Mindset Makeover: Why Resilience Transcends Growth and Grit

Both growth mindset and grit have been celebrated as powerful concepts for personal achievement and success. I've extensively used Carol Dweck's and Angela Duckworth's research and seen what works and what doesn’t.

This post offers a nuanced critique, aiming to spark a discussion that acknowledges the value and limitations of these concepts. I hope to encourage my clients—including athletes, coaches, educators, and students—not to adopt these frameworks as one-size-fits-all solutions.

While I’ve worked in all these areas over the years, I will focus on education, where I was formally introduced to these ideas and where I believe resilience is most needed.

This article aims to prompt coaches, educators, and parents to reflect on the importance of resilience and how concepts like growth mindset and grit, alongside other models, can help students and athletes achieve more despite the inevitable failures they will face.

Defining Key Concepts

As we work toward answering the question, “How do we ensure our students succeed?” it’s essential to understand a few key definitions:

• Resilience: The ability to bounce back from challenges and use those challenges as learning opportunities. Resilience is often characterized by optimism and the ability to draw on past strengths.
• Grit: The drive to keep going when facing adversity and stick to long-term goals. Grit is often characterized by passion and perseverance.
• Growth Mindset: The belief that abilities can be developed through dedication and hard work. A growth mindset embraces challenges, views failure as a learning opportunity, and celebrates progress.

If we center the concept of resilience while collectively exploring all the models that help build it, we can achieve success more holistically.

The Evolution of Mindset and Grit

The concept of mindset, popularized by Carol Dweck in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and grit, popularized by Angela Duckworth, have become buzzwords in the last decade. While both are generally related to achievement and personal growth, they have limitations.

These days, as a Mindfulness and Mental Performance Coach, I use these concepts with a wide array of clients and students:

• In education, to foster grit in students.
• In business, for hiring and employee development.
• In sports, to develop mental toughness.
• Personal development is?a popular topic in self-help literature.

For the sake of this article, I will focus on education and working with students. With summer ending and the school year approaching, this is the perfect time to transition from old thinking to something new.

The Importance of a Resilience-Centered Approach

I invite you to makeover your mindset by focusing on building student resilience. Yes, this involves teaching a growth mindset and grit, but I want you to think bigger and go deeper. By becoming too narrowly focused, we risk missing the mark.

Stop Your Stinking Thinking

I had to do this before I could honestly do the work I was called to do: youth empowerment. Playing sports from grade school through college, mainly in the 1990s, taught me specific rules about winning that aren’t valid.

For instance, remember being told to “stand up, be tall, put your hands on your head” when you were exhausted from running sprints? Me too. But this is bad science. When you bend over and place your hands on your knees, you open up your chest cavity and allow your diaphragm to move more freely, making it the most effective way to recover during a timeout or break in the game.

So why do some coaches still tell athletes that this makes them look weak?

“Stinking thinking,” also known as cognitive distortions, are negative or irrational thoughts that can influence how a person feels and behaves. It can lead to:

• Increased stress in daily life
• Anxiety
• Depression
• Relapse

I’ll admit, as an untraditional (untrained) educator, I found myself volunteering at a local high school, teaching breathing meditation to students, staff, and parents. It was challenging to introduce an ancient practice to a new audience before it was popularized out of necessity to combat the growing mental health crisis caused by the COVID-19 pandemic—but that’s a story for another time.

Although I didn’t have any clinical diagnosis, I found myself stressed by the limiting beliefs swirling around in my head:

• Blaming others instead of focusing on what was in my control.
• Resenting people instead of learning to forgive.
• Believing people would fail or that bad things would happen.
• Thinking some people were just inherently bad.

Does this sound like any educators or parents you know? If we’re honest, that person might even be you.

And that’s okay. I was there, too. But today, I’m a more resilient coach, getting better results, and still in the field of education.

Before we dive into the three core concepts of growth mindset, grit, and resilience, I want to share three additional concepts that helped me grow personally and professionally, which I’ll discuss at the end of this post.

Let's continue if you’re ready to let go of your stinking thinking—the opposite of a growth mindset.

Why is Resilience So Important?

Resilience is crucial because students need strategies to overcome obstacles they will inevitably face in school, sports, and social life. These challenges may include receiving grades that don’t match their expectations, not making the cut for extracurricular activities, and dealing with peer pressure.

The reality is that students will fail. And that’s okay. What’s not okay is failing to prepare them to navigate these moments of failure.

It’s important to understand the limitations of the concepts and frameworks we use here, especially when offering them as solutions to real-life obstacles.

For example, Dweck has argued that “students who believed their intelligence could be developed (a growth mindset) outperformed those who believed their intelligence was fixed (a fixed mindset).” The idea that a growth mindset allows students to see challenges as opportunities for intellectual development rather than as dead-ends is a worthwhile bar to set for our students. However, a meta-analysis of 129 studies published in Psychological Science suggests that the correlation between a growth mindset and academic achievement is “very weak.”

Similarly, Duckworth defined grit as “a combination of passion and perseverance for a singularly important goal,” is a noble pursuit and not as predictive of success as we once thought. A meta-analysis of 66,807 individuals from the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology found that interventions designed to increase grit had “weak effects on performance and success.”

I’m not saying we should stop talking about or using the concepts of growth mindset and grit. I am saying that we need to take the research around these popular concepts and the books, podcasts, and programs that stem from them with a grain of salt.

Why the Whole Person Needs to Be Considered

As the saying goes, “If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail.” This famous quote by Abraham Maslow, commonly known as the 'law of the instrument' or Maslow's Hammer, refers to an over-reliance on a familiar or favorite tool.

The favorite tools of late have been all about grit, mindset, and mental toughness.

But what if we grounded students in an understanding of and ability to manage their whole-person wellness—intellectual, spiritual, physical, and mental/social/emotional health—at least during their high school years and beyond, if not sooner?

This whole-person approach seeks to bring together the individual’s context with an understanding of the nature of personhood, creating learning tasks in collaboration with the learner to enhance their development toward a more complete personhood.

This approach is very similar to my Deep Health coaching method. As a health and wellness coach, most of my clients come to me wanting to focus on physical fitness and maybe nutrition. They’re correct in knowing these are two essential areas of their health. However, this isn’t a holistic approach. Deep health considers multiple dimensions of our lives, ensuring a balanced and fulfilling existence. Whether I’m coaching nutrition or mental performance, I collaboratively explore all six elements:

• Physical: Strength, endurance, flexibility, cardiovascular, and digestive health.
• Emotional: Understanding and managing emotions.
• Mental: How you think and feel about yourself and your ability to cope with everyday life.
• Social: The importance of meaningful relationships and support systems.
• Environmental: How your surroundings impact your well-being.
• Existential: Your sense of purpose and meaning in life.

As my clients learn and practice how these six elements interconnect to create a comprehensive picture of well-being, they are genuinely empowered and more successful than they could have been if only focused on one area.

?Are You Ready for Your Mindset Makeover?

I don’t have all the answers, but I have an idea that will help you find the correct answers for the people you serve: a more comprehensive approach to supporting success.

Now, let’s dive into three practical applications you can implement at your school, with your team, or at home:

?1. Social-Emotional Learning (SEL)

Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) is a process that helps people develop and use the skills they need to manage their emotions, build relationships, and make responsible decisions. SEL is a strengths-based approach that starts at birth and continues throughout life.

Today's schools are increasingly multicultural and multilingual, with students from diverse social and economic backgrounds. Educators and community agencies serve students with different motivations for engaging in learning, behaving positively, and performing academically. SEL provides a foundation for safe and positive learning and enhances students' ability to succeed in school, careers, and life.

?2. Display Emotional Awareness and Regulation

Emotional awareness is recognizing and understanding our emotions and those of others. By expressing your feelings and talking openly about them, you show children that it’s okay to feel a range of emotions. Here are some ways to demonstrate emotional awareness and regulation:

- Label your emotions and explain why you feel that way.

- Encourage children or students to express their feelings and validate their emotions.

- Practice coping strategies like deep breathing, mindfulness, or journaling.

- Discuss appropriate ways to express emotions, even when they’re negative.

By modeling emotional awareness, we give students the tools to manage their emotions healthily and productively. This leads to better decision-making and problem-solving when they face difficult situations.

?3. Breathwork

Yes, breathwork can help build resilience by improving emotional regulation. Breathwork techniques like diaphragmatic breathing and deep breathing can:

- Initiate the body’s relaxation response to reduce stress, anxiety, and anger.

- Activate the parasympathetic nervous system to shift away from fight-or-flight mode.

- Improve mind-body connection and regulate the stress hormone cortisol.

- Boost energy and immune function through increased blood flow and oxygenation.

- Increase sense of presence, self-awareness, self-acceptance, and inner peace.

- Release emotions and trauma.

- Induce theta and delta brain waves for receptivity, insight, intuition, and better sleep.

- Reduce symptoms of PTSD.

Teaching breathwork to students, athletes, and workplace wellness programs provides a simple, accessible tool for self-regulation and stress reduction. It empowers them to take control of their physical and emotional responses to challenging situations, which is critical to building resilience.

---

By incorporating these practices—social-emotional learning, emotional awareness and regulation, and breathwork—you'll be equipping your students, athletes, or colleagues with the skills they need to thrive, not just in the moment but throughout their lives. Resilience is not just about persevering through tough times; it’s about growing through them and emerging stronger on the other side.

Coach Ambrose

Your Mindfulness and Mental Performance Coach

MISPIBO Fitness

Work hard, Live Well, and Have Heart