of expression differed, and how we each experienced that. We got much closer.

In this particular story, which happened many years ago, there was an epilogue — eventually, when we could both see our differences more clearly without the fog of anger and resentment, we broke up. And we both ended up with people matched our needs more fully. So a Before and After might have a “Way After” over time. But in most cases, when you’re telling the story right after your insight, the time horizon will be shorter.

That’s the basic shape of a Before and After. One Resilience Academy member put it like this: “Life sucked. I did a worksheet. It blew my mind. I made changes. Things got better.”

Not every worksheet will have a dramatic arc, but many will, and your capturing matters.

Try it below as part of this lesson. When you complete Level 3, you’ll find the Before-and-After form unlocked in the navigation menu under Share.

[fluentform id=”16″]