In our conversations with the automotive industry, we ask them what we can do in our schools to make our students more job-ready. A resounding response was teach them "work ethic." In keeping with that line of thought, Mr. Hawthorne sent me this devotion by Dr. Kevin Elko. I think it is fitting both for our students and for us as adults.
Recently, on a Sunday morning, I was on my front porch talking to Coach Saban of the Alabama Crimson Tide on the phone about the intangibles of winning and what to teach his team. As we were speaking, my friend Al came jogging by. Two years ago Al, who is only about 140 lbs., had a major heart attack and had to have emergency quadruple heart by-pass surgery. A few days after his surgery, the nurses took him for a walk for a few feet, then a few days later half way down the hall, then after that, eventually up and down the hall. One day on his walk, he looked into a room and saw patients lying there, not moving at all, and said to the nurse walking him, "I have seen those guys all week; they must have had an awful heart attack." The nurse responded, "No, yours was much worse, but they are sitting in the room, feeling sorry for themselves; you are trying to get better." I wondered, as I watched Al jog by my home, where those other heart attack victims were now.
We are not teaching our children something by our words or by our actions that many of our parents taught us: Grit. The definition is having a passion and a perseverance for a goal and not surrendering a vision as soon as challenges present themselves. What my friend demonstrated was Grit as opposed to self-pity and anger. For that matter, we don’t reteach it to ourselves. When the child gets into a challenge in school or even with a friend, we think we are good parents by going in and fixing it, therefore teaching the child that he or she can’t handle it. And when we get into a fix in the marriage, we pull ourselves out of it, even though we said, "Until death do us part." Most parents do not allow their children to experience enough existential suffering to ever learn how to be a success; for that matter, we have not even allowed ourselves to experience discomfort to ever develop a mindset to overcome the problem. Let’s face it: we’ve become soft and there are many more people getting bitter than there are getting better.
Much of Paul’s ministry was about Grit. When he ask God to pull him out of a situation (which is much of what we pray for and then get mad when God doesn’t like our treating him as if he is our bell hop), God answered Paul, clarifying his role: "My Grace is sufficient." In other words, I will give you blessings, not in delivering you but with Grit – with stick-to-it-ive-ness – with character. When criticized and questioned, Paul said, "I do not look backwards but forward, always keeping my eyes in the prize." Again, Grit, the focus on the goal of knowing God!
Angela Duckworth, a math teacher, started to wonder why some kids were successful and others were not, so she went back to school to study psychology. Presently she is a professor at The University of Pennsylvania, studying Grit. She has found the number one predictor of success is having the characteristic of Grit – not grades, SAT scores or any other characteristic. Those children, regardless of IQ or socio-economic background, who had the ability to stay focused on a goal, regardless of setbacks and obstacles, who weren’t even concerned with positive feedback but just the goal, were the ones who experienced victory. In fact, when children were praised for being smart, they eventually lost confidence and did not demonstrate Grit, as opposed to children who were recognized for the way they work focused toward a goal and persevere. I am going back and forth from child to self but the lessons are the same: teach the child Grit by your actions. Develop Grit yourself in the areas of your life that matter—work, health, marriage and faith.
But to develop Grit, we must address a myth. I hear it said all the time: "People don’t change," "You are what you are," or "That’s just the way I am; I can’t help it." I love the work of Carol Dweck, a psychology professor at Stanford, whose research states that, with people who are healthy and vibrant, they do not believe these myths to be true. She states there are two kinds of people: those who learn and those who don’t. And the successes are those who do learn, who don’t go around saying, "That’s the way I am."
We think the challenges have come uniquely to us. That belief is never true, but because we think so, we enter into self-pity, and we become offended. Those self-pitying conditions will leave you lifeless and suck all the energy out of you. With self-pity, now we are not thinking about our vision and all the good it can do to get there, but we are thinking about us and how sad it is that this thing has happened. There is a choice to make. Are you going to be pitiful or powerful or are you going to get bitter or better?
You can change and those you love can change. Start by not praising and reinforcing who they are but begin noticing the work and sticking to a process. Winners have private speech that gives them Grit. They say things to themselves that keep them focused. Those people who are told they are smart enough identify with being smart and eventually lose confidence. But those people who have developed Grit and are told they know how to work and stay focused on goals become very confident.
Start to have private conversations with yourself to develop Grit as you are moving toward your goal. Moreover, always have goals. Having something in your life that you have to work toward is one of the things that make life worth living. Having a goal is the reason we recently developed our series on goal setting: To Do The Impossible You Have To See The Invisible, where we have you write out your goals, see them happen and then develop a plan to achieve that goal.
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