Building Resilience: How do we do it?

Resilience is the ability to adapt and thrive despite adversity. We all need it. The pandemic was a global demonstration of our need for resilience. Businesses and organizations that adapted to the unprecedented difficulties we all faced survived those difficulties; some of them thrived. On a smaller, more personal scale, the cultivation and development of resilience is one of the primary predictors of college success.

According to psychologist, science author, and MacArthur “genius” grant winner Angela Duckworth, “Doing well in school and in life depends on much more than your ability to learn quickly and easily.” Her research shows that doing well depends upon resilience, or what she calls grit. “Grit is passion and perseverance for very long-term goals. Grit is having stamina. Grit is staying with your future day in, day out, not just for the week, not just for the month, but for years…Grit is living life like it’s a marathon, not a sprint.” From a motivational and psychological perspective, “Grittier kids are significantly more likely to graduate.”[1]

The development of resiliency is experiential. Our individualized support is geared to the recognition, reinforcement, and replication of resilience.

We use an evidence-based resiliency scale to measure student outcomes. We also recognize building resilience in the conversations and check-ins we have with our students. We provide the positive feedback that strengthens their good experiences. “Social supports and prosocial behaviors, meaning making, humor, and exercise can foster and support resilience and reduce the intensity and duration of stress responsivity…The impact of positive emotions is cumulative; repeated positive emotional experiences over time prime the system for optimal response to negative stimuli.”[2] In other words, our focus on successes fosters more success.

At Focus Collegiate, we recognize resilience as a direct reaction to how the brain changes and grows in response to challenge. Each challenge faced successfully creates new neural pathways for future successes. Being able to not only deal with adversity but also have a vision that you can deal with it becomes a self-fulfilling experience. Ultimately the ability of our students to bounce back in the face of new challenges as they transition to collegiate life improves learning outcomes and becomes the foundation of successful independent living.

Space is limited, but we are still enrolling students for the fall – in person and virtually. Contact us right away to save your spot.

[1] https://www.ted.com/talks/angela_lee_duckworth_grit_the_power_of_passion_and_perseverance?language=en#t-330766

[2] https://melissainstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/THE-EMERGING-NEUROBIOLOGY-OF-RESILIENCE-June-2015.pdf

Photo by Anthony Fomin on Unsplash