Emotional Resilience

Emotional Resilience is essential in our daily lives, especially to help us deal with confrontations, making choices, getting bad results, encountering negative situations that are beyond our control or struggling with difficult day-to-day activities.

As adults we generally face such difficulties with varying levels of resilience. Equipping children with the skills to develop emotional resilience is an important facet of their growth.

Negative Habits of Mind greatly fuel emotional discomfort. These negative habits of mind include self-downing, the need to be perfect, the need for approval, the ‘I can’t do it’ or ‘I can’t be bothered’ mindsets and being intolerant of others. This week, I would like to continue to share some strategies from the You Can Do It Program, which may help eliminate or help to balance these negative mindsets.

To Eliminate ‘I Can’t Be Bothered’

Explain to your child that while it may seem that life should always be fun and exciting, this isn’t always the case. Life is a mixture of fun activities and also some more mundane things. While it is natural to try to avoid uninteresting activities such as homework or chores, the more they avoid these things, the greater chance they have of not achieving their potential.

Other suggestions for eliminating an ‘I Can’t Be Bothered’ mindset:

• Explain the meaning of the expression ‘no pain, no gain’ (in order to get ahead in life, one has to do things that are ‘painful’ to do).
• Point to the experience of others and show how, in part, their success has come from doing things that are not pleasant to do.
• Provide examples from times in your own life when you avoided doing unpleasant work and how it held you back from achieving your goals.
• Model for children examples of how doing unpleasant things in the short term can help to achieve pleasant results in the long term.
• Teach children the 5 Minute Plan. Ahead of time, identify aspects of schoolwork that children find to be boring or tedious. Have children agree to work on this for five minutes. Then, after five minutes has passed (set a timer), encourage them to work for another five minutes. In this way, children obtain evidence that challenges their belief that they cannot be bothered with things that are not exciting and fun.
• When you catch children avoiding work they find tedious, provide feedback: “By not doing this work, you are making the choice to not be successful”.
• When you catch children doing work they find tedious, offer feedback: “You can stand doing boring things. By doing it, you are choosing to be successful”.
• Show children concrete evidence that by doing tedious work they are more successful.

Mr David Druery, Head of Staff and Students P-5