How Resilience is Related to Growth Mindset and Grit

Last week Heather talked about how you can build resilience in the face of grief, and how it can help you process your grief in a more healthy way. Today I want to talk about how resilience is linked to having a growth mindset and developing grit. Resilience, which is our capacity to process setbacks and disappointments and adapt to change, is an important part of developing your grit, and can be helped along by having a growth mindset.

For more information, check out these related posts:

• What Grit Means to Me
• Growth Mindset: An Introduction

Failing is Hard

When we don’t succeed at something, or if something doesn’t turn out as well as we’d hoped or expected, that can have a negative impact on our self confidence and belief in our own abilities. Being able to process that impact in a healthy way – and recover from it – requires resilience. Resilience can be built just like any other skill, but it takes practice and effort.

When you intentionally change the way you react and adapt to changing circumstances and setbacks, you are building your resilience. And when you can put those new habits into practice, you will be able to deal with things like failure and change with less stress and in a more healthy way.

Related:

• Fail Like a Champ

Building Resilience is a Journey

Resilience is not a character trait. It is a set of skills and coping mechanisms that can be learned and improved upon just like any other skill. Thinking back to our growth mindset and grit themes, I see a lot of connections between being gritty, having a growth mindset, and having resilience to help you get past failures and to persevere.

Also just like any other skill, it doesn’t happen overnight. You don’t just wake up one day and “be resilient”. Reading this blog post, or any other blog post out there, won’t make you more resilient. All this can do is help you see why resilience is important and hopefully give you some ideas and ways to improve your resilience factor. It’s up to you to put in the work to make changes in how you respond to stressful situations, loss, grief, disappointments, and setbacks.

Tips for Building Resilience

There are so many articles out there containing ways to build or improve your resilience, and Heather gave some great tips last week as well. I’ve linked some additional articles at the bottom of this one. I’ve also listed out some of the ways that seem to make a lot of sense or that I’ve tried myself that seem to be effective for me. However, it’s important to remember that what works for some may not work for others. So I would encourage you to do lots of reading and learning from a variety of sources. Asking for help from a psychologist or therapist can’t hurt either.

Have Hope

It may be easier said than done. However, try cultivating a hopeful outlook by focusing on what you want and not all the negative things that could get in the way or go wrong. Hope is a powerful way to counteract negativity, while hopelessness is a trap that can lead you to give up.

Take Care of Yourself

Have you ever tried to deal successfully with a stressful situation when you’re tired or hungry? I don’t know about you, but when I’m tired or feeling worn down it’s a lot easier to let a stressful situation get out of control or blown out of proportion. Making sure we get enough sleep, food, and relaxation is an important part of being ready to deal with and more easily adapt to negative events.

Change Your View of Change Itself

Change in our lives causes stress, particularly if those changes are viewed as negative. We sometimes add to this stress by how we react to the change. The challenge is to see if we can figure out ways to remind ourselves that change is a fact of life; we can’t escape it. Fighting against it or spending our energy trying to prevent it not only causes even more stress, but it will hinder our ability to move on. So if we can find ways to remind ourselves that change is the only constant in life, and focus on ways we can adapt to and embrace changes, we will be building our resilience (and reducing stress!).

Keep Things In Perspective

When something traumatic or negative is happening, it’s easy to allow the event to take up all our energy. This can cause our view to narrow until this thing is all we can see. Be careful to keep things in perspective. Remind yourself to keep an eye on the larger view. Doing this will help us not to be consumed with the negativity of what’s going on. It will also help us avoid blowing everything out of proportion.

Change the Narrative

What we tell ourselves about an event is going to color our emotions and how we think about it. This will, in turn, affect our ability (or inability) to recover from it. This story we tell ourselves about something that happened is the narrative we have developed about that event. If our narrative is negative, and we haven’t processed the emotions inspired in us by that negative event, we will have difficulty moving on from it. So first, I think we want to understand what those emotions are and how they are impacting us.

Then, if we can, trying to look for the “bright side” of a negative event. While I think it can sometimes be difficult to see the silver lining in every situation, looking for one can help us change our narrative. Journaling is one way to help us explore our emotions and thoughts about an event in a way that is private and safe. This article has more detail on this, and found it very useful.

Self-Compassion

The same article I just linked above from Greater Good Magazine had three points about self-compassion that I just loved, and wanted to share here. One of the practices recommended in that article is called the “Self-Compassion Break“, and involves the following:

• Be mindful. When something happens, or when you are reliving a painful moment, acknowledge what you’re feeling. Do this without trying to analyze it or apply judgement. Just something as simple as saying, “This hurts” can help you recognize and acknowledge what you’re feeling without applying any judgement.
• Remember that you’re not alone. Remind yourself that pain, suffering, and stress are a part of life, and that everyone feels this way at times. Ground yourself in the reminder that everyone has these feelings, and that you are not alone in feeling this way.
• Give yourself some compassion. Say something to yourself that is kind and supportive. Offer yourself some kindness, just like you might offer it to a friend that is struggling with a similar challenge. Express a wish for patience, acceptance, hope, or something similar to help you through this. You deserve it.

Wrap Up

Everyone will have different ways of dealing with negative events. Some ways will be more successful for some than others. Understanding yourself and what you need will help you identify ways to deal with stress, change, and other negative happenings in a way that will work for you specifically. Remember that resilience is something you can build, and it doesn’t happen overnight. You can change the way you react and adapt to trauma and negativity if you are intentional about making the change. And, of course, practice.

Additional Resources

Below are the articles I linked above plus some additional ones that may help you make progress on your journey to improve your resilience!

Related articles:

• 10 Tips to Build Resilience in Teens and Young Adults | American Psychological Association. This article proposes a number of tricks to help teens and young adults build resilience. It seems like great advice for anyone, really.
• What is Resilience | Psych Central
• 5 Science-Backed Strategies to Build Resilience | The Greater Good Magazine