Overcome Stress and Challenge: 7 Mechanisms of Resilience for High Productivity Timothy So, Msc, is a PhD candidate in Psychology in the University of Cambridge Department of Psychiatry. He is a Research Associate of Cambridge University's Well-being Institute and a Chartered Occupational Psychologist. Timothy is also responsible for both the Traditional and the Simplified Chinese PPND sites. Full bio. Timothy's articles are here and here. “It ain’t about how hard you hit, but how hard you can get hit, and keep moving forward.” Resilience is a Fast Comeback This quote from Rocky in the movie Rocky Balboa is the best summary of this month’s optional theme of “Stress and Resilience.” 7 Mechanisms of Resilience: The Model What I have learned from my studies in Leadership and Positive Psychology is that one common characteristic among successful leaders is that they do not let disappointments deter them from what they want and beat them down – instead, they stay focused and navigate according to their plans to succeed. A) Inner Self Mechanism B.) 4) Taking Mechansim Summary
The Unexpected Antidote to Procrastination - Peter Bregman by Peter Bregman | 9:00 AM May 10, 2013 A recent early morning hike in Malibu, California, led me to a beach, where I sat on a rock and watched surfers. I marveled at these courageous men and women who woke before dawn, endured freezing water, paddled through barreling waves, and even risked shark attacks, all for the sake of, maybe, catching an epic ride. After about 15 minutes, it was easy to tell the surfers apart by their style of surfing, their handling of the board, their skill, and their playfulness. What really struck me though, was what they had in common. No matter how good, how experienced, how graceful they were on the wave, every surfer ended their ride in precisely the same way: By falling. Some had fun with their fall, while others tried desperately to avoid it. But here’s what I found most interesting: The only difference between a failure and a fizzle was the element of surprise. That got me thinking: What if we all lived life like a surfer on a wave? Practice.
Grit: The Other 21st Century Skills Due to the interest of my post The Other 21st Skills, I decided to discuss individually each of the skills or dispositions I proposed that are in addition to the seven survival skills as identified by Tony Wagner. This post focuses on Grit: Here is Angela Duckwoth’s TED Talk about Grit that provides an overview about the topic. Angela Duckworth developed a scale to measure Grit found at Some of characteristics or dispositions of Grit include: Perseverance and TenacityDeliberate PracticeAbility to Delay GratificationPassion-Driven FocusSelf Control and Self DisciplineLong Term Goal-OrientedStick-to-it-ness Under Difficult ConditionsConsistency of Effort So how can Grit be taught or facilitated? Awareness of grit can be brought more into conscious by first, teaching learners about grit and then by helping them reflect on their degree and level of grit. Grit can be reinforced though provide emotionally and intellectual support for grit-related behaviors.
Skills & Competencies CASEL has identified five interrelated sets of cognitive, affective and behavioral competencies. The definitions of the five competency clusters for students are: Self-awareness: The ability to accurately recognize one’s emotions and thoughts and their influence on behavior. The Art of Resilience Think you're a prisoner of a troubled childhood? Think again. You need not go through the rest of your life as an emotional cripple. It is possible to bounce back from adversity and go on to live a healthy, fulfilling life. In fact, more people do it than you may think. Resilience may be an art, the ultimate art of living, but is has recently been subjected to the scrutiny of science. Resilient people do not let adversity define them. Experts argue among themselves about how much of resilience is genetic. And it's definitely necessary to go back and reinterpret past events to find the strengths you have probably had within all along. One problem is, there are elements of our culture that glorify frailty, says Washington, D.C. psychiatrist Steven Wolin, M.D. Sometimes it is easier to be a victim; talking about how other people make you do what you do removes the obligation to change. Resilient people don't walk between the raindrops; they have scars to show for their experience.
How Resilience Works When I began my career in journalism—I was a reporter at a national magazine in those days—there was a man I’ll call Claus Schmidt. He was in his mid-fifties, and to my impressionable eyes, he was the quintessential newsman: cynical at times, but unrelentingly curious and full of life, and often hilariously funny in a sandpaper-dry kind of way. He churned out hard-hitting cover stories and features with a speed and elegance I could only dream of. It always astounded me that he was never promoted to managing editor. But people who knew Claus better than I did thought of him not just as a great newsman but as a quintessential survivor, someone who had endured in an environment often hostile to talent. Why do some people suffer real hardships and not falter? It’s a question that has fascinated me ever since I first learned of the Holocaust survivors in elementary school. My exploration has taught me much about resilience, although it’s a subject none of us will ever understand fully.
Developing Character, Courage & College Readiness Leaders often cut their own path. That is certainly the case for Dan Scoggin, perhaps the most countercultural guy in K-12. The Phoenix school network leader has an unusual “reverence for western tradition.” Back-to-basics doesn’t come close to describing Great Hearts Academies, a K-12 charter network offering “classical education, revolutionary schools.” The elementary schools follow the Core Knowledge curriculum. The high school day starts with Humane Letters, a two-hour Socratic seminar where students read great books and the founding documents. There is no reference to pop culture at Great Hearts–just the study of spirit, law, and philosophy. Raphael’s painting School of Athens (1510) adorns the lobby of all Great Hearts schools–placing the Aristotle-Socrates dialectic center stage. Scoggins uses unusual language to describe aims: the lifelong pursuit of truth, goodness, and beauty. Families are lining up in Phoenix and soon Great Hearts will have a Texas network. Kern Convening.
Benchmarks for Core Skills Benchmarks for Core Skills – First Draft Table of Contents A. CommunicationB. CognitionC. A. Students will communicate effectively in many different situations, involving diverse people and viewpoints. 1. Demonstrated Competence Beginner · Avoid interrupting the speaker. · Summarize speaker’s main points when called upon to do so. · Integrate the message into his or her own frame of reference. · Anticipate forthcoming points. Developed · Develop a framework for organizing the message. · Differentiate between relevant information and information requiring further explanation or analysis. · Take notes paraphrasing salient points. · Ask clarifying questions. Accomplished · Differentiate between denotation and connotation; recognize irony, metaphorical language, and intentionally misleading language. · Summarize the speaker's purpose. · Identify the relative importance of parts of the message and their relevance. · Identify and evaluate evidence used to support specific claims. 2. Demonstrated Competence 3.
The Neuroscience of Perseverance Perseverance separates the winners from the losers in both sports and life. Are you someone who perseveres despite difficulties and setbacks, or do you tend to throw in the towel and call it quits when faced with a challenge or adversity? What makes some people able to keep pushing and complete a task while others habitually fizzle and don't follow through? Dopamine is the fuel that keeps people motivated to persevere and achieve a goal. Neuroscientists have known for years that dopamine is linked to positive behavior reinforcement and the 'ding, ding, ding' jackpot feeling you get when you accomplish a goal. A study released on December 22, 2011 found that key receptors for dopamine function like 'gateways' that are essential to enable habit formation. Part of my work with The Athlete's Way is to make neuroscientific knowledge a tool that can be used to create behavioral changes in your life. Dr. Perseverance is synonymous with pain and suffering to many people.
Why Insecurity May Be The Key To Success Editor's Note: This story contains one of our 11 New Years resolutions you can actually keep in 2014. For the full list, click here. Maybe everything you've been led to believe about being a successful business leader is wrong. What if confidence is overrated? What if faking it until you make it actually does more harm than good? Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, a professor of business psychology at University College London, thinks so. In fact, Confidence says the exact opposite. “Although society places a great deal of importance on being confident, there are no genuine benefits except feeling good,” Chamorro-Premuzic writes. Drawing on his own research studies and those of others, Chamorro-Premuzic finds that overconfident people are less popular than those who are realistic about their abilities. Most “confident” people are also deluded. We don’t lack for self-esteem. But, as Chamorro-Premuzic writes, “the truth is often painful, but less painful than ignoring it.” That’s a good thing.
Nine Things Successful People Do Differently Learn more about the science of success with Heidi Grant Halvorson’s HBR Single, based on this blog post. Why have you been so successful in reaching some of your goals, but not others? If you aren’t sure, you are far from alone in your confusion. It turns out that even brilliant, highly accomplished people are pretty lousy when it comes to understanding why they succeed or fail. 1. To seize the moment, decide when and where you will take each action you want to take, in advance. 3. Fortunately, decades of research suggest that the belief in fixed ability is completely wrong — abilities of all kinds are profoundly malleable. The good news is, if you aren’t particularly gritty now, there is something you can do about it. 7. To build willpower, take on a challenge that requires you to do something you’d honestly rather not do. 8. 9. If you want to change your ways, ask yourself, What will I do instead?
Healthy Living Performance Standards The BC Healthy Living Performance Standards have been developed as an assessment resource for voluntary use in BC schools. They are designed to support and align with several required areas of study within the BC provincial curriculum. The BC Healthy Living Performance Standards describe the professional judgments of a number of BC educators about cross-curricular expectations for healthy living, and they provide a context within which teachers, students, and families can examine student learning in these areas. The standards are intended to provide a resource those schools and families can use to focus and monitor their efforts to enhance health knowledge, skills, attitudes, and behaviours among students while providing a foundation for student achievement in general. The BC Healthy Living Performance Standards are not intended to replace existing curricula, nor do they represent all concepts addressed within such curricula.
The Payoff of Perseverance In the summer of 1994, in the tallest of Princeton University's ivory towers, Andrew Wiles was completing one of the most extraordinary odysseys in the history of math. For more than three decades, Wiles had been obsessed with Fermat's Last Theorem, a seemingly simple problem that had stumped mathematicians for 350 years. French mathematician Pierre de Fermat had noted that although there are plenty of solutions to the equation X2 + Y2 = Z2 (for example, 32 + 42 = 52), there is no corresponding solution if the numbers are cubed instead of squared. In fact, Fermat scribbled in the margin of a book that he had "truly marvelous" proof that the equation Xn + Yn = Zn has no solution if n is any number greater than 2. Unfortunately, he never put his proof on paper. Wiles was 10 years old when he encountered the theorem. Despite long hours of focus—his only source of relaxation was playing with his two young children—the next few years produced little concrete progress.
The Key to Success: 3 Emotions Highly Accomplished People Share Yesterday, the final piece of a puzzle fell into my lap, a puzzle I've been working on for the past 10 years. I've been trying to build a model for how emotions create success, but I kept on getting tripped up when I came to gratitude. I was categorizing it as a result of success or a form of success. Here's the missing puzzle piece: A study soon to be published in the journal Psychological Science proves that people who are grateful are willing to wait longer for a financial reward. Bingo. 1. As I mentioned above, a new study shows that people who feel gratitude are more likely to delay financial gratification. In business, patience is extraordinarily valuable. Why are some people so effective at dealing with employees, colleagues, coworkers, and customers, while other people are constantly frustrated and angry and do things that alienate those around them? So here's the first formula: Gratitude=>Patience=>Timing=>Success How do you create more gratitude? 2. So here's the second formula: