Building Resilience in Students: A Practical Guide to Creating Resilient Students

Everywhere we go, we hear educators complaining that students are becoming less and less resilient each year. 

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Everyone recognises resilience as a critical skill, but how do you actually train it? Is it a personality trait limited to a special few? And how do you nurture a resilient student?

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What is Resilience?

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Resilience is the capacity to adapt successfully to challenges and adversity while maintaining overall well-being. It's often described as the ability to "bounce back" from difficult experiences, but it's more than that. 

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Resilience involves a complex interplay of thoughts, emotions, and behaviours that help individuals navigate through tough times. 

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It's important to emphasise that resilience isn't a fixed trait; it's a skill that can be cultivated and strengthened over time. Everyone has the potential to develop resilience, regardless of their background or past experiences.

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How to teach students to be Resilient?

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In today's complex, competitive world, it's more important than ever to equip students with the resources to navigate challenges and emerge stronger.

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But it’s a fine line to tread. You want to push students enough so they feel out of their comfort zone and have to overcome some challenges and setbacks, but you don’t want to push them too much, so that it seems like they’re constantly failing and run the risk of damaging their mental health. 

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It’s important to stretch, not snap - but it’s important to equip students with the tools and techniques so they know how to be resilient rather than just being told they lack resilience. 

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Resilience is a skill that should be taught. 

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Why is Resilience so important? 

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You’ll never get rid of stress out of your life, nor do you want to. Stress is important and helps us grow and become better. 

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If you’re going to achieve anything in life, you’re going to experience failure and setbacks along the way. And if you’re going to overcome these challenges, then it’s imperative to be resilient. 

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What are the benefits of being Resilient? 

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Resilience doesn’t just help us overcome challenges, but offers a myriad of benefits for our physical, mental and social well being.

Studies have linked resilience to lower rates of depression, anxiety, and stress-related disorders. Research also suggests that resilient individuals are better equipped to cope with adversity, such as trauma or chronic illness. 

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Psychological benefits include enhanced memory, improved problem-solving, and better decision-making abilities. These cognitive benefits contribute to improved academic performance, career success, and overall life satisfaction.

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While resilience is known for its psychological benefits, scientific evidence indicates a strong correlation between resilience and physical health. Resilient individuals tend to have lower rates of chronic diseases, such as heart disease and diabetes. 

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Chronic stress does a lot more than make us moody and irritable. It plays a leading role in physical health issues and severely compromises our immune system, making us vulnerable to illness and disease. Managing stress and building the tools to be resilient is crucial for our physical health and longevity too. 

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How to train Resilience? 

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In our Resilience training, we run through the 6 pillars of Resilience that are critical for aiding individuals to become antifragile - to not merely withstand setbacks, but actually improve because of it. 

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A key trait of high performers and successful people is not that they’ve avoided stress - they’ve embraced it as they recognise success makes you better, not worse! 

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But it only makes you better when you respond in the right way. Here’s how: 

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What are the 6 pillars of Resilience?

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1. Control & Choice 

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Some things suck - there’s no way of dressing it up. It’s important to process emotions and normal to be upset, but when we get caught up in fault and blame, we can slip into a victim mentality which makes us helpless to the situation. 

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Identifying things within your control and recognising you have a choice in how you think and respond is a crucial first step in dealing with any form of setback. 

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2. Change & Uncertainty 

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Our brains don’t like change. We're human beings so we like comfort, we like things staying the same and a future that we can predict. 

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But that safety that we are biased towards in the short term actually makes us more vulnerable for 2 reasons: 

1. Known fears - If we get too stuck in a comfort zone for too long it exacerbates our fears because they are never faced. Most of our fears are irrational and most of what we worry about never comes true, but if we never test this out, we never know. 
2. Unknown fears - Staying in our comfort zone for too long means we're shocked when we're forced out of it. If we don’t learn the coping mechanisms and resources to deal with micro-discomfort, we’re going to struggle to deal with unknown, uncontrollable, big-changes that inevitably occur in life. 

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3. Self-Awareness & Self-regulation

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Perhaps the most important step to building resilience is understanding how you respond and react to stressful situations. 

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Self-awareness is one of, if not the most important skills you can possess. There’s no self-development without self-awareness. You need to be self-aware so you can know when and how, to self-regulate. 

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The goal is to stay calm in stressful situations. Acute stress negatively affects our thinking. We lose 10-20% of intelligence when we're stressed so it's imperative to stay calm, so we can think clearly and make better decisions. 

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4. Stress Management 

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“It’s not the stress that kills us - it’s our reaction to it” - Hans Selye 

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There’s some important truths to recognise when it comes to stress:

1. Stress is part of life 
2. Stress is subjective 
3. The power lays in your reaction 

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Check out our ultimate guide for managing stress and Download our cognitive reframing worksheet for some free stress management tools from us. 

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5. Managing Failure & Setbacks 

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Whenever I speak with someone about managing failure and setbacks, I remind them of the Magic Eraser test created by former GoogleX CEO - Mo Gawdat. 

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Mo Gawdat raised this thought experiment where he asked individuals to think back to some of the worst events, failures and setbacks in their lives. 

He then offered them the choice of having a magic eraser which could erase the event from their lives, but under one condition. 

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It would also erase everything that happened as a result of the event - the teachings, coping mechanisms and changes that occurred. Would you still use the magic eraser?

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Out of 12,000 people, 99% said they wouldn’t erase these events. 

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The person you are is a result of the difficult moments, not the easy parts. Next time you experience a failure or setback, remind yourself that there’s a 99% chance you’ll be grateful that it happened. 

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6. Challenge & Support 

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Finally, to develop resilience, we need to get the right balance of challenge and support. Too little challenge makes us stagnant and comfortable, which as discussed in the change & uncertainty pillar - makes us vulnerable.

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But too much challenge without the adequate support creates an unrelenting environment that has the potential to damage our mental health and wellbeing. 

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Humans have an innate desire to explore & progress - we're rewarded for it through our feel good neurochemical called Dopamine. Humans also need connection - we're tribe creatures who need to feel like we fit in, belong and have support around us. 

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When people think of a resilient person, they often imagine someone dealing with everything and coping on their own - but this is all wrong.

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Support is critical and resilience isn't just about coping with things on your own and showing no emotion. Resilience is about being vulnerable and seeking out a support network to help you through tough times. 

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Equip your students with our Resilience Training

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If you recognise that your students lack Resilience, then get in touch so you can train them with one of the most critical skills they can possess. 

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