Growing Our Resilience Muscles!

I’ve heard it said that resilience is like a muscle – you need to work at building its capacity and strength, which takes time, commitment and a whole lot of practice! In a similar way, we believe in providing some explicit strategies that can help our ‘resilience muscles’ to grow.

I’m sure that, like me, you can recall times when you have found yourself spiralling into a negative train of thought – where you find yourself not only listening to, but believing some of the negative voices and opinions we can conjure up about ourselves. Our students can experience this too.

The mind is a powerful thing. In Romans 12, Paul speaks of the importance of allowing God to transform and renew our minds. Again, in Philippians 4 we are reminded that as we cast our thoughts, cares and worries on God, His peace will guard our hearts and minds. Learning to do this is a spiritual discipline that even we, as adults, need to continually remember to do as we seek to live a life that is God-glorifying. It goes without saying that we desire for our students to learn this discipline and put it into practice every day. To support their learning, our current wellbeing focus is the importance of Positive Thinking.

Negative phrases can flood our young learners’ minds as they face challenges of any kind. A writing task can be challenging – I’ll never be able to do this. A social conflict may be ongoing – No one likes me. Missing out on a position in the final soccer team – I’m not good enough. Every day and in any situation, we need to learn how to control these thoughts, hand them over to God and allow His truth to turn our thinking around.

A simple strategy we have introduced to help turn our negative thoughts into positive ones follows this acronym – A.C.T.

Ask: Is this a green (positive) or red (negative) thought?

Choose: I notice that this is a red (negative) thought. I can change that to green (positive).

Talk: That isn’t true. I just made a mistake. I can do better next time.

As you have chats in the car on the way home, as you reflect on the day with your children at bedtime, as you converse around the dinner table as a family, or as they share with you any worries about the challenges they are facing, I encourage you to share in the language of A.C.T. as you help your children to learn to persevere and navigate through the various challenges they encounter – and grow their resilience muscles along the way!

It was encouraging to see many of our Primary parents at the Resilience Presentation on Tuesday evening, where Zoe Broomhead (Life Therapies, Victoria) shared some valuable learnings about the human brain and its development. 

You might like to visit the website www.lifetherapiesvictoria.com.auto access PDFs and videos on regulation and the window of tolerance. 

Alternatively, a recommended text, Teaching your Children to Tell Themselves the Truth by William and Candace Backus, might be a helpful resource as we support our students in developing emotional regulation. 

Our hope is that they might grow and flourish as resilient young people today and resilient adults of the future.