The Resilient Cheerleader
Do you think resilience is innate (we are born with it) or can it be learned? No matter what you believe, we can all agree that resilience is an important ingredient for cheerleading success (and life success, too!).
Of course I believe it can be learned and so does Dr Karen Reivich who is co-author of The Optimistic Child, with Professor Martin Seligman, and co-author of the Resilience Factor.
Dr, Reivich says that there are (at least) 7 skills associated with resilience. All can be learned and incorporated into your life. Here they are:
1. Emotional awareness and regulation.
This is primarily the ability to identify what you are feeling and, when necessary, the ability to control and manage your feelings.
2. Impulse control.
Highly resilient people are able to tolerate ambiguity so they don’t rush to make decisions. They sit back and look at things in a thoughtful way before acting.
3. Optimism.
This refers to ‘realistic optimism’ not pie-in-the-sky optimism. People who are blindly optimistic do not have a brand of optimism which facilitates problem solving: in fact it interferes with it. So for optimism to help resilience, it needs to be wed to reality.
4. Causal analysis
This means the ability to think comprehensively about the problems you confront. Folks who score high in resilience are able to look at problems from many perspectives and consider many factors.
5. Empathy
People who score high on emotional awareness and understand their own emotions tend also to score high on empathy – the ability to read and understand the emotions of others. This is important for resilience for two reasons: first, it helps build relationships with others and then this builds social support
6. Self-efficacy
This is confidence in your ability to solve problems. This is partly about knowing what your strengths and weaknesses are and relying on your strengths to cope. Reivich stresses that this is different than self esteem. In other words, it is not just about feeling good about yourself, it is what she calls “a skills based mastery notion of coping.”
7. Reaching out
By this Reivich means being prepared to take appropriate risk. People who score high on resilience are willing to try things and think failure is a part of life.
Take a few moments to consider this list. On a scale of 1 – 5, with 1 being low and 5 being high, how would you rate yourself on each dimension? Stay tuned for ways to improve your score!
Tags: cheerleader, cheerleaders, Cheerleading, resiliency