Seven keys to building resilience

Seven keys to building resilience

Head of Wellbeing Mr James Hindle

Resilience has become a buzzword and a cure-all; people bemoan its absence, particularly in the young. If only they had more of it, they say, as though you can find it lying around. And yet, that is precisely what you can do – you can develop a person’s capacity to be resilient, just as you can develop literacy or numeracy, you just have to provide opportunities to do it. If young people are going to make the most of the challenges they will undoubtedly face, at school and beyond, then resilience is an essential tool to do this, which is why it is one of the three pillars of our Wellbeing programme, along with Relationships and Respect.

During Autumn Term, and as part of the Year 11 Cognitive Curriculum course, we ran a series of lectures which explored some of the key elements of resilience.

These lectures were designed to get students to consider their own levels of resilience and encourage them to incorporate some of those elements into their daily lives. Resilience is something which can be strengthened with deliberate awareness and practice, and this was a message which ran through the series.

We started by exploring the significance of having a purpose in life. This is a daunting thing to place before a 16-year-old, as it is either something they have not thought about or they have thought about it and struggled to come up with anything. We talked about finding the sweet spot between your passion (the things you are good at), your precision (what you’re good at) and the present needs of the world. We also discussed Stoicism and making the most of what you’ve got and where you are.

The second key was to focus on making good choices and controlling our response to stress. Here, we discussed Viktor Frankl, who survived the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz and who later developed his own school of psychological thought which focused on the importance of meaning in an individual’s life. In the harshest of environments, Frankl came to realise that “everything can be taken from

a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”

We raised awareness of the amount of selftalk each of us engages in each day, and how that is not always helpful. We looked at the idea of switching ‘have to’ for ‘get to’ and I introduced the Finnish concepts of Sisu (akin to grit and perseverance) and Periksiantamattomuus (unyieldingness). I then challenged the boys to learn how to spell these in a relatively short space of time – an exercise in controlled failure for most and an opportunity to move into the next of the keys to resilience: having a Plan B. This too stems from Stoicism; imagining what can go wrong and having contingency plans for this, or at least the flexibility to try something else if your current approach is not working.

Next, we spent time considering what we can give up in our lives. Decluttering, going without and going further, are simple ways to focus on what really matters and extend our tolerance of discomfort. I set the students a Resilience Challenge – things like having a cold shower – just to take us beyond our comfort zones.

We then discussed what we can do more of, particularly being kind. This is not only kindness to others, but kindness to ourselves. This is a choice we make. In particular, we looked at the importance of sleep and the power of mindfulness in enabling us to change our perspective. This was followed by a presentation on gratitude, designed to shift the focus so that we are more aware of what we have, rather than what is ‘missing’. The last session highlighted the power of creativity to help us deal with difficulty – learning something new or changing a routine can give us greater flexibility and a new range of strategies.

Resilience is a positive adaptation to a difficult situation. So, one way to develop it is to be exposed to minor challenges on a regular basis. This is the essence of this lecture series, of school and, indeed, life: having to use past experiences to cope with a familiar or completely novel set of circumstances. And having a good dose of periksiantamattomuus.