 Previously, I wrote about Dr. Angela Lee Duckworth and her insightful research on the role that Grit plays in our success in life and how we can cultivate it in our families. how-to-cultivate-resilience.html
A practice that Dr. Duckworth and her family live by is the “Hard Thing Rule.” It’s an easy concept. Everyone in the family including Mom and Dad chooses a hard thing, something that requires “daily deliberate practice.” It can be anything one chooses to do—yoga, running, piano, soccer, ballet, mountain climbing—it just must be something that’s challenging and is interesting enough to continue for a set amount of time. You can quit your hard thing if you change your mind, but you must stick with it until a natural stopping point, like the end of a semester or after the tuition runs out. In other words, you can’t quit on a bad day just because it was hard; you have to see it through to a reasonable end. It has three parts:
What would it look like for your family to take on this challenge? Talk about it at your next family meeting the-power-of-weekly-family-time.html Hear Dr. Duckworth talk about her experience with the Hard Thing Rule: globalleadership.org/videos/leading-yourself/the-hard-thing-rule?locale=en Another way to build resilience might surprise you--video games. Dr. Jane McGonigal is embracing technology for the sake of improving the lives of kids, youth, and adults. She is a world-renowned designer of alternate reality games—or games that are designed to improve real lives and solve real problems. Believing that game designers are on a humanitarian mission, her number one goal in life is to see a game developer win a Nobel Peace Prize. Dr. McGonigal specializes in games that challenge players to tackle real-world problems, such as poverty, hunger, and climate change, through planetary-scale collaboration. Her game “SuperBetter” helps players tackle health challenges such as depression, anxiety, chronic pain, and traumatic brain injury. The online game for ages thirteen and up builds resilience—the ability to stay strong, motivated, and optimistic even in the face of change and difficult challenges. Playing “SuperBetter” unlocks heroic potential to overcome tough situations and achieve goals that matter most. Check out her website: www.superbetter.com/ If you enjoyed this excerpt from "The Gift of Resilience", consider purchasing my book. Find out more here: 7 Gifts to Give Your Child  Dr. Angela Lee Duckworth, a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania, worked with Dr. Seligman. In her application to the program, Ms. Duckworth stated that she had done extensive teaching and volunteering in public schools, summer programs, and universities. What she found was that what was needed to improve education was not the schools but the students themselves. Dr. Duckworth and her team went on to prove that the common denominator among spelling bee finalists, successful West Point cadets, salespeople, and teachers who not only stick with but improve in their performance, is grit.
In her book Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance, she defines grit as a distinct combination of passion, resilience, determination, and focus that allows a person to maintain the discipline and optimism to persevere in their goals, even in the face of discomfort, rejection, and a lack of visible progress for years, or even decades. Dr. Duckworth and her team created a test called the Grit Scale, and they discovered that a person’s grit score can predict their achievement in difficult situations, and that grit is a greater predictor of success in life than intelligence, family background and income, and grades in school. The exciting news for all parents is that grit can be cultivated in ourselves and our children. Dr. Duckworth is the founder and CEO of Character Lab characterlab.org/ where parents and teachers can find actionable advice based on science. On the website, you can find out where you are on the grit scale. Or you can sign up to get sixty second “Tips of the Week” on everything from “How to Benefit from Boredom” to “The Soul of Empathy.” There are playbooks on assorted topics. The one on grit gives the following tips on how to encourage grit in others--my children, family, co-workers and friends:
If you enjoyed this article, check out last week's post--how-to-cultivate-resilience.html--and consider purchasing my book. Find out more here: 7 Gifts to Give Your Child  Did you know that Dr. Martin E. P. Seligman discovered that children need to fail in order to succeed? In fact, it can help them figure out how to succeed next time. He discovered that until the early 1960s, achievement was the most important goal that parents sought to instill in their children. But from the later 1960s until the present, the focus of schools and parents has shifted to building up self-esteem.
Despite the increased focus on self-esteem over the past decades, depression in children has continued to grow, now affecting a quarter of all kids today. To combat this trend, Dr. Seligman began the Penn Depression Prevention Project, the first long-term study aimed at children ages eight through twelve. His findings were revolutionary, proving that children can be protected against depression by being taught how to challenge their pessimistic thoughts. His book The Optimistic Child offers parents and teachers the tools developed in this study to teach children of all ages life skills that transform helplessness into proficiency and bolster self-esteem. Dr. Seligman says that to develop resilience, children need to develop optimism. This involves changing one’s belief from “I can’t” to “I can.” Parents can support this transformation by creating an environment where it is safe to try and fail, as well as helping their child discover the gifts that come from failure: the opportunity to evaluate, the motivation to try harder, the chance to be creative, and the development of maturity. This helps our child develop a growth mindset instead of a fixed mindset, putting the emphasis on the steps the child took to reach the end result. By focusing on process, it shows that getting stuck, asking for help, and trying new strategies are an important part of the process. How we respond to our child can result in their feelings of helplessness or sense of accomplishment. How we respond to our child’s hurtful words or actions can impact their resilience. Suppose I take my children on an outing to the zoo, and my daughter is teasing her brother. She says, “You know that you are adopted, right? Daddy is not your real dad. Your dad is a gorilla. You had better behave today because right next to the zoo is the prison, and if you do anything wrong, you will get sent there for the rest of your life.” Of course, as the parent, I need to step in and say something. But imagine the impact of two vastly different parental responses to the daughter.
The first response attacks the child’s character and does not give them a way to recover. Speaking in this manner can create a feeling of shame— “I am a bad person.” The second response begins with her good qualities and states clearly that today, she is doing something unacceptable. It allows her to feel the guilt—that she has done something wrong—and gives her a chance to correct her behavior. When a child knows that it is safe to make mistakes or to mess up sometimes, their performance often improves. The knowledge that they have a safe place to try and keep trying until they succeed gives them confidence. We can see an example of this in the building of the Golden Gate Bridge. In 1933, the work was falling behind the targeted deadlines. One of the crew members had fallen to his death, causing everyone to work more slowly out of fear for their own lives. Although reluctant due to the time crunch, the supervisor took the advice of one of the workers to hoist a safety net into place. Suddenly, the men began to work more quickly and efficiently, and the bridge was soon completed. What was it that enabled them to work faster and better? It was the removal of the fear of failure. When we create an environment in our home that shows that it is safe to fail and that our child is supported in finding a way to try again, resiliency is fostered. If you enjoyed this short excerpt from "The Gift of Resilience", consider purchasing my book. Find out more here: 7 Gifts to Give Your Child |