As Real as Gravity
I was in a meeting recently, when someone said, things are happening that are as real as gravity. My mind, as a psychologist, went immediately to those aspects of our inner reality—namely our thoughts and feelings—that are equally invisible and as real as gravity. And it struck me that we often treat these two things – the […]
It’s Not Happening
What’s happening? Somebody DO something! Look what just happened. I can’t wait for [fill in the blank] to happen! We are so dialed into the happenings in our lives. There’s no such thing as FONMO (fear of not missing out), nor do we spend much time dwelling on the catastrophes that don’t happen, the things that miss us (narrowly […]
Don’t Read the Label!
Many of us have heard about “learning mindset,” a way of thinking first championed by social psychologist Carol Dweck. This is the idea that when we can see challenges as learning opportunities rather than as ways to label ourselves (usually in personally derogatory terms), we build our immunity to the potentially negative effects of failure. Subsequent research […]
Resilience and Grit? It’s Complicated
First to resilience. I have come to dislike that term as a result of how it, like so many other terms like it (mental toughness, anyone?) has been trivialised or even weaponised. Coaches who tell their athletes things like, you just have to get more resilient! Employers who run a two-hour resilience program and think […]
Can I Have More Grit, Please?
For those who weren’t playing along with my last newsletter, I spoke about the “inverted U” curve that defines the relationship between resilience and grit. In that, it doesn’t take much resilience to be non-gritty, but then it becomes a virtuous cycle of increased grit and resilience with one feeding the other…until it is not. Chronic over-gritting kills our resilience. Today, […]
The Law of Diminishing Grit Returns
This is the last in a series about that less-than-obvious relationship between two presumed virtues: resilience and grit. Catch up on what you missed with these links (the relationship between them and what to do if you are low on both). Now we are exploring the “Purple Zone.” This is when we grit too hard for too […]
