Developing grit and perseverance in young adults for personal, professional, and social development
Grit, the perseverance and passion for achieving long-term goals, has become a buzzword in personal development. Whether in academics, sports, or professional careers, individuals with grit are better equipped to handle challenges and overcome obstacles.
Researchers have found that people with grit are more successful and fulfilled. But can grit be developed? The answer is yes. Developing grit in young adults is crucial for their success and happiness. This post explores the concept of grit, its importance in personal development, practical ways to develop grit in young adults, and how to instill the value of perseverance. We discuss the importance of mindset, goal-setting, self-reflection, and practical strategies for building resilience and staying motivated. We also introduce you to freshpractice.org, a coaching platform that provides resources to help people develop grit and achieve their goals.
Grit is an essential individual trait and the ability to maintain passion and perseverance toward a long-term goal. Unfortunately, it’s becoming increasingly rare in young adults today. The lack of grit and determination can be attributed to many factors, including the constant need for instant gratification and the fear of failure. However, young adults can develop grit by recognizing that it’s a learned skill.
Relevant topics to consider when developing grit include
The role of failure in developing grit;
Strategies for building resilience and perseverance;
Teaching young adults to set goals and work towards them;
Building a support system to enhance resilience.
Key Takeaways: Developing grit is essential for success and fulfillment in life. With the right mindset and tools, everyone can cultivate this valuable trait.
Encouraging grit and resilience can help young adults overcome obstacles and achieve their goals.
What is grit, and why is it important?
Grit is the ability to persevere and maintain passion and determination toward long-term, meaningful goals, despite facing challenges or obstacles. It involves having resilience, a growth mindset, and an unwavering sense of discipline and perseverance. In short, it is the ability to stick with something even when it gets difficult, to pick yourself up after failure, and to keep working towards your goals even when progress is slow.
Grit is important for success in almost every life area, whether in academics, career, sports, or personal relationships. It helps individuals stay focused, motivated, and resilient when facing difficult situations.
Grit also fosters a sense of confidence or self-efficacy, which are essential elements for overcoming adversity and achieving long-term success. Ultimately, grit enables one to pursue their passions and goals with greater determination, focus, and success.
Our freshpractice vision is for young adults to develop the grit they need to succeed. Our programs focus on building resilience, perseverance, and a growth mindset. We believe young adults can develop the grit they need to overcome challenges and achieve their goals.
The importance of meaningful goals
When trying to stick to a goal or overcome a challenge, it is important to tune into what will feel good in the long term and quiet down what feels good in the short term.
We often gravitate to what feels good at the moment because we fall into the present bias, which is a tendency to value immediate rewards at the expense of future goals. This is because the future can feel abstract and intangible, while the present moment is right before us, making it harder to connect with how we might feel when our long-term goal is accomplished.
For example, at the moment, we might choose to eat that cake because its deliciousness is crystal clear, whereas our long-term goal about health is less apparent and tangible.
To make the goal more tangible, savor your progress and the growth you attain as you grapple with and overcome challenges. Connect periodically with your interest and the pleasurable feeling of your intrinsic motivation.
The One Thing You Need to Succeed: Grit
Successful young adults possess many important qualities, but few are as crucial as grit and perseverance. In today’s fast-paced and competitive world, having the ability to persevere through challenges and setbacks is essential for personal, professional, and social development. With grit and perseverance, young adults can overcome obstacles, learn from failures, and achieve their goals.
Grit combines perseverance, determination, and passion. It means staying focused on your goals and keeping going when obstacles get in your way. Without grit, you may give up too soon or become discouraged when things don’t go as planned. Remember that success isn’t achieved overnight but takes time, effort, and resilience.
Examples of real-life grit include always finishing what you start, staying committed to your goals, and sticking with long-term goals and projects that require more than a few weeks of commitment.
Developing grit takes work, but it can lead to consistent success in both personal and professional endeavors.
Goal-Directed Perseverance: Smart Strategies for School and Life
Goal-directed perseverance means focusing on the strategies that allow us to work smarter, not harder, in school and life. This mindset enables us to maintain our motivation and pursue our goals. Rather than relying on sheer effort, goal-directed perseverance encourages us to prioritize the most impactful actions and strategies to achieve our aims. This approach also means being flexible and adaptive, adjusting our approach, and making necessary changes as we encounter obstacles and challenges. By working smarter, we can develop better time management skills, streamline our efforts, and achieve our objectives more efficiently.
10 Ways to Develop Grit and Resilience
Building grit and resilience is important for facing and overcoming obstacles in life. Here are ten ways to develop these qualities:
Set challenging goals – Setting and achieving challenging goals builds confidence and a sense of accomplishment.
Embrace failure – Failure is often a necessary step towards success. Learning to accept and even embrace failure is the right step toward growth. Fear of failure does not need to stop achieving your goals.
Practice discipline – Cultivating discipline and sticking to a routine can help build grit and resilience.
Focus on growth – Instead of getting bogged down by setbacks, focus on how to grow and learn from them. Making mistakes is natural when working toward meaningful goals. To cultivate a growth mindset, recognize that challenges and failures are inevitable and essential to learning and growing. Instead of dwelling on them, analyze what happened objectively and what you can do differently next time. Embrace the learning process, and view challenges as opportunities to gain new skills and knowledge. Seek feedback and criticism from others, and use it constructively to improve your work. Change your self-talk from a fixed mindset to a growth-oriented one. Instead of saying things like “I’m not good enough” or “I’ll never be able to do this,” reframe it as “I can learn this if I keep practicing” or “This is a challenge I can overcome with time and effort.” Finally, celebrate small wins, even tiny steps toward your ultimate goal. By focusing on growth and progress, setbacks and failures become stepping stones to success rather than roadblocks.
Cultivate a growth mindset – Adopt a mindset that believes abilities can be developed through hard work and dedication. Developing a growth mindset enhances your grit.
Build a support network – A supportive network of friends, family, and mentors can help provide encouragement and motivation during tough times.
Practice self-compassion – Treat yourself with kindness and understanding during difficult times rather than being overly critical. Some ways to practice self-compassion: 1. Speak kindly to yourself: When you notice your internal dialogue becoming harsh and critical, stop and practice kind and compassionate self-talk. Use phrases like “It’s okay” or “I’m doing my best.” 2. Give yourself permission to make mistakes: Accept that making mistakes is a normal part of being human. Instead of beating yourself up, learn from your mistakes and move forward. 3. Practice mindfulness: Pay attention to the present moment without judgment or criticism. Acknowledge your thoughts and feelings without getting caught up in them. 4. Be forgiving: Forgive yourself for the mistakes you’ve made in the past, and let go of any grudges or resentments you’re holding onto. 5. Take care of yourself: Show compassion by caring for your physical and emotional needs. For example, treat yourself to a massage or a healthy meal, or take a break from your responsibilities to relax and recharge. Remember that self-compassion doesn’t mean ignoring your flaws or shirking responsibilities. It simply means treating yourself with kindness and understanding as you navigate life’s challenges.
Learn to manage stress – Developing healthy coping mechanisms for stress can help build resilience and prevent burnout.
Take action – Even when difficult, action towards your goals can build grit and resilience. Deliberate practice prepares you for times when things get tough.
Seek challenges – Facing challenges and stepping out of your comfort zone can help build resilience and grow. So instead of focusing on getting by easily, seek challenges that require going out of your comfort zone, even if you face difficult or boring obstacles. Look for growth opportunities, and your effort will be worth it.
Celebrate your progress.
It’s important to recognize and celebrate your personal or professional progress. Celebrating milestones and accomplishments can boost your confidence, motivate you to keep going, and create a positive mindset. Reflecting on your progress can also help you identify areas where you’ve grown and where you may still need improvement. Celebrating progress doesn’t have to be a big event – it can be as simple as treating yourself to a nice dinner or taking time to relax and unwind. Progress takes time and effort, and every step forward is worth celebrating. So take a moment to celebrate your progress, and use that celebration to motivate you. Also, learn the skill of savoring.
What will you do today to boost your grit?
Where have you demonstrated grit in your life?
Notes from an educator: Tips for cultivating grit and perseverance in young adults.
Cultivating grit and perseverance in young adults is important for parents, educators, and mentors. These qualities will help them achieve success in all aspects of their lives, including personal, professional, and social development. Here are some tips for helping young adults develop grit and perseverance: 1. Encourage them to set goals: Goal setting is essential to developing grit and perseverance. Encourage young adults to set realistic and achievable goals and then help them develop a plan to achieve them. 2. Teach them resilience: Life is full of challenges and setbacks. Help young adults learn to bounce back from these setbacks and use them as learning experiences. 3. Foster a growth mindset: A growth mindset is a belief that one can develop abilities through dedication and hard work. Encourage young adults to adopt a growth mindset and teach them that failure is not a reflection of their abilities but rather an opportunity to learn and grow. 4. Provide opportunities for them to take risks: Taking risks is important to developing grit and perseverance. Encourage young adults to step out of their comfort zones and try new things, even if they are unsure of the outcome. 5. Model grit and perseverance: Children and young adults learn by example. Show them how to persevere through challenges and setbacks, and demonstrate the importance of grit in your life. By cultivating grit and perseverance in young adults, we can help them develop the skills they need to succeed in all areas of their lives.
Conclusion.
In conclusion, grit and perseverance are essential for young adults’ personal, professional, and social development. These traits allow individuals to overcome obstacles, achieve their goals, and develop resilience in adversity. By teaching young people to embrace challenges and develop a growth mindset, we can help them to become more successful in all areas of their lives.
Cognitive Coaching Tools for Educators
{Auerbach, 2006. Cognitive Coaching. In Stober & Grant (Eds.). Evidence-Based Coaching Handbook.}
Cognitive coaching is a supervision model used by Costa and Garmston (2002) to positively impact teacher thought processes and improve classroom instruction.
It is based on many fields of study, including language, individuation, constructivism, mediation, cognitive theory, humanistic psychology, systems thinking, and clinical supervision.
Cognitive coaching aims to produce self-directed individuals who demonstrate high performance, individually and as community members.
The process relies on a trusting relationship and utilizes rapport, pausing, paraphrasing, probing, and identifying inner resources.
The three coaching maps the coach uses are (1) the planning conversation, (2) the reflecting conversation, and (3) the problem-resolving conversation.
The planning conversation involves goal clarification, identification of success indicators, planning approaches, establishing a learning focus, and an awareness of the coaching process.
The reflecting conversation involves summarizing impressions of their experience, analyzing causal factors, making meaning from their analysis, and developing insights.
The problem-resolving conversation involves helping the person move from the existing, undesired state to the desired state by using pacing tools and leading and helping the person identify resources.
Coaches work with clients who want to be more effective in their careers or develop more fulfilling lives.
They use a coaching conversation approach to help clients see themselves accurately, evaluate their situations and options, examine their assumptions and thought processes, and utilize introspection and insight to achieve their goals.
Cognitive coaching techniques help clients observe assumptions, erroneous conclusions, mental models, unproductive schemas, and maladaptive self-talk and learn and express alternative ways of viewing situations.
This leads to the coaching client being able to develop more constructive methods of inner communication that underpin more effective behavior, successful outcomes, and higher life satisfaction.
Mental models are our beliefs about how the world and people work.
They can be useful or they can get in our way.
Examples of mental models include “People cannot be trusted,” “Early to bed, early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise,” and “In this company if you don’t have an engineering background you will never be taken seriously,” and “If I get a good education I will have better job prospects.”
Senge (1990) postulates that these mental models that hinder the acceptance of new insight are deeply in-grained internal images that managers working in a given organization tend to internalize unconsciously and often fail to adjust.
Coaches can make a strong impact by integrating a discussion of mental models into the coaching conversation.
A key method that skilled coaches can use to assist their clients is to help them recognize their mental models, grasp how much unexamined mental models affect their decision-making and behavior, learn how to slow down and reflect on their mental models, and have conversations that encourage an open discussion of mental models, assumptions, and inferences.
The ladder of inference (Argyris, Putnam, & Smith, 1985; Senge, Kleiner, Roberts, Ross, & Smith, 1994) is a tool used to help clients understand how they make subjective interpretations or inferences from an observation that leads to a particular conclusion and/or behavior.
The five steps of the ladder are:
At the first or bottom rung, we are exposed to images, words, and other sensory data.
At the second rung, we select certain data and focus on it.
At the third rung, we make assumptions about the data we selected.
At the fourth rung, we draw conclusions.
At the fifth rung, we take action based on our conclusions.
As people quickly climb up the ladder, their attitudes and beliefs also limit what data they pay attention to.
5 more ways to build perseverance:
Anticipate problems and consider personal strengths to overcome them.
Increase motivation by thinking positively about progress and using positive self-talk.
Remind yourself of similar challenging situations where you were able to overcome them.
Brainstorm alternate ideas when faced with an obstacle and try using various ideas.
Make a conscious effort to maintain positive thoughts and reframe negative ones into positive ones.
Expand on the list of ways to develop your capacities.
Take the list of ways to develop grit and resilience and put these strategies to the test. Add your own ideas and learnings as you go. Become an exemplary model for others to emulate.