Building Resilience and Writing Your Story

BY RANDI CRAWFORD (ZETA TAU, VILLANOVA UNIVERSITY)

Since my children flew the coop, I’ve become obsessed with pickleball. In my opinion, it checks all the boxes. When we head over to the pickleball courts, we’re surrounded by people, IRL (in real life). We’re not on our cell phones, and we’re getting physical exercise, making new friends, soaking in vitamin D and learning lessons that will teach us to cope when things don’t go our way.

As a life coach who works with college-age women, I see incredible young ladies who work hard at school, in sorority life and hold down part-time jobs, all while balancing friends and family. So why are they working with me? Because the reality is that in their downtime, which is usually late at night, they scroll social media, and it makes them feel worthless. If anyone told me that social media doesn’t impact their mental health, I’d call their bluff. We compare our life to what we see on “the Gram,” even when we know that people are just posting the “glossy” version of their life, using filters and curating a life they want us to believe is true. I cannot tell you how many young women I work with who admit they post pictures that make them look like they’re having a great time, when in reality, they’re miserable.

I wish I could take away your pain when things don’t go your way, when you feel left out of a group activity or when you feel like you don’t measure up. But the best way you can become resilient in the face of this adversity is to rewrite your story. How do you become resilient and develop coping skills? It’s taking small steps toward living the life that you want and celebrating every step along the way – including the steps that involve failure! When you do what makes you feel happy, you gain confidence and won’t need to compare yourself on social media. Changing your mental game is easier than you think, but it starts with knowing what your narrative is today, and what you want it to be tomorrow. Once you write your story down, you will start to live it.

As parents, our job is to help our kids write their story, not to write it for them. And each story requires finding the value in challenges. We strive to raise our kids to be strong, but the problem is that we do a lot for our kids because it hurts us more to watch them struggle than for them to actually struggle. We figure that if we just fix it, it will get done faster and better. But by doing this, we are creating learned helplessness. Our kids start to rely on us for everything because that’s all they’ve known.

If your daughter makes the cheer team but isn’t in the stunt group that she wants, don’t text the coach and have her moved. Let your daughter work it out with the coach. Maybe she needs to be a higher level to be in that particular group. Maybe she is a fantastic base, and they need her skills in the group she’s in. Whatever the case, when you let her figure it out, everybody wins. Once she learns the coach needs her in a certain group to show the other girls how to catch the flyer, it will send her confidence through the roof. If you step in and interfere because she’s not happy, you’ve just stolen a life lesson that your daughter needs to learn on her own. We don’t intentionally steal from our kids. But when we remove adversity and don’t let them handle certain situations on their own, they also feel our lack of confidence in them.

It’s a lot like pickleball was for me. After I learned to play the game and started to return some hard shots, I would still lose the point, and it was incredibly frustrating. I had two options. I could get angry and decide this game isn’t for me because I’ll never be good enough. Or I could take lessons, start drilling, watch YouTube videos and ask friends for help. That’s the definition of grit. We shouldn’t run away when we don’t succeed at first. We can rewrite our story to be whatever we want, and we must be willing to learn from our failures along the way and make changes that we need.

When I went to Villanova, from a ranch in Weatherford, Texas, having Alpha Chi Omega provided me with a sisterhood that extended far beyond the court, offering lifelong friendships. Ladies, lean on your community during challenging moments because we all need each other. We’re all going to fall, get frustrated and feel unworthy after doom-scrolling. Let’s change our story, set limits on our social media use, and only follow people and influencers who make us feel great about ourselves and fit into our new story. What do you want your story to be?

Here’s to sisterhood, lifelong friendships and lifting each other up!

You can learn more about Randi’s coaching business at randicrawfordcoaching.com.