From the Leadership Team 

Matt Brinson, Head of Senior School 

Resilience - Semester 2 character trait 

Our character trait for Semester 2 is 'resilience'. Given our past two-and-a-half years of living through the pandemic, I think this is a really fitting trait for us to focus on. 

Traditionally, resilience has been defined as toughness or the capacity to recover quickly or bounce back from difficulties. However, I feel that this definition doesn’t quite encompass the true breadth of resilience. 

ADVANCING DESPITE ADVERSITY 

The resilience-focused organisation Driven defines resilience as 'advancing despite adversity'. 

Resilience is not simply about ‘bouncing back’ which implies returning to normal. Instead, it involves ‘advancing’ forward by moving towards continual growth and achievement of goals. 

The word ‘despite’ in this context suggests proactivity. A highly proactive person learns from the mistakes of others. 

'Adversity’ includes facing not just big life-altering events like a pandemic, but also the small challenges of everyday life, such as a late train or a disagreement with a friend.  

The idea of 'advancing despite adversity' helps to illustrate that resilience is something we need to work on every day, because all of us will face adversity in our lives, both in small and big ways. It’s not a matter of if, but when. 

CONNECTING RESILIENCE WITH PASSION

There is a wonderful interconnection between passion, our character trait for Semester 1, and resilience, our Semester 2 character trait.

Passion helps us to become more creative and innovative and it connects us to our capacity for resilience. If we don’t care about something, we don’t invest in this development. When we have passion, we develop stronger coping strategies. This helps us to dig deeper into our stores of resilience and, in turn, to strengthen our ability to recover.  

Each of us has some level of resilience. What’s really exciting is that our level of resilience isn’t static but dynamic; we all have the ability to learn and become much more resilient. 

DEVELOPING RESILIENCE 

Resilience is not genetic but developed. 

Ann Masten, a Professor at the University of Minnesota and renowned author of several books on resilience, coined the term ‘ordinary magic’ to describe the idea that resilience isn’t rare or special, but just the result of kids having more resources within themselves and their families and communities. 

As Nelson Mandela once said, 'Do not judge me by my success, judge me by how many times I fell down and got back up again.'

Here are some basic guidelines of how we can help our students become more resilient.

Source: Jonny Shannon