Speaking at the "University of California, Berkeley Commencements 2016," Sheryl Sandberg was a wife before becoming the COO of "Facebook" and an author to a book dedicated for women empowerment. She said while having a visit in Mexico last 2014, her husband Dave Goldberg unexpectedly died of cardiac arrhythmia, the first time she publicly spoke of it.

Goldberg's death brought her so much pain. She said her own resilience after his husband's death came from the psychologist Martin Seligman's "three P's," namely, personalization, pervasiveness, and permanence as transcribed by the LA Times.

The Three P's

The Facebook COO said: "Personalization" is the lesson that not everything that happens is because of us. She blamed herself before learning about the three P's. She eventually accepted that she could not have avoided his death. She was an economics major, how could she?

Pervasiveness is the principle that an event will influence all areas of your life, she said. She and her two children tried to return their lives ten days in ten days after Goldberg's death. Amid "consuming sadness of her loss," she went to a Facebook meeting, where she got waned into the discussion and for a brief split second, death was forgotten, she continued in her UC Commencement Speech 2016.

Third P is Permanence. It is the principle that the mourning will last a longer time. No matter what she did for months, it felt like the devastating grief would always be there, Sandberg continued in her commencement speech. Sooner, her rabbi encouraged her to accept your feelings but discern they would not last.

She ended her address at the University of California, Berkeley with this moving message: no one is born with a permanent sum of resilience. Be like a muscle, build it up then draw on it. In the end, figure out who you really are and be the best version of yourself.

You may get the complete transcript here and watch the video below:

Related
Tags University of California, Berkeley, Facebook, Commencement