"Nothing I do makes any difference"

Here's an example. In her last job a woman complained twice about a supervisor who bullied her. Nothing was done, and she found out later that she'd been written down as difficult. She works somewhere else now. The rota here is unfair to her in a small, fixable way, and she hasn't mentioned it. When a colleague asks why not, she says there's no point and they never listen.

I want to be fair to this belief, because it's usually drawn from experience. For many people it was the most accurate belief available at the time. A child can't leave home, and can't make a parent stop drinking. An employee in a firm that protects its managers really can't get a complaint heard. If you learned that trying gets you nowhere, the chances are that someone taught you.

There's a well known line of research here, and its authors changed their minds about it in a way I find useful. In the 1960s Martin Seligman and Steven Maier gave dogs electric shocks that the dogs could do nothing to stop. Later, when escape was made easy, many of those dogs didn't try. The researchers concluded that the animals had learned that nothing they did mattered, and they called it learned helplessness.

Fifty years on, the same two men looked back over what brain research had found since, mostly in rats, and said they'd had it backwards. Staying passive appears to be the built-in response to bad events that go on and on. It doesn't have to be learned. What has to be learned is control. An animal that has acted and found that acting worked is protected against the passivity later.

Rats are a long way from your career, and I don't want to lean on this harder than it will bear. I still find the reversal helpful. It suggests that nobody trained you to be helpless. More likely you spent a long time somewhere that trying didn't work, and you haven't since had enough experience of trying that did. If that's right, the remedy is that experience, in small amounts. Being argued with won't do it, and that includes being argued with by me.

The trouble with the belief is that it travels. It was formed in one place about one set of people, and it goes with you into places where it isn't true. An old door in a shared house might be locked every time you try it, for years. You stop trying, and you're right to. But nobody tells you on the day someone unlocks it.

You can often hear the belief travelling in the words. In 1978 Lyn Abramson, Seligman and John Teasdale revised the helplessness theory for people. They argued that what does the damage is how you explain a bad event. Explanations that are permanent, such as "it'll always be like this", and that cover everything, such as "it's like this with everyone", predict giving up. The words to listen for are "always", "never", "everyone", "nobody" and "typical". "My last manager ignored two complaints" is a fact about one manager. "They never listen" is a forecast about every manager you'll ever have.

A sorting exercise helps here. Take a grievance and put everything about it into three piles. The first pile is what you can't change, which includes what already happened, other people's characters, and decisions that are final. The second is what you can influence. You can ask, apply, complain, negotiate or propose. The outcome isn't yours to decide, but you can always make the attempt. The third pile is what you can simply do, such as opening the envelope, updating the CV, making the appointment, or leaving.

Helplessness puts everything in the first pile. I should say that the opposite mistake exists too. Some self-help writing puts everything in the third pile and tells you that your life is whatever you decide it is. That's false, and it's cruel to people who are up against poverty, illness or prejudice. Some situations leave you very few moves. Even then there are usually one or two, and they often involve other people, such as a union, an advice service, or a neighbour who knows how the council works.

The way to test the belief is with small experiments. Choose something from the second pile, small enough that a no won't flatten you. Before you do it, write down what you expect to happen. Then do it, and write down what did happen. The woman in the example might write "they'll brush me off", and then ask about the rota.

Some of these experiments will fail, and chapter 12 is about that. The aim isn't to prove that trying always works, because it doesn't. The aim is to swap "never" for an actual count. My guess is that the count will be better than you expect.