The Survivor Personality

Al Siebert
Practical Psychology Press
Portland, Oregon, 1994

Life's best survivors are better than most people at quickly turning a disruptive event or adversity into a desireable development. Their reaction to almost anything that happens is a "Good! I'm glad this happened! Look what we can do now. Let's play."

If distressed by an unexpected crisis, they do not let themselves feel victimized. They go from being emotionally upset to coping to thriving to serendipity with amazing speed.

Thus it is that the phrase "The Serendipity Personality" could have been selected instead of "The Survivor Personality."

From Chapter 11 (page 226), "The Serendipity Talent: Turning Misfortune into Good Luck."

A nice addition to the list of things (see for example Voyage to Serendip ) which "intrinsic variability" makes it possible to do. More generally, The Survivor Personality is a very humane, sane, and accessible "self-help" sort of book. Siebert draws some eminently practical and useful implications from his background in psychology (Ph.D., University of Michigan, 1965). interviews with "survivors" of catastrophic events, and life experiences in general. A book one could happily hand to a friend in crisis, this is also a book which weaves together in interesting ways a variety of ideas and topics central to the Serendip mission "to support intellectual and social change in education... and in how one makes sense of life."

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