The capacity to overcome hardships and persevere in the face of adversity are only two characteristics of highly successful people. These characteristics are mostly referred to as grit and resilience, which Do With Coach helps in defining, so read away!
Resilience vs. Grit
Angela Duckworth, a scholar and MacArthur Fellow with a TED talk on grit, defines grit as “perseverance and enthusiasm for long-term goals.”
Duckworth’s study has focused on determining why some people with the same skill, intellect, and resources achieve more than others. She realised that grit might be tied to how much you can motivate yourself, reach your passion, and keep your drive when striving to describe the core of grit.
What Distinguishes Grit from Resilience?
Resilience is the capacity to get back up after being knocked down or strike back harder after a setback.
The subtle difference between these two highly intertwined character characteristics appears to be that resilience is the confidence to persevere when things are rough, and you fail when others regard continuing as fruitless or impossible. Grit is the motivation that keeps you working on challenging work for an extended time.
A Growth Mindset:
Are grit and resilience something you’re blessed with and cannot change, or are they resources that can drain and enhance via your routines and preferences?
Carol Dweck researches growth mentality, and her research has demonstrated that you can alter your attitude, which is equally essential to changing your grit. Dweck studied tenacity and its implications on accomplishment, particularly in academic settings, and established the following characteristics that influence pupils’ continuous persistence:
- Their perceptions of oneself
- Their objectives
- Their perspectives on social connectivity
- Their self-control abilities
When pupils have a growth mindset (a mindset that sees difficulty as a chance to learn rather than a hurdle to surpass), they respond with positive thoughts and demonstrate tenacity rather than defeat.
There are two kinds of mindsets: fixed and growth. The fixed mindset is defined as “thinking your attributes are engraved in stone,” whereas a growth mindset is defined as “believing your basic traits are something you can improve through your endeavors.”
These mindsets’ experiences are on a scale. It is not always practicable to run from one or the other. For example, you may have a fixed or growing view of your arithmetic abilities. Perhaps you believe you are terrible with figures because they do not come easily to you. You either “understand” arithmetic or you don’t, in your mind.
On the other hand, if you feel you have the potential to learn arithmetic since it is a skill that can be developed, you may have a growth mindset. Your point of view is that you don’t grasp it yet.
A person may also have a fixed mentality in one part of life and a progressive mindset in another. Perhaps you feel you are not athletic, so you shun sports and other physically demanding tasks. You think that individuals are born with athletic ability and that they have a natural gift that you lack.
In another aspect of your life, you are confident in your abilities to speak publicly, so you look for opportunities to do so more frequently. You also feel it is a talent that can be learned via practice. Every time you perform it and get criticized, learn how to improve. It encourages you to keep going.
It’s simple to see how a stuck perspective may keep someone back. In our math skills example, that individual may avoid applying for jobs that require arithmetic. The final line is that some individuals believe that intellect is a finite resource. Others feel it can change.
Some people are perplexed about three aspects of her findings. First, many confuse open-mindedness and positivism with a growth mindset, thinking they have always had and will always have a development mindset.
Second, some individuals assume that simply recognizing and rewarding work is sufficient.
Finally, some believe that simply talking about a development mindset or handing out flyers about it is sufficient. Those flyers are only paper on a wall if no work is done to develop a growth mindset, culture or surroundings.
Importance of Grit and Resilience for growth mindset:
Developing grit and resilience aids in the development and maintenance of a growth mentality.
If people are born with some grit, grit likely influences their thinking. Consider a youngster who is just starting to walk. Some people do this without any prodding. They lift themselves, take a few steps, fail, rise back up, and repeat the cycle until their guardians can’t catch them anymore.
Other youngsters require more motivation to get up and try again after multiple falls.
Relation between Mindfulness & Resilience:
Mindfulness promotes resilience. People with better mindfulness levels are more resilient, boosting their life happiness, according to a study involving 327 undergrads who performed a series of surveys evaluating their level of mindfulness, sense of well-being, emotional state, and degree of resilience.
Characteristics of grit:
Five traits may be utilized to identify someone who has grit. They are:
- bravery
- diligence
- long-term goal orientation
- resilience
- excellence
Bravery:
The capacity to handle one’s fear of failure is a trait of bravery. Will you be able to overcome your fear of failure and try a new challenge? It pertains to your capacity to overcome your anxieties and attempt something new. Willingness to take up tribulations.
Do you also have the fortitude to persevere in the face of adversity? Will you be defeated by the difficulty, or will you be able to resist the tension and remain persistent? Do you learn lessons from failure even after trying bravely and still failing?
These are characteristics of bravery. The capacity to overcome fear, begin something new, persevere, and get something from it despite success or failure.
Diligence:
Conscientiousness refers to the ability to be goal-oriented and trustworthy. That suggests you can be counted on to do the task.
Goal-oriented people are self-controlling. They will be able to motivate themselves to strive toward their objectives. They are trustworthy in fulfilling their tasks since they are goal-oriented.
These elements of conscientiousness, when combined, identify someone with grit.
Long-term Goal Orientation:
Life is a marathon, not a sprint. That means we’ll have to look long-term and be patient to achieve our objectives.
It is a trait shared by those who have grit. The capacity to run the marathon of life. Capable of making their long-term plans, working on them, and finally seeing them through to completion.
Resilience:
Things seldom go while accomplishing anything challenging. There will undoubtedly be roadblocks along the route to your objectives. To overcome these challenges, you must be resilient.
Staying cheerful, confident, and innovative in the face of adversity will display your resilience. With these mindsets, you are more likely to tackle these challenges. Otherwise, if you fail, you will be in the right mental state to accept it and go on.
Excellence vs. perfectionism:
There is a fine line between excellence and perfection. Individuals with grit will always strive for greatness over perfection. It is because perfection is an absolute result of someone’s vision and may not be achieved.
Excellence, on the other hand, is about doing one’s best. It will be about putting in their best effort to achieve the goal of a tenacious individual. The goal’s outcome does not have to be fulfilled perfectly.
Excellence is the commitment to do a task well to achieve the objective.
Tips for developing resilience and grit:
Building resilience and grit differs by individual and is impacted by our society. Nonetheless, the American Psychological Association recommends ten strategies for developing resilience that almost anybody may implement.
- If you are not an extrovert, being more social (i.e., engaging with others on purpose) might help.
- Gain control over how you react to negative occurrences.
- “The only constant in life changes,” Greek philosopher Heraclitus is credited as saying. Become accustomed to it. A goal must sometimes be abandoned because it is no longer reachable. The unwillingness to accept what we cannot alter is a fruitless endeavor.
- Use the Kaizen approach to achieve your objectives. Begin with the smallest part related to the larger, long-term aim. “We keep pushing forward, opening new doors, and doing new things, because we’re interested, and curiosity continues guiding us down new routes,” Walt Disney famously stated.
- Focus on making decisions when faced with a challenging scenario. There is no place for hesitating acts.
- Negative self-talk is out. Believe that you know yourself better than anybody else and have the intellect and capacity to make sound judgments. You can deal with issues as they emerge.
- Things will go wrong. Consider things from a long-term viewpoint. Draw a line on paper from your birth date to the age you feel you will die. Make a list of key life events, both positive and negative, that occurred along that timeline. On that piece of paper, draw a line representing your current age. Put a cursor on that line to show the current difficulty. How significant is that dot in the broader picture of your life? How much or how little do previous events affect your life when you reflect on them?
- Attempt to be optimistic. It is not a rejection of the negative. It is an acknowledgment of what is extraordinary and potential in your life.
- Self-compassion, exercise, learning something new, and laughter are all good things to do.
Conclusion:
Grit is our enthusiasm and tenacity in achieving a long-term objective, whereas resilience is our confidence in continuing to bounce back from failure.
Both of these positive attributes are built in a growth mindset, and the best part is that with a growth mindset, you can acquire, build, and enhance your resilience and grit. It, like other worthwhile abilities, will need practice and attention. However, these efforts are well worth it since cultivating these characteristics will positively influence your life.
