“I Lost My Mind In The School Parking Lot”: An Exclusive Extract From Shatterproof By Tasha Eurich
In today’s fast-paced world, resilience feels essential – but is it really enough? We’ve long been told it’s the key to coping with stress and setbacks, yet many of us are still burning out.
In Shatterproof, New York Times bestselling organisational psychologist Dr Tasha Eurich offers a new approach. Instead of simply bouncing back, she shows how to turn stress into energy and challenges into growth. Backed by science and real stories, Shatterproof is a practical guide to becoming truly unbreakable – so life’s chaos doesn’t just test you, it transforms you.
Below, we share an exclusive extract from the book that reveals the real story behind resilience and what it takes to stay strong when life feels overwhelming.
Ever-resilient Emily will never forget the day she collapsed under the weight of a feather.
One chilly February morning, Emily was completing a routine kindergarten drop-off before heading to work. As the wind stung her cheeks, she wearily hoisted five-year-old Clark from her Subaru. Her mind was racing faster than her footsteps, filled with the day’s overflowing to-do list and a growing concern for her son’s well-being.
Clark had been different lately: sullen, defiant, uncooperative. At home, tantrums erupted frequently and without warning; at school, his teachers were increasingly worried about his disruptive behaviour. Earlier that week, Clark had tearfully confessed to being bullied by an older girl in his class, leaving Emily and her husband with nothing to do but stew as they waited for a meeting with the principal the following Monday. Then, as they hurried across the school parking lot, a dejected Clark pointed out a child walking with her mother. “That’s her, Mama. That’s Greta. The one who picks on me.”
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No one who knew Emily, not even Emily herself, could have predicted what happened next.
“I . . . saw . . . red. I marched over, pulling Clark behind me by his little hand and I – honestly, I lost my mind.” Her voice trembling with fury, she confronted the little girl. “You!” she pointed an accusatory finger, “You need to stop picking on my son!”
Greta’s mom instinctively stepped in front of her daughter, angrily demanding that Emily address the issue through proper channels.
Instead, Emily impulsively seized a bag of school supplies from the woman’s grip. Soon the two mothers were in a tug-of-war over coloured pencils, glue sticks and glitter as their children looked on.
The altercation was eventually broken up by two bewildered parents, with Greta’s mom threatening to call the police. “Thank God no one had their phone out,” Emily said. “If that went online, I’d lose my job . . . at best. And just imagine how this will look to the principal. I’m the crazy woman who raised a crazy child.”
The truth is, Emily was anything but crazy.
On the contrary, I knew my friend to be a master juggler of life’s endless demands: a loving wife and mother of two young children who seamlessly balanced her family life with her taxing role as a nurse practitioner at a local hospital, all while constantly showing up for her extended family and friends. She’d even started a weekend business selling beauty products to boost her kids’ college funds. Emily had always faced life’s challenges with unwavering resolve and positivity, including during her husband’s recent health crisis. But that winter morning, she finally snapped.
As she told me about the Parking Lot Brawl, I learned that my seemingly cool and collected friend had felt the cracks forming for some time.
Stress was materialising more often and hitting harder across multiple areas of her life. At work, constant pressure to “do more with less” left her falling farther and farther behind as she struggled to keep up with an ever-expanding to-do list. Like many high achievers, the thought of asking for help made Emily queasy – not just because it signalled that she couldn’t handle everything, but also because she knew that everyone else was just as swamped as she was.
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Clark’s issues weighed particularly heavily on her. Most nights, Emily lay awake watching the red numbers on her alarm clock tick upward, wondering where she’d gone wrong as a parent. Months earlier, when her husband initially raised concerns about Clark’s behaviour, Emily was already in a nearly constant overwhelmed state. At a loss for how she could handle one more problem, she’d suggested a wait-and-see approach – a response she now regretted at a cellular level. To the outside observer, Emily appeared to have everything under control. But on the inside, she was grappling with a growing sense of anxiety and self-doubt, terrified she would let everyone down. Of late, she found herself silently sobbing in her car more often than she cared to admit, even to herself. As to the cause, it would be easy to chalk up Emily’s situation to weak coping skills, especially if you believe in the power of resilience. After all, for decades, we’ve been taught that no matter what life throws at us, if we can just manage to tough it out, we’ll emerge stronger on the other side.
Yet when I dug into how Emily was coping with this stressful period, I discovered she was doing almost everything right. She exercised regularly and engaged in self-care. She maintained a positive attitude, practiced gratitude and worked to reframe challenges as opportunities. She turned to her husband and friends for social support. She’d even added a daily ten-minute meditation before work and kicked all added sugar (including her beloved gummy bears). By all objective measures, Emily should have been a paragon of mental health amid adversity. But these tried-and-true coping behaviours weren’t getting to the root cause of her suffering. Instead, they were masking the symptoms, like a thin layer of paint applied to cover cracked concrete. And just below the surface, those cracks continued to widen.
Emily’s commitment to pretending she was okay was so strong and so effective that virtually no one knew anything was wrong. Anyway, who was she to complain? She was just going through a difficult spell, like everyone does at one time or another. Eventually, she told herself, the playground bully would tire of picking on her son, things at work would start to normalise, and her husband would feel well enough to offer more help and support around the house. She kept reminding herself, God will never give me more than I can handle.
But to Emily’s great frustration, her mental health kept spiraling. Every day was a marathon of anxiety and dread. All she could think was, I’ve always been such a tough person – so why can’t I handle this?
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That’s when she called me.
“You’ve spent twenty years coaching some of the world’s most powerful CEOs and executives, and the stakes are too high for them to fall apart.” Then, in an uncharacteristically frantic tone, she pleaded, “You have to tell me why none of my coping tools are working, and what I’m supposed to do!” I thought of a recent conversation with a coaching client, a chief executive officer (CEO) who was leading a massive business transformation. He admitted, “I thought I was doing fine with the endless change. Then one day, on a call with my team, I started screaming at them. So . . . I guess I’m not fine.”
Suddenly, I realised that neither Emily nor my client were outliers. A few years back, I’d published my second book (Insight) on the link between self-awareness and success. It took me all over the world to speak to people from every walk of life. Along the way, I noticed that clients, audiences and readers were increasingly asking variations of one question: “How do I handle all this chaos endlessly swirling around me?”
While few were strangers to setbacks and stress, navigating them seemed to be getting harder. This hinted that our current solutions weren’t working the way we’d like.
Here’s something to know about me: with a PhD in a highly quantitative field of psychology, I think “research says” are probably the two most exciting words in the English language. (I’ve even spent the last ten years conducting empirical research on self-awareness just for fun, without even being employed by a university requiring me to do so.) Therefore, in Emily’s cry for help, I saw a new way to deploy my nerdery.
So, (obviously) I assembled a research team and hatched a comprehensive program to push past the old platitudes about how to navigate stress and setbacks to find out what really worked. My research team’s investigation involved synthesising more than 1 200 scientific articles, surveying thousands of people across a half dozen data sets, and analysing more than three hundred in-depth interviews with a global sample of working adults. Our research questions mirrored Emily’s: Why are existing coping strategies no longer working, and is there a better way to shore up our mental health and well-being? In other words, my team wanted to learn how we can keep from shattering in a world that seems intent on trying to break us – and occasionally succeeds.
I wish I could tell you the answers came easily. The truth is that it took nearly five years to confidently uncover them. But once we did, our findings upended much of the conventional wisdom about how humans can thrive in the face of adversity.
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I wrote Shatterproof for my fellow stressed-out strivers goal-oriented people seeking success and fulfillment, who feel exhausted by chronic, compounding challenges across multiple areas of life: work, career, romantic relationships, family, friends, health, community and the world. Emily is far from alone in feeling weighed down by the unrelenting demands of work and life. How often do you feel like you’re moving at full speed but unable to catch up? Or pretend you’re fine when you’re not? Or fear that you’re one crisis away from shattering?
Most of us are working more than ever yet feel like we’re never doing enough. We’re disconnected and exhausted but too afraid to ask for support or advocate for our needs. We strive to appear “fine” on the outside, but on this inside are being crushed under the weight of fear, anxiety, and self-doubt. Then, when we break, we blame ourselves for not being tough enough.
As I mentioned earlier, we’ve long been taught that by strengthening our resilience muscles, we can survive anything while growing stronger in the process. However, current research (mine and others) casts doubt on much of this “grit and bear it” gospel. And despite the literature on the power of resilience, even the most resilient among us are struggling.
In this book, I argue two things. First, because resilience is a limited resource, it alone may no longer be an adequate coping strategy in our increasingly chaotic world. And second, the best response to constant chaos is not merely to survive it but to harness it in order to thrive. In the pages ahead, you’ll learn a new set of scientifically supported strategies for doing just that, helping you feel more energised, confident and ready to navigate future challenges – from small but recurring setbacks to major life-defining crises.
As we trudge through each day while trying to keep our heads above water, the idea of thriving might feel like a distant fantasy. Indeed, with change as our constant companion, we will inevitably bend or even break under the weight of life’s stressors, and more often than we’d like. But as we will see throughout this book, the challenges that threaten to break us can also uniquely remake us – this is what it means to become shatterproof.
By following the four steps of the Shatterproof Road Map I unveil in the chapters ahead, you will learn to go beyond merely bouncing back from stress or setbacks and begin to confidently channel them into forward growth. Part empowering manifesto, part scientific exploration and part how-to guide, Shatterproof provides new clarity and language around a few experiences you may have struggled to explain or describe while setting you on the path to feeling better, doing better and living better than you ever have before.
Photo by Adena Rossiter
Meet The Author
Dr Tasha Eurich is a New York Times bestselling author, organisational psychologist and one of the world’s most influential coaches. Her TEDx talk has been viewed more than 10 million times, and she has worked with 30 000+ leaders and spoken to audiences across 20+ countries. Her clients include Google, Salesforce, the NBA, Nestlé, Johnson & Johnson, Deloitte, Walmart and the White House Leadership Development Program.
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