August 2014

I’d Rather be Scarred Than Scared

Is it better to play it safe and avoid the battle scars of life? Or take chances and risk failure or getting hurt?

How Resilient Students Prepare for the New School Year

The new pencils are sharpened. The backpacks are laid by the front door with care. It’s the start of a new school year!

 

Every parent wants his or her child do start the new year with a bang. It’s much easier to have a successful school year if you start out on the right foot. So what can parents do to ensure success this year? Make sure their children are resilient students!

 

A resilient student will not only score better on homework and tests, but will have a much happier attitude about school and education overall. School is, in fact, a wonderful place for kids to learn about healthy ways to struggle, and how to bounce back from defeat.

 

The three major things resilient students know are:
1) Accept feedback gracefully
2) Ask for help early
3) Judge the learning, not the score

 

As a parent, first, help your student accept feedback gracefully. When the teacher writes a note in red ink at the top of a paper, it isn’t a personal condemnation; it’s a suggestion for your student to put more effort into a certain element of the work next time. If the teacher is giving constructive criticism, help your student accept it for what it is and move on. This skill will come in handy in athletics, the arts, and definitely later in life on the job.

 

Next, encourage a struggling student to ask for help as early as possible. When my son started college, I told him to go to the TAs the first time he had a question, even if he could probably get it answered by another student. By asking for help early, you show an eagerness to learn that educators respond well to. No one likes the kid with the failing grade who shows up the week before finals and asks, “What do I need to do to pass?” Instead, at the BEGINNING of the semester, ask, “What do I need to do to be successful?” A teacher would much rather help any child whose goal is to succeed – regardless of their innate ability in the subject – rather than a kid who coasted and is now panicking.

 

The last suggestion is probably the hardest one. Try to show your child that it’s important to judge the learning, not the score. Their improvement in a subject is far more important than the grade, although that can be hard for both parents and children to stomach in this competitive world we live in. But kids aren’t supposed to know everything on the first day of school – if they were, why do you get up at 5:45 every morning to get them on the school bus! Your children are there to learn, and learning is the goal, not straight As. So try to praise the achievement and the improvement, and let them see that it’s the hard work that you care most about.

 

These reminders will help you build resilient students for this school year and the rest of their education. There are a lot of late nights, field trip forms, group projects and cram sessions ahead, but you can do it!

 

-Courtney

Three Resilience Lessons from Lucas the Cat

Believe it or not, watching a cat can teach you some lessons about resilience. My cat, Lucas, is happy to demonstrate!

Are Millenials More or Less Resilient Than the Rest of Us? Part 2 of 2

Last week we looked at Millenial resilience when it comes to personal relationships. This upcoming generation, because of the way they interact with the world in a sort of “impermanent” fashion, might actually be MORE resilient. They shake it off, and nothing plagues them for too long, because they see the world through ever-shifting, attention-grabbing soundbites.

 

This week, we’ll take a look at how Millenial resilience functions in the workplace. Spoiler alert: it doesn’t fare nearly as well.

 

The millennial generation grew up in the world “everybody gets a trophy.” Some schools have done away with honor role in the past decade or so, because no one wanted to hurt a child’s feelings. The idea behind the “everyone gets a trophy” philosophy is that sparing a child from rejection would build healthier children. In reality, however, it does the opposite.

 

Think about a house cat, eating canned tuna every day and sleeping on a pillow. One day someone opens a door to the outside, and shoves the cat out. Cats are descended from wild animals! She’ll be fine! But the cat never learned how to handle the big, wide world. She knew she liked tuna in a crystal dish, but she didn’t know to look both ways before crossing the street. She wasn’t prepared.

 

Many millenials who were raised to expect a trophy enter the real world presuming they will be a success at everything they do, because they were protected from failure early in life. This means when they enter the workplace, they may expect success to come easy.

 

I once had an entry level employee I trained who was acceptable, but not great. When she finished her work, instead of asking me what to do next, she would sit at her desk and print things off the internet until I came looking for her. About six months into her tenure with the company, she asked for a raise. When I questioned her why she felt she deserved a raise, her rationale was that she showed up for work on time every day! Not being late deserved a raise in her book! However she was brought up, the bare minimum of how she SHOULD behave was enough to garner her applause.

 

No one wants a child to suffer. But early failure actually breeds resilience. Children learn how to succeed by practicing, and that practice sometimes yields success and it sometimes yields failure. Often, Millenials have been protected from their own failures by well-meaning parents and teachers, who thought they were producing a MORE psychologically strong generation, but might actually have been doing the opposite. If you work with a millennial, try to gently ease them into their first failure, because they won’t be prepared for it. Help them learn why showing up isn’t enough to earn a trophy.

 

-Courtney

Are Millenials More or Less Resilient Than the Rest of Us? Part 1 of 2

I feel like I can’t throw a stone these days without hitting a media piece on the struggles of how Millenials and the rest of the world interact (and I can’t throw very far!)

 

Full disclosure – I’m a Generation Xer right on the cusp of Generation Y. I’ve been hearing this kind of cross-generation griping since I was a teenager, about my own generation and now the generation behind me. My gut tells me that every single generation deals with this same kind of alienation – I definitely recall a lot of “I don’t’ know how to talk to/motivate/work with Generation X!” as well.

 

I don’t know if we’re all talking about the Millennials because they really are so strange and different from the rest of the generations, or if we’re talking about them because everybody else is talking about them, so it seems like a topic so hot that it must be true. But it got me thinking about whether or not Millenials might, in fact, have a few differences that impact the way they bounce back in the world. In other words, Millennials might just have a different resilience factor.

 

For Part 1 of this 2-part post, I’m going to look at why Millenials might need some resilience-boosting in their personal lives. You see, many Millenials had a different relationship with their families versus previous generations. The Great Generation was often cared for by close-knit, extended family. Many Boomers report having been free to run around the neighborhood, watched by the community at large. Generation X experienced the rise of the latchkey kid.

 

Then Generation Y comes along, and “helicopter parenting” becomes a thing. Having your parents “all up in your business,” as they would say, changes a person. Parents of Millenials have clamped down on certain freedoms that previous generations took for granted, because the world seems less safe than it used to be. So Millenials have grown up with an idea that your closest family is always right there, hovering. It makes them approach personal relationships in a different way, either EMBRACING that closeness, or possibly REJECTING it.

 

Another difference in Millenial resilience is the fact that Millenials have also grown up in the age of the Internet. Everything about their lives is out there for the world to see, like a giant hacked diary, and they not only don’t care, they embrace it. Gen Xers and the generations above are wary of the openness that social media brings, but Millenials don’t seem to care about the permanence of the information they distribute on the Internet. If politicians can bounce back from having all of their dirty laundry aired, the Millenials seem to say, why does it matter if a future employer sees a picture of me on Spring Break?

 

This attitude speaks to a certain kind of resilience in the Millenial generation. They believe they can make a comeback from anything, and they are closely interconnected with their families and their friends.

 

In their personal lives, Millenials show a special kind of resilience thanks to the way they’ve interacted with the world. But when it comes to professional resilience, Millenials may not enjoy the same benefits. Stay tuned for Part 2 to learn how Millenials might miss the boat on worklplace resilience.

 

-Courtney

When Moral Support Keeps You Stuck

I had the pleasure of giving a speech to a small group yesterday, and afterward a woman came up to me to purchase a copy of my book “The Giving Prescription.” She let me know that she had been through a difficult time the past few years, and was having trouble moving on with her life. She was hopeful that reading “The Giving Perscription” would give her the perspective she has been looking for to move past her challenges.

 

Often when people come up to talk to me after they hear a presentation I give, they want to talk about getting “unstuck.” For some people, that’s a taller order than others. I left the talk yesterday thinking about this woman and how she has so much potential, but hasn’t been able to shake that stuck feeling for years.

 

Then yesterday evening I went to a Mastermind session for my professional organization. With a bunch of speakers sitting around a room, a lot of talking gets done! As I looked around at the end of the evening, we were all energized by the new ideas, the flow of energy, and the amazing prospects we had uncovered for our businesses by solving one another’s problems together for two hours. Nearly every single one of us was walking away with some brilliant idea to apply to our businesses, to move our careers forward.

 

It got me thinking about how last night’s Mastermind session was almost a “support group,” of a type. It was a bunch of people with similar professionals and similar goals, supporting one another in moving our careers forward. Yet it felt so different from a traditional support group. The focus of support groups is often “where have you been?” and “where are you?” A Mastermind group, on the other hand is about “where are you going?” Last night’s Mastermind session got a lot of people unstuck, and got many people moving forward.

 

Don’t get me wrong – Support groups are a wonderful and critical function of the healing process. Support for where you are is a necessary part of healing and coming to grips with stressful situations. But does there come a point where someone might be staying stuck because they get in a rut of needing support? Of reverbalizing the problem time and again? What if we got more support in a Mastermind kind of way? If, instead of rehashing where we are, we moved on from there and got ourselves unstuck by Masterminding our new plan?

 

Maybe when we are struggling, we need two types of support. Tier 1 support is crisis focused, more traditional support groups, just to get through the day and put one foot in front of the other. Then you can graduate to Tier 2 support, which is Mastermind-style skills for moving forward and rebuilding. If we could all Mastermind our lives the way I watched a room full of people Mastermind their businesses last night, we’d be in good shape.

 

-Courtney