Navigating through the Struggle Stage
During the last couple of weeks, we’ve talked about the struggle stage of learning. Feeling your best, finding flow, starts in struggle. You might recognize struggle as the part of learning that feels hard and often negative emotions in the form of frustration, stress or self-doubt show up. We may feel like we aren’t making progress and we may want to give up. We might complain in our heads or aloud and we might see distraction creep in through escape activities, like picking up a phone, checking email, starting a conversation, or getting up to get a snack.
If you believe the task is not too hard and not too easy, encourage yourself or your child to stay with it. Here are some additional tips:
Check in with your Mindset
You may have heard of a growth mindset and a fixed mindset. These ideas help us to understand how we see and interact with the world around us. A growth mindset looks at frustration with an attitude of perseverance. Challenges are embraced and failure is seen as an opportunity to learn something. Those with a growth mindset believe they can learn anything and that effort and attitude, rather than talent, determine success.
In contrast, those with a fixed mindset don’t like to be challenged because they believe that failure means they aren’t smart or good enough. When other succeed, they feel threatened. They believe that their abilities aren’t fluid, but rather they are either good at something or not good at something. As a result, when facing frustration, they give up.
- Start to listen closely for clues in you and your children’s mindset.
- Cultivate the ability to name the mindset as fixed or growth in that moment.
- Then, reframe and reword to a growth mindset, while leaning into behaviors that match a growth mindset.
For example, if your child does poorly on a set of questions about some learning, watch what follows. Does your child take the gaps in knowledge or skills as information to dig in and an opportunity to get some partnering from an expert or does your child choose to ignore, hide, or give up? Raise awareness around mindset, have conversations and feel the power that comes from a growth mindset.
Listen, also, to your own words and thoughts. Do you ever talk about being good or bad at particular subject areas? Do you attribute the skills or lack of skills to talent, genetics, or some other likely misnomer? I say likely because genetics sometimes do a play a role in pursuits such as in some sports, but often our beliefs play a bigger role. Do you feel like you could learn anything that you wanted to learn? Why or why not?
Cultivate Choice
When our kids are frustrated, up the autonomy, what I call choice. We gain autonomy by being able to do what we want, or we can gain autonomy by wanting to do the things we have to do. We all want to feel like we’re in control, that we can learn and grow and make choices that influence our world. Whether at school or at work, it’s helpful to remember that the value belongs to the one that assigned the work. We don’t automatically value the things others ask us to do. People need to feel like they have options and that they have control over what’s happening in life. Without this we feel powerless, pressured, and fearful. Help your child learn to create choice by asking: What choices have I made and what choices can I still make?
When I was about four-years-old, my mother started to give us a book allowance each month. We didn’t get a regular allowance at that time, but I clearly remember the book allowance. When we went to the bookstore, my brother and I could spend the money however we chose. At a young age, I only bought pink books and I spent all my money every month. In contrast, my older brother would save his money for many months and buy expensive coffee table books on fishing. In time, we both came to value the choice we had—to either borrow a book from the library or to purchase it—based on our own understanding of a “temporary read" or something that was going to last and was worth owning. This freedom instilled a love of books and is also a beautiful example of handing over choice and control to a child.
When feeling that burn of frustration it sometimes helps to lean into control. For example, a child can put parameters around activities, perhaps choosing to focus for 10 more minutes or working through two more problems. What choices can you hand over to your child? Ownership goes hand-in-hand with choice. The more our children feel like they are part of the plan, the more invested they become in the plan. Sometimes, it’s faster or easier just to make the plans yourself or handle whatever it is that needs doing, but there’s a payoff to remembering that involving your child is empowering and motivating.
Lean into Kaizen
We want to feel competent and that often happens when we feel like we are making progress in meaningful work. These wins don’t have to be large to be meaningful, in fact authentically celebrating small wins can be highly motivating and breaking down tasks can offer a boost of energy. Testing an idea, without emotional attachment; failing fast and failing often gets to an answer more quickly.
Kaizen is a Japanese word that means “change for the better.” Kaizen is the continuous improvement across all areas of our lives. Small steps are taken towards better results, paper-thin progressions. Focusing on one or two new things is usually much more effective than attempting to learn or change multiple things at once. If frustration persists, it can be helpful to break down activities into even smaller pieces until the resistance melts away. You might try helping your child to set some small, high-probability goals and celebrate when those are reached. The foundation of success found with tiny, clear goals can provide the motivation and fuel required for bigger challenges down the line. When motivation is running low, small wins help reset our motivational reserves.
Here's Jesse’s experience with this idea:
Jesse started the day with four goals he wanted to accomplish. He started with the hardest goal first because his energy was highest at the beginning of the day, but before long he wasn’t moving forward and he was itching to do something else, anything else. Jesse took a short break and then tried again to get some forward movement on his first goal, but this time he approached it differently. He decided to break that first goal down into the smallest steps he could imagine. Step one was to open the textbook in front of him. He could do that. Step two was to open his class notes to the right lecture. Easy. Step three was to look at the first line of the first sample problem and then pause to think about it. Doable.
You get the idea. Paper thin progressions stacked on top of one another…thinner than you might ever imagine. That’s sometimes what it takes to melt away our own resistance and inner thunderstorm of objection. We want the little voice to say, “You can do that,” without any pushback.
Happy Boldschooling!
