Help Your Child Practice Grit and Perseverance
Grit and perseverance are essential skills for tackling challenging tasks successfully. Children can develop these skills by practicing the steps required to accomplish complex goals, preparing them for long-term success!
This exercise uses a fun maze visualization to help children understand the path from setting a goal to achieving the goal is usually not straight or easy. This exercise is especially helpful if your child is struggling and expressing frustration, such as saying, “I can’t do this; I’m too [insert self-criticism].
The steps in this exercise are:
Set a Goal
Practice and Learn
Perfect vs. Good Enough
Positive Self-Talk
CELEBRATE!
Below, we’ll walk through each step with examples for children and adults. I strongly suggest you share your experiences achieving professional and personal goals, including the journey you took to reach them. Sharing your journeys will help emphasize how adults use these skills and demonstrate why they are valuable skills to learn.
Step 1: Set a Goal
The first step is helping your child identify and articulate their goal. The child can write or draw a picture of the goal on the worksheet.
Kids Example Goal: Ride a bike
Adults Example Goal: Write a children's book
Step 2: Practice and Learn
Achieving a challenging goal requires learning and practicing new skills. It’s important to acknowledge that setbacks are part of the process and remain flexible in adjusting one's approach. Visualizing the path, like navigating a maze, helps children understand that obstacles and setbacks may exist. They will need to adjust, and as theycontinue to strive for their goal.
Kids Example: Practice and Learn
For a child to learn to ride a bike, they may need to practice riding a bike with training wheels, riding a balance bike, riding a bike with an adult helping them balance, and finally, riding the bike independently! Through these stages, it is likely the child may fall. Talking with the child about this normal progression of how they will practice will help them understand how they can learn to ride a bike and recognize as they progress through the process! (You can also discuss some ideas that may make it easier, like wearing elbow and knee pads while learning.)
Adults Example: Practice and Learn
To write a children’s book, you must draft the text, draw illustrations, go through editing cycles, publish the book, and market the book. Each of these steps needs to be practiced. Maybe the first pick in software doesn’t work as expected, and you need to learn a second type of software. If the publisher does not offer the quality you want, you need to find a different publisher, and if your marketing is not working, you need to make adjustments. For the first-time author, there is a lot of practicing and learning! Outlining the path you need to take before you start helps; there will still be adjustments, which is where the maze comes in, but acknowledging the steps you plan to take will help you recognize your progress!
Step 3: Perfect vs. Good Enough
As you work toward your goal, having people you trust on the journey can help you keep track of your progress. While striving for perfection is admirable, having people you trust who can help you determine whether you are doing well enough is one key to successfully achieving challenging goals.
Kids Example: Perfect vs Good Enough
Say the child is riding a bike with training wheels; if they turn the handlebars too sharply and fall over repeatedly, some kids may throw up their hands and say, “Good enough. It's time to move on. Let’s take the training wheels off!” A sanity check may help encourage the child to practice more before proceeding to the next step.
A different scenario might be where the child is riding the bike with training wheels perfectly, but they don’t want to move on to the next step. This is a good time when the sanity check person can encourage their child to take the next step to remove the training wheels. Having the child identify this person's role beforehand may help the discussion go more smoothly. It also allows the child to practice requesting and listening to advice from trusted individuals.
Adult's Example: of Perfect vs Good Enough
One of the hardest things for an author is letting the book go into publishing. Most authors could rewrite and re-illustrate their books indefinitely. However, authors have editors who help them identify things that need to be fixed and help the author understand when the book is good enough to be published.
Step 4: Positive Self-Talk
Criticism and setbacks are inevitable on the path to success. Preparing your inner dialogue in advance can help you stay resilient. Instead of internalizing negative feedback with thoughts like, “I’m horrible at this,” shift your mindset to, “I’m making progress and getting better!” Viewing criticism and setbacks as an opportunity for growth can help build confidence and persistence. This step is related to having a growth mindset.
Childs Example of Positive Self-Talk
Writing down how you will talk to yourself before the event can help train the child’s inner voice. In our bike example, the child may write on the exercise paper When I fall while learning to ride my bike, I say, “Oops!” and get back on to try again. Unless I am hurt, in that case I will get a bandage and get back on the bike a bit later
Adults Example of Positive Self-Talk
As adults, practicing that inner dialog also helps us train our inner voice. For our adult example, one of the self-talk statements may look like this: When I publish a book, I may get negative feedback and comments. If I do, I will evaluate each comment, take what I can learn from it, and let the rest go. It’s a learning curve, and all people do not think the same way. I’m not going to let it crush me!
Step 5: Celebrate!
Celebrate your success and the journey it took to get there. Acknowledge the hurdles you overcome, the positive self-talk you practiced, and the new skills you developed. Whether it’s a small victory or a significant accomplishment, taking time to celebrate reinforces the value of perseverance!
By practicing these steps and encouraging open discussions about grit and perseverance, you can help your child develop the resilience and determination needed to succeed now and in the future!
