What is grit?
Is it really a psychological thing,
or just a term that people use to refer
to tenacity and resilience?
I'm Dr. Tracey Marks, a psychiatrist,
and I make mental health education videos.
Grit can be defined as perseverance
and passion for consistent, long-term goals.
Personality-wise, grit can be compared
to the personality trait, conscientiousness.
It's not identical, but very similar.
Conscientiousness is one of the dimensions
of the big five-factor model of personality traits
developed by Lewis Goldberg in the eighties.
The five factors form the acronym OCEAN,
which stands for openness, conscientiousness,
extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism.
I talked in detail about neuroticism in this video.
If you score high on the conscientiousness scale,
you tend to be a rule follower, efficient,
organized, thorough in your efforts,
achievement-focused, disciplined, and deliberate.
If you score low on this scale,
you tend to be more impulsive, easily distracted by things,
and need situations to be fluid and flexible,
and allowing for all possible outcomes to be acceptable.
Kind of like whatever happens, happens,
just go with the flow.
Some people assume that perseverance
is something that you learn based on family values,
and it can be, but according to research,
it's a trait that you're born with.
It either comes naturally for you or it doesn't,
so it's a trait that's been studied
and determined to have two aspects to it,
perseverance of effort and consistency of interests.
So it's your ability to stick with something,
even when it's a hard road,
and researchers have found that the grit trait
predicts future life successes, like graduating from school,
like high school and professional schools, staying in a job,
and even with achievements and a sport or a skill,
because these are all things that take
effort and stamina to see the end results.
And this being a trait could explain why,
if you have trouble sticking with something
when things get tough,
it's not that you're inadequate or lazy,
it's just not your nature to keep going.
It's like brushing an animal's fur the wrong way.
Pushing through just goes against the grain for you,
but all is not lost if you don't naturally have grit.
And here's four ways that you can develop it.
Number one, adopt a growth mindset.
This is a construct developed by psychologist Carol Dweck.
With a growth mindset, you lean into the thought
that your ability and competence grow with your efforts,
strategy, and support from other people.
And this means that you marinate on the belief
that your intelligence is changeable.
Think of your mind as a muscle
that gets stronger with effort.
As you accomplish things, you reward yourself
for your efforts and your focus, and not for your ability,
because you're not measuring your talent,
you're counting the fruit of your labor.
Number two is to shift how you think about challenges
and lack of progress from it being a personal failure
to being a temporary, external circumstance.
It's easy to get caught up in a cycle of self-blame
and doubt that can destroy your motivation to persevere,
so you have to train yourself to think of challenges
as situational setbacks that you can't control,
but you can work around.
Some of the research studying students
showed that when they got negative feedback,
they were better able to keep going
if the person giving the feedback
told them that they didn't have everything correct,
but because this was high level work,
they believed that they could do it.
In other words, you get criticism combined
with realistic encouragement, and the reasoning behind this
is that if you struggle with grit,
you can become easily discouraged when things get hard.
And it's at those times that you have to remind yourself,
or get a trusted friend to remind you,
that what you're doing is the equivalent
of lifting a heavier weight.
Increasing the weight is hard for anyone,
but you can learn to handle the heavy weight
just like the next person.
You just have to keep lifting and dropping
until you don't drop it anymore.
Everyone dropped the heavy weight at first,
but you can learn to hold on to it
just like the next person did.
If you know someone who struggles with perseverance,
as a friend, this is how you can encourage them.
If you're the person struggling,
get someone to say these kinds of things to you
when you need it, or, write these statements down
on a journal and read them to yourself
as part of a self-reflection or meditation time.
Number three, when you struggle with sticking
with something because it's no longer interesting,
find a way to make it meaningful.
This meaning can be personal, or it can be in a broad sense,
like something that's for the greater good.
Surely, there's some aspect of what you're doing
that can connect to your values,
or you can see it benefit a cause that's bigger than you.
And then number four, clarify your goals
so that you don't spend a lot of time
in unproductive effort.
Since grit is about perseverance
despite challenges and setbacks,
getting clear on what you want your end point
to look like will help guide you
on how to maneuver around the challenges.
Without the focus, you can get distracted
with other options that may be easier,
but lead you in the wrong direction.
You can feel like you're still on track
because you're still working at it,
but you're not on track because you're working
on something that's different from what you started with.
And this is one of the ways that people
can flounder and not really accomplish much,
despite the fact that they've been putting in
a lot of effort working towards something.
Watch this video for more on getting satisfaction
from doing things that have meaning and value.
Thanks for watching.
See you next time.