Willpower, grit and how to increase them with learning power

Is our willpower limited? If we exercise self-restraint avoiding distractions or unhealthy temptations, will this reduce our capacity to stay focused with our work? What if we believed our willpower was without limits, that we could never exhaust its resources?

The answers to these questions, and others, has potential significance to how companies manage staff motivation, how schools and colleges encourage students' resilience and learning engagement.  New research led by psychologist Veronika Job, at the University of Zurich,  suggests that a person’s beliefs in the qualities of their willpower, or self-regulatory capacities, has a significant influence on their performance and sense of well-being.  

I explore these issues further in an article which can be found in 'The Conversation'. There is a close relationship between self-regulation and grit. ‘Grit’ refers to a person’s ability to persevere towards a goal despite problems and setbacks. Having grit has been associated with reduced dropout at work, improved academic attainment and increased determined practice - the kind of practice which is often frustrating but most associated with developing expertise. The key issues which emerge from these considerations are about how we  can help people become grittier and how can we can help them change their perspective on the limits of their willpower.

The missing learning power piece

One area of research I have been interested in for several years concerns learning power, or learning-to-learning dispositions.  I’ve been involved in profiling individuals’ learning power using a tool developed at the University of Bristol called ELLI (Effective Lifelong Learning Inventory).  One of the interesting things observed when we look at a person’s learning power over a period of time is that their ‘Resilience’ score often goes down slightly when other dimensions increase.  This has been observed most dramatically with underperforming students and young adults, where often their resilience was the only dimension appearing strong. 

After initial use of ELLI, individuals are encouraged and helped to think about ways they can grow their learning powers and engage more positively in opportunities to develop.  With this group of underachievers, when some created a second profile, their ‘Resilience’ scores had decreased, while other dimensions had grown.  This at first this caused doubt about the reliability of the resilience scale used in the measurement tool.  But further analysis revealed that this was not the case.  The trouble with resilience, as with grit, is that looking at dispositions or personal characteristics associated with learning in isolation is highly problematic[1]. We always learn in contexts and we never learn by only drawing on one positive learning capability.  Resilience without a growth orientated perspective on learning becomes a kind of narrow-minded stubbornness – “I’ll do it my way, I don’t care if I fail, I’m no changing.”

It takes time for someone’s grit to positively change.  Developing other learning dispositions considerably helps. The more we begin to see that we can learn effectively and the more we begin to believe that our effort, self-regulatory stamina, is not exhaustible, the more we develop resilience in the face of challenges.  One the reasons we need to consider these dispositions together is because a sense of purpose is closely related to their development (Yeager et al., 2014).  People who have clearer long-term goals, positive aspirations for the future, are better at growing resilience and there are few greater stimuli for positive aspirations than knowing you are becoming a more powerful learner.

Sense of purpose and values

The high pressure cultures we frequently inhabit are disorientating, inducing a form of passivity, encouraging consumption rather than creativity, and inhibit us from seeing the interconnectedness and beautiful complexity of our lives. Yes, ‘beautiful complexity’ because we should not try to keep separate what we are becoming at home on the weekends with who we are during the week[2]. Rather we should seek to grow, develop and translate experiences from each area of our lives.  Our well-being is closely related to what is called self-concordance, when people feel they pursue their goals because they match their interests and values rather than because others (the school or corporation) tell them to have these goals (Sheldon et al., 2004). How often are students made to feel their future aspirations are taken seriously at school? Or, colleagues at work asked about how the organisation’s values align with their personal values?

In fact, a problem with research which narrowly measures positive learning attitudes and perceptions is that it can obscure the importance of personal values and beliefs. These permeate the cultures we live within at home, in the community and at work. From early on in the learning power research, there was interest in the way cultures and personal values were related to learning dimensions (Crick & Jelfs, 2011; Crick et al., 2007; Arthur et al. 2006). There is thought-provoking evidence showing the way values positively contribute to learning orientation (Lovat et al., 2010; Lietz & Matthews, 2006) and the way organisational values affect business performance (Barrett, 2006).

Paraphrasing the German philosopher Jurgen Habermas, it seems we need to decolonise the life-worlds which give meaning to our lives from an unhealthy domination by the system. Efficiency and productivity are ultimately reduced, not increased, by a relentless reduction of everything done to their mechanisms and structures.  Put another way, you don’t make someone work better and produce more by telling them second by second what their work rate is; you don’t improve a students’ engagement with their studies by daily reminding them of their target attainment levels. It’s expedient and responsible for someone to keep an eye on targets, scores and productivity graphs. But we’re not machines – and that’s a virtue, not a problem – we have nonlimited potential to grow, adapt, create, produce and achieve.  We are greatly benefitted from believing this.

 Job et al.’s research helps to show that we don’t need to and shouldn’t give in to self-imposed limits.  This isn’t to say we can’t take a break during a busy work or study period. But that’s not because we’ve exhausted or depleted our powers to focus and achieve. Purposeful engagement is exhilarating, increasing our well-being, helpfully keeping us from harmful habits.  It can also help enrich our lives by drawing us to the values that matter to us.  And it should come as no surprise that learning power, deeply related to values, provide a pathway for us to grow positive self-regulatory perspectives.    

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What to do next

 Personal focus

On an individual level here’s some things to do:

• Don’t confuse short-term physical tiredness with self-regulatory burn out.
• Use tasks completed as encouragements to engage purposefully with the next activity.
• Recognise, avoid and strategise your way out of situations and factors which distract and discourage you, i.e. don’t passively give in to it – you know it’s going to leave you feeling miserable, if you do.
• Connect your life together - identifying and celebrating your commitments, participation and involvement in anything positive and purposeful at home, work or in your community. Find learning achievements across these domains and talk to family, colleagues and friends about them.

Working with others (teachers and managers)

• Don’t let students and colleagues get bored – the more challenges, the better for developing positive self-regulatory orientations.
• Help your people plan wisely and identify the resources they need in good time, which includes working out how long a task should take before starting.
• Encourage a culture of learning where all the learning dimensions are seen as interconnected and of value.
• Make things meaningful, talk about the relevance of tasks to bigger goals and purposes, discuss values and how they can outworked through study and work opportunities.
• Role model resilience and grit, talk about how you keep going when things are hard, how you’ve made mistakes and learnt from them and how you’re optimistic about what can be achieved in the future.
•  Never accept the belief that a student’s or colleague’s will to achieve is depleted. Gently nurture, nudge, exhort and inspire them to positively engage with the next thing. 

Thanks for reading.  If you’ve appreciated the post please ‘like’ and share with your network. More posts can be found at https://www.dhirubhai.net/today/author/nigel-newton-76992624 

Nigel Newton is a consultant, speaker and educational researcher working to help organisations and individuals realise their potential. 

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References

 Arthur, J., Deakin-Crick, R., Samuel, E., Wilson, K., & McGettrick, B. (2006). Character Education: The Formation of Virtues and Dispositions in 16-19 Year Olds with particular reference to the religious and spiritual. Canterbury Christ Church University and University of Bristol.

Barrett, R. (2006). Building a values-driven organization: A whole system approach to cultural transformation. Routledge.

Bernecker, K., Herrmann, M., Brandst?tter, V., & Job, V. (2015). Implicit Theories About Willpower Predict Subjective Well‐Being. Journal of personality.

Crick, R. D., & Jelfs, H. (2011). Spirituality, learning and personalisation: exploring the relationship between spiritual development and learning to learn in a faith-based secondary school. International Journal of Children's Spirituality, 16(3), 197-217.

Deakin Crick, R., McCombs, B., Haddon, A., Broadfoot, P., & Tew, M. (2007). The ecology of learning: factors contributing to learner‐centred classroom cultures. Research Papers in Education, 22(3), 267-307.           “We argue that: learning power seems to be a form of consciousness characterised by particular values, attitudes and dispositions, with a lateral and a temporal connectivity.”

Ferrari, J. R., Kapoor, M., & Cowman, S. (2005). Exploring the relationship between students’ values and the values of postsecondary institutions. Social Psychology of Education, 8(2), 207-221.

Job, V., Dweck, C. S., & Walton, G. M. (2010). Ego depletion—Is it all in your head? Implicit theories about willpower affect self-regulation.Psychological science.

Job, V., Walton, G. M., Bernecker, K., & Dweck, C. S. (2015). Implicit theories about willpower predict self-regulation and grades in everyday life. Journal of personality and social psychology, 108(4), 637.

Lawrence, A., & Lawrence, P. (2009). Values congruence and organisational commitment: P—O fit in higher education institutions. Journal of Academic Ethics, 7(4), 297-314.

Lietz, P., & Matthews, B. (2006). Are values more important than learning approaches? Factors influencing student performance at an international university. In AARE 2006 Conference, Australia Adelaide,(Jan 2007)

Lovat, T., Clement, N., Dally, K., & Toomey, R. (2010). Values education as holistic development for all sectors: Researching for effective pedagogy. Oxford Review of Education, 36(6), 713-729.

Lozano, J. F. (2012). Educating responsible managers. The role of university ethos. Journal of Academic Ethics, 10(3), 213-226.

Sheldon, Kennon M., Andrew J. Elliot, Richard M. Ryan, Valery Chirkov, Youngmee Kim, Cindy Wu, Meliksah Demir, & Zhigang Sun (2004). Self-concordance and subjective well-being in four cultures. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 35(2), 209-223.

Yeager, D. S., Henderson, M. D., Paunesku, D., Walton, G. M., D’Mello, S., Spitzer, B. J., & Duckworth, A. L. (2014). Boring but important: A self-transcendent purpose for learning fosters academic self-regulation. Journal of personality and social psychology, 107(4), 559.

Footnotes

[1] Grit and resilience are often used to refer to similar or complementary things. But as Duckworth describes, they also have differences. The most common is that measurement of grit includes a ‘focused passions’ scale. This has a future orientated dimension relating to how strong a person’s goal-orientation is.  Within the Effective Lifelong Learning Inventory (ELLI), this aspect of grit can be seen reflected in the ‘meaning-making’ scale and in terms of future orientation with ‘changing and learning’. Also, grit is often used to refer to longer-term pursuit of goals, whereas resilience can relate to task focused response to challenge.

[2] This isn’t the same as saying we should take our work home with us or bring all our domestic concerns to work. But in terms of values and aspirations there needs to be greater harmony. There are interesting papers by Ferrari et al. (2005) and Lawrence & Lawrence (2009) discussing the disjuncture between the values of undergraduates and the universities they studying within. Also, Lozano (2012) presents a strong argument about how business schools within universities need to develop and practice an ethos which is consistent with the corporate responsibility discourse they teach in order for that teaching to be truly meaningful to students.