Resilience

 

Resilience or Growth Mindset is the ability to work through, challenges, setbacks and failures. This is required to get us through the day-to-day pressures of university and longer-term challenges we experience. Our personal supplies of resilience are affected by our perception of the situation, how we feel and the coping mechanisms we use to manage this.

Having a growth mindset involves understanding sometimes we may fail, or not do as well as we hoped and that we can cope with that. Research suggests that in order to develop and maintain this mindset, we must develop the following characteristics;

  • We embrace challenges.
  • We persist in the face of challenges, setbacks and failure.
  • We learn from criticism.
  • We find lessons and inspiration in the success of others.

Here are some helpful ways to develop a growth mindset and build your resilience;

Ways to develop a growth mindset

  • Acknowledge your weakness with kindness
  • View challenges as opportunities to learn
  • Try different ways to learn and be open that these maybe different to others around you.
  • See failure as an opportunity to receive feedback and learn.
  • Value the process of learning over the end result.
  • Celebrate growth and milestones with others

What support do we offer? 

Student Services is here to help you would like to look at resilience. Our Coaching Team can help you if you are motivated to work towards developing a Growth Mindset. You can book an appointment to speak to a member of staff or email support.advice@st-andrews.ac.uk for advice. You can also see our latest groups and workshops on our Instagram. 

Alternative Internal Support

You can access self-help through various University channels such as:

  • TogetherAll - a safe, online community where people support each other anonymously to improve mental health and wellbeing. (This service will be available until February 2023. After this time, we recommend that students reach out to SHOUT).
  • ShelfHelp, which provides eBooks or physical copies which can help you understand resilience.

External Support

If you would like to access some self-help materials here are a list of alternative support resources: