Resilience is the skill of using setbacks, mistakes, and failures as a lesson to recover back to a useful perspective and positive action. The best part about Resilience is: failure is actually embraced, even expected, and thus useful in learning and moving forward faster with more confidence.

The point of the Academic Life Coaching program is NOT so teenagers never fail and always have a positive perspective or fantastic attitude. We all get bummed out and need to process tough truths. The real point is being able to develop the self-awareness to identify when you’ve been stuck in a useless perspective and are literally working against yourself by seeing things as overly difficult. Building resilience allows a student to recognize when they’re at the top of their game and how to quickly return back to that state after a minor fallback.

In essence, Resilience is tapping back into hope and moving into action.

In this exercise, your coach also looks at what your student’s most successful tools have been in the Life Coaching program. Usually, a student has three or four tools that are most useful. We want to highlight those tools and resolve how to continue with them.

Oftentimes in school there is the myth that students have to display constant perfection in order to achieve their desired grade. But in reality, the people who are most successful are those who are willing to take risks responsibly and accept the outcome and keep moving forward in being creative with that outcome.

This concept is so powerful, especially at the end of the program, because it helps students address how they can continue to use the concepts of the program to face larger challenges in the future. The whole purpose of the Academic Life Coaching program isn’t to look at the challenges that are facing the student currently but to give them skills to face those challenges as they arise.

How to Best Support Your Child

Remind your child how best to recover when things don’t seem to go their own way. They don’t need to wallow in their mistakes, but rather focus on recovering back to that positive state. Remind them of the process of letting go of being perfect all the time and understanding that one can learn to recover almost immediately from setbacks.

From the Academic Life Coaching Workbook

The point of leadership is not being perfect. It’s about riding your successes and recovering from your mistakes. The more you learn to recover from setbacks and build up your resiliency the better leader you’re going to become. The aim here is to cut down the amount of time it takes for you to recover, and you’re at a point when you have many tools to help you do that. This exercise is about finding the perspectives, values, and motivation to build your resilience.

What tools (perspectives, values, future-self, etc.) have worked well for you over the past three months?

What systems have worked well?

Within those systems what have been the key structures you’ve put in place?

What are examples of when you have recovered quickly? How did you do it? Why do you think it worked so well?

What additional tools can you add to target being resilient?