Most people understand that resilience is important. I’m not sure there is anyone from any walk of life who would argue that resilience is overrated and/or an unnecessary life-skill. What people tend to disagree on is the level of challenge. How much resilience should we demand of ourselves and our children? How much pressure is too much? If we could answer this question, we could probably find the answer to much of life, and we could certainly write the text book on parenting.
I’m a reasonably strong believer in the fact that most things that are worth doing are hard work, including the process of study. The fact that study is hard is rarely denied by students or by their parents, but what’s interesting is what you find when you unpack these beliefs a little further. I often refer clients to a book by the university lecturer and psychologist Dr. Paul Penn, who has written an outstanding book on the psychology of effective study. He argues that most students avoid more effective methods because they are actually under the false impression that the process of studying should come easily to them. In a recent post on LinkedIn, Paul wrote the following: “I can’t emphasise enough how important it is to convey to students that their intuition about what works and what doesn’t work when it comes to studying is often wrong. This is why the entire first chapter of my book is dedicated to metacognition and specifically how a raft of metacognitive errors can compel students to persist with ineffective studying methods because they “feel good or right”. Chief among these errors is the conflation of ease with effectiveness and short-term performance with longer-term learning. The notion that learning is supposed to be an effortful and difficult process is often revelatory to students (in a good way), because they tend to assume that finding studying challenging is a negative indictment on them and therefore gravitate towards ineffective methods such as re-reading, that generate illusory impressions of progress. Once they realise that failure is an integral part of learning, difficulty is often desirable and short-term performance should not be confused with longer-term learning, they are much more amenable to implementing advice on effective studying.“
The emphasis is mine, as I feel the final words in this quote are absolutely crucial. In recent months I have started using more and more analogies to explain this phenomenon to the young learners that I work with. Many youngsters in their mid to late teens play sport or work out at the gym, indeed there is a significant trend in that generation for weight and resistance training (when I was at school the trend was all aerobics and feeling the burn). While not every student works out, a notable number of them either do so or at least have a vague grasp of the concept. It can be really useful to their understanding of study to liken their efforts to a workout in the gym. Weight-lifting is a process which should be done to the point of failure, or near-failure. Just because you have found it impossible to lift an 8 kilo weight for the eighth time, that does not render your workout worthless: quite the opposite, in fact. The very fact that you have worked on those muscles to the point of failure or near-failure is the very same process that builds muscle and will make the lifting easier in the long-run. So short-term “failures” lead to long-term gains.
This is all well and good, and it’s important to explain this underlying truth to those who are new to the process of study (or, indeed, to working out). But I think there are other things that we can always do to support ourselves through such challenges, whatever they may be, and these come down to the fact that we need to forgive ourselves for the inescapable fact that the vast majority of us are naturally reluctant to leave our comfort zones. We’ve all met the odd exceptional person who runs endurance marathons across the arctic or the desert or both in the same week. These people are not useful models. The overwhelming majority of us find it hard to motivate ourselves to stick with things that are difficult and, to take inspiration from James Clear, author of Atomic Habits, we need to accept that fact and to help ourselves out by removing as many barriers as possible. It is not productive or effective to tell ourselves we’re useless when we feel like giving up: it is much more useful to investigate whether we could be doing something slightly differently in order to mitigate against the likelihood of giving up. This is something that many teenagers fall foul of, especially those with a perfectionist streak: they set themselves up for inevitable long-term failure by failing to forgive themselves for short-term defeats.
As regular readers will know, I am currently in the process of learning to run on a regular basis. I experimented with the Couch to 5K programme and then switched to using music instead. Try as I might, I hit a wall when it came to running for anything longer than three to four minutes and I was becoming frustrated and upset by my lack of progress. I wasn’t enjoying the runs I was doing, in fact I was starting to dread them, and a little voice in my head was starting to say: you’re not going to stick with this.
Rather than beating myself up, I addressed the fact that I was at risk of giving up and faced it head-on. Let’s be honest, for every person on social media announcing their incredible progress at a feat such as running, there are at least ten, possibly twenty others, who have quietly given up on the whole thing. I don’t want to be in that group. To quote Marie Murphy, Professor of exercise and health at Ulster university, “the best form of exercise is the one you will do. That trumps everything else.” While fitness experts can argue about the minutiae of marginal gains and optimal exercise programmes, the general population is getting less and less fit because they’re not doing any of it. Sure, it would be optimal if I could stick with pushing myself to run for more than four minutes: but if I find this so miserable that I give up altogether, the end result will be entirely negative. So, I’ve completely switched the process and am now using the walk-run method, starting with 30 seconds of each. It is utterly blissful and I am enjoying the process again. This week, I cut the walk break by five seconds, so running for 30 seconds and then walking for 25 and it was absolutely fine. I will continue to reduce the walk breaks marginally, and see how that goes.
Somewhat anxiously, I shared my decision with a friend. This friend, by the way, can run 10K without stopping or taking a walk break. She told me I’d made absolutely the right decision and reinforced the mantra that sticking with the process was more important than anything else. We chatted about the psychology of cutting the walk times rather than increasing the run-times. Ultimately, the result will (hopefully) be the same, but for me there is something about the psychology of “I only have to run for 30 seconds!” that really works for me. She related a conversation that she had overheard at a swimming pool, where one woman was saying that she preferred 50m to 25m pools (“30 lengths feels so much easier than 60!”) whilst the other preferred 25m (“but each 50m length is sooooo long!”). As my friend pointed out, each of those swimmers is ultimately doing the same workout, but they feel differently about the two different approaches, and that’s what matters. Whatever happens, the trick is to adjust your challenges so that they remain challenges but are not so insurmountable that you risk calling it a day.
If there is a magic formula for that and someone discovers it, they’ll make a fortune.
