What is Resilience in Children
Resilience or Grit is a term coined by Angela Duckworth in her book Grit where she aims to explain’ Why Passion and Resilience are the Secrets to Success’. Her story starts with her memories as a little girl when her Dad, a Chinese emigrant, was always very concerned with how Smart people are as a measure of success. In fact, Angela will dedicate her life long work in Psychology to studying what the main component of success is. She found that ‘Grit’ in combination with purpose far outweigh talent and that talented individuals would soon be outperformed by non-talented individuals who practised their skill consistently.
The first component of Grit is to actually Turn up. Turning up is essential to getting results. In fact, all you need to do is ‘Turning up’ consistently and success of some kind is guaranteed over time as a result. This works if you even practise 10mins a day, whether it is piano, meditation, or Yoga, or any ball games, or timetables! Consistency over time adds up to an enormous amount of time and compounded skill and effort. Master Yogi Pathabi Joins summed this up well in his classic line, famous amongst Ashtanga Yoga Students: ‘Do Your Practice and All is Coming’ and again Yoga is 99% Practice and 1% Theory
Before Angela was a psychologist, she was first a teacher in the classroom and she noticed that Effort and Interest in a subject were key to success, as opposed to talent. Some of her ‘talented’ maths students in fact scored lower marks than those students who applied themselves. In fact Effort is component number 2 as well as recognising when help is needed and asking for help, without dwelling on your low marks. Identify the gaps and work at it is component number 3, not dwelling on your failures is component number 4, it helps you keep focused on what needs doing as opposed to what we have not gotten right yet. In a comparative study of whether talent or effort is more important, Angela found that psychologists test to measure talent are not very objective, and in fact that talent can be distracting. What is most important is effort. Effort builds skill and at the same time makes skill more productive. Talent is how quickly your skills improve when you invest effort, however should you not invest effort, then talent becomes your unrealised potential, ie what you could have done but did not.
One of the top component of Grit is clarifying your goals and making sure they are aligned with your purpose or passion. Over time Grit grows and we can learn to accelerate that growth. It is therefore very important to help your child identify some goals or targets that they are interested in and understand that they need to stick to it for a while as commitment is a major component of perseverance. Understanding the power of ‘Yet’ is term coined by Carol Dweck in the book ‘Growth Mindset’ which also supports the fact that effort is the key to success. Being purpose driven or solution driven is important, as well as understanding that small steps eventually gets us there. Aligning expectations on a regular basis will help keep your child motivated so that their skill measures up the challenge that they are presented with. Should the challenge be too great in comparison to the skill, your child might feel discouraged as the amount of effort required seems unfair.
There is cause and effect dimension to effort+skills+talent+purpose+achievement=performance. Passion seems the main critical driver to wanting to spend effort consistently over time on a new skill. Feeling good about yourself and being praised for your effort can certainly act as a validation of our choice of skills. A virtuoso cycle of skill improvement or social multiplier effect is when a team of children are being coached and everyone benefits from each others learning, passion and excitement for the skill or game.
Between the journey and the goal, Yoga philosophy certainly views the journey as the most valuable path. It is important to set your goals well, but once the goals are set we should stick to it, turn up, practice and use good effort and the results will be inevitable. In fact, we may often find that our goals within our practice of Yoga keep evolving as we become more competent and confident, we are able to define more accurate goals, and so one and so forth. Joy in the practice is important as only passion and pleasure can help sustain effort overtime.
Because Yoga is a non competitive discipline, when children are not pushed through grades constantly, it is an ideal discipline to discover the reward that comes from an internal motivation as opposed to external forces and systems. Yoga and Mindfulness practice is beneficial with as little as a few minutes per day. There are many simple techniques and set routines that Children can learn to improve focus, and concentration, to develop strength and flexibility and to improve coordination. To learn how to teach Yoga to Children, join our online self paced courses that are available to anyone working with children with or without Yoga experience.
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