What is resilience?
Resilience is the ability to bounce back from difficult situations. Didn’t do so well on an exam? Then your resilience can be shown by how hard you study for the next exam or how you might take better notes. Perhaps the role you were hoping to get was filled by someone else in your club, perhaps you take a few steps to congratulate and help the new officer with their role by telling them about the things you would have liked to do in that position.
Research done by Richard Sagor showed that students who have had more positive experiences earlier on in school show more resilience, such as, ones that proved competence, demonstrated a sense of belonging to the community, made them feel useful, or gave them a sense of agency.
Now that we are in college now, we have more independence and it can be more difficult to really get recognition that can build up our resilience. Some activities that you can do to help build resilience can include, but are not limited to…
Building a sense of competence:
It can be hard to feel that you are doing things correctly when your schedule consists of spending most of your time completing assignments to turn in the next day digitally, only to be assigned another and perhaps receive a number rating how well you did maybe a week later.
There are lots of apps available for helping including habitica, trello, and asana to name a few.
Develop a sense of community:
It can be difficult to gain a sense of community as most of our daily lives have been transformed into a digital landscape, void of most face to face communication. However, you were fortunate enough to pick Coe College for your campus where we have lots of clubs and groups to join!
You also aren’t limited to clubs and activities on campus. Find volunteering opportunities with a quick google search or check out this site here with a few good opportunities for students!
Feel useful:
In the last bullet point, we discussed briefly donating our time or resources to charity. You can also help a little bit more within campus by taking on roles in your club or buying seeds to feed to the squirrels. More things that you can try is to check in with some friends or set up a group chat where you can talk to your friends all at once like at a table at the caf. This would be a great chance to ask for favors and offer to help others with their own. Helping friends to the grocery store, lend some notes, or be a sounding board for a presentation or prep for a test.
Take back control of the things you can:
While there are things we cannot control, like how long we will be wearing masks for or what they’re serving in the caf, but we can take control of things such as some of the design of our rooms, our schedule, our style of notes, what activities we do in our free time, and while relaxing, this can also cause some anxiety if you have too many things that you would like to do. To help relieve this, Be aware of what you let in — Netflix, online games, social media posts. Allow yourself some space and time to declutter your mind and religiously build in “me time” into your day. This could simply be some time for quiet meditation, home workouts, or doodling. Respond to situations or people only after you’ve taken the time to think. And when you need to think, repeat step one.
Above all else, it is important to think of yourself as a learner in this situation — something you did at school and are continuing to do at college. While these are dark times, they have also given you the opportunity to get to know yourself better, to connect with how you experience the world around you. So keep calm, and learn on.
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