Day 189 of 365 - Cultivating Resilience & Grit
I came across that phrase in a recent column and it caught my attention. It sounds good, right? Who wouldn't want to be resilient or to have grit? But how do we foster these characteristics?
My memory about resilience pointed me to the work of psychologist Kelly McGonigal. She wrote a book called The Upside of Stress, and she has a great TED Talk video on the topic. Her approach to building resilience is, to leverage the physiological effects of stress to your advantage.
She talks about three ways to do this:
1) Perceive of stress as energy you can harness. Consider that your body is rising to the challenge to increase blood flow and oxygen to the brain for clearer thinking. Then, direct this energy to your goal.
2) Some neuro-chemicals released during stress help your brain grow stronger and build your resilience. Relax into the stress, breathe slowly and let your brain do its job.
3) When under stress, oxytocin is released and it's natural and helpful to reach out to others. This connection quiets our fears, increases our hope and optimism.
For discussion about the quality of grit, I turned to the work of another popular psychologist, Angela Duckworth. She defines grit as 'passion and sustained persistence applied toward long-term achievement, with no particular concern for rewards or recognition along the way.' It combines resilience, ambition and self-control in the pursuit of goals.
Duckworth says that if you have self-awareness you can mediate your weaknesses and raise your strengths. She recommends breaking down big goals into smaller parts that you can do with just a bit of support and to keep building on that.
We might think these concepts are just for young, ambitious students or adults just coming into the prime of life. But, they are actually valuable characteristics to cultivate throughout life. Given that we always have dreams and desires, we are always having to look at who we are becoming versus who we have been. We need resilience and grit to face challenges when they arise.
That challenge might be something chosen, like wanting to retire or downsize our home. Or, it may be unchosen, like dealing with a limiting health condition. We'll need our resilience and grit to dig deeper than our surface reactions, to find out what beliefs and desires and dreams we can count on in the long run, or the ones we ought to let go as we move forward.
Becoming clear on those will help us to break things down into manageable steps and to draw on that energy resource from the positive aspects of stress. It doesn't matter how small those steps need to be to help us feel successful in our coping strategy. If we're lucky and have asked, we'll also have others to support us along the way.
My memory about resilience pointed me to the work of psychologist Kelly McGonigal. She wrote a book called The Upside of Stress, and she has a great TED Talk video on the topic. Her approach to building resilience is, to leverage the physiological effects of stress to your advantage.
She talks about three ways to do this:
1) Perceive of stress as energy you can harness. Consider that your body is rising to the challenge to increase blood flow and oxygen to the brain for clearer thinking. Then, direct this energy to your goal.
2) Some neuro-chemicals released during stress help your brain grow stronger and build your resilience. Relax into the stress, breathe slowly and let your brain do its job.
3) When under stress, oxytocin is released and it's natural and helpful to reach out to others. This connection quiets our fears, increases our hope and optimism.
For discussion about the quality of grit, I turned to the work of another popular psychologist, Angela Duckworth. She defines grit as 'passion and sustained persistence applied toward long-term achievement, with no particular concern for rewards or recognition along the way.' It combines resilience, ambition and self-control in the pursuit of goals.
Duckworth says that if you have self-awareness you can mediate your weaknesses and raise your strengths. She recommends breaking down big goals into smaller parts that you can do with just a bit of support and to keep building on that.
We might think these concepts are just for young, ambitious students or adults just coming into the prime of life. But, they are actually valuable characteristics to cultivate throughout life. Given that we always have dreams and desires, we are always having to look at who we are becoming versus who we have been. We need resilience and grit to face challenges when they arise.
That challenge might be something chosen, like wanting to retire or downsize our home. Or, it may be unchosen, like dealing with a limiting health condition. We'll need our resilience and grit to dig deeper than our surface reactions, to find out what beliefs and desires and dreams we can count on in the long run, or the ones we ought to let go as we move forward.
Becoming clear on those will help us to break things down into manageable steps and to draw on that energy resource from the positive aspects of stress. It doesn't matter how small those steps need to be to help us feel successful in our coping strategy. If we're lucky and have asked, we'll also have others to support us along the way.
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