Building Resiliency by Shifting Your Mindset
Resiliency is a hard concept to wrap your mind around but at its core, resiliency is the ability to keep your chin up and keep moving forward when things get tough. The more resilient you are, the better you will be at overcoming challenges and obstacles that stand in between you and your end goal. As a student, resiliency plays a key role as every class brings a new set of challenges that need to be overcome. Whether it’s a group project, huge final essay, or even just a challenging homework question, resiliency is the underlying skill that will drive you to success everyday. In this article, we’ll take a closer look at what resiliency looks like, why it’s such a valuable asset, and how we can work towards becoming more resilient each and every day.
Resiliency is one of those weird concepts that can’t be seen, heard, or felt, and everyone has it to a certain degree. The goal is to strengthen your resiliency so you can overcome more, be discouraged by less, and lower those barriers that might be holding you back. To give you an example, when a child tries to put the square into the circle hole and it doesn’t fit, you don’t see them give up, they try to put the square into other holes. This is a form of resiliency because while the child failed the first time, they continued to try again and again, overcoming challenges until they achieved success. Taking this into a post-secondary context, imagine a complex math problem on your homework, you don’t just try once and call it quits, you look from a new angle, learn more about the factors in play, maybe even ask a friend for direction, this is you demonstrating how resilient you are. The question now becomes, how can I become more resilient? We all want to feel like things are easy but half the problem is your mindset sees challenges as problems instead of opportunities.
Creating a Growth Mindset
When we begin to see challenges as opportunities to learn, suddenly things that were formerly hard, laborious, and relatively disliked become more interesting and engaging and you begin to find ways to learn and grow from them. The challenge is getting your mind to think the right way. Take a bodybuilder for example, lifting weights is tough, hard, requires a lot of energy and effort, and leaves you feeling tired and drained afterwards, put simply it’s a challenge. A bodybuilder knows it’s a challenge but instead sees it as an opportunity to grow more muscle and become stronger. This is the kind of mindset we want to take with us into every challenge. Unfortunately, training your mind is a lot easier said than done but with the right tools, small adjustments can be made to get on the right track to becoming more resilient.
Self-Talk
The first change to make is your language and how you speak to yourself or your inner dialogue. When you encounter a problem, instead of telling yourself “I can’t do this” or “I don’t know how to do this”, you can try saying “I’m not sure how to do this right now, but let me do some learning and come back to it” or even “I’m unsure how to start this task but I know my professor can help point me in the right direction.” Both of these statements go from discouraging and accepting to hopeful, optimistic, and resilient. The key rule here is to use more positive statements that focus on growth, learning, and development. As a side note, you might be under the impression that your resiliency is pretty strong, and it might be, but there will always be more opportunities to learn and grow so adopting this mindset is a long-term investment.
Relationships and Your Support Network
Contributing to the growth mindset is the relationships you have and the people you keep as company. Take a minute to reflect on those closest to you. Do they want you to succeed and overcome the challenges you face? Are they supporting you through those challenges? Who can you turn to when you need some help? Having the right people in your corner is just as important as shifting your mindset. When you are surrounded by positivity and people who are genuinely cheering you on, it becomes easier to believe in yourself and shift to a more positive mindset. I’m not saying you have to cut ties with your friends because they would rather you attend their party instead of studying. What I am saying is those same people need to be there to study by your side when the time comes, they need to be supportive and tell you “You got this!” Building your support network with positivity in mind is a surefire way to shift towards a growth mindset. There’s a fun and quick activity I like to run with my staff called “Who is at your table?” The activity is aimed for you to think about who is in your support network. There can be as many as 11 seats at the table or as few as 4, that number is totally up to you. The goal of the exercise is to reflect on your support network and ask the tough questions, especially “Are these people really on my team?” and “Do they really want to see me winning?” Knowing these answers can help make your table more supportive. I’ve linked a short article here about some of the people you might want to include at your table. It might feel a bit yucky or mean to exclude certain people from your table but this also isn’t meant to be a contact list, you can still connect with people outside of your table, they just might not be the best person to turn to when you are seeking support.
Finding Meaning in Challenges
When navigating the tough challenges of post-secondary life, I find that when we can understand the purpose or the “why” behind the challenge, it can make it easier to overcome and see as a learning opportunity. You might not understand the immediate reason why a challenge is presented to you and it’s not always important that you do, but it can certainly help make overcoming it easier. In these moments when I start to get frustrated about a problem, the best thing to do is take a step back, take a deep breath, and think about why this is happening and what the goal is. Math problems are there to help you learn the skills you’ll need in the real world. Essays are there to help encourage reflection and demonstrate understanding. Group projects encourage teamwork, collaboration, communication, and leadership skills. There is always a reason behind the challenge and it can be worth reflecting on what the reason, goal, or outcome might be. Think about a recent challenge you faced. What was the goal or outcome? What did you learn from it? How will the lesson inform your future endeavours?
Practicing Self-Care
As a nice conclusion to our resiliency-building journey, I wanted to include a short piece about self-care and how it can contribute to a growth mindset. You might not think self-care has much to do with resiliency, and you’d be right. However, self-care can provide the time and space needed to exercise resiliency, you need both of them to work together for the perfect balance. Activities that reduce stress are perfect for those times when you need to step away from a problem. They allow you to get out, focus on something else for a while, and come back at the problem with the right mindset and perhaps a nice fresh perspective. On the other hand, mindfulness practices such as journalling or meditation provide time and space for self-reflection leading to an increase in your self-awareness. Writing down your thoughts and emotions can also be an outlet for you to then come back to the issue at hand without feeling as overwhelmed. Engaging in some quick and easy self-care activities is a great habit to get into and can really boost your mood throughout the day. Consider what self-care looks like to you and the benefits you get from those activities.
At the end of the day, resiliency is going to look different for everyone and everyone will have their own ideas of what resiliency should look like. The important thing to remember is to keep trying your best and never give up. If you want to achieve something, set a goal, work towards it, and don’t stop when times get tough. Take those challenges as opportunities and show the world what you can achieve when you set your mind to it!