This is a word you hear frequently. The context might be during a coaching session, executing a 1v1 with a co-worker, in athletics, in your family dialogue, at your school, describing someone, maybe something you are looking for in your next employee, a new coach, teammate, game you are about to play in or recently played, etc., but what exactly is GRIT and where do you stand with it and how can you develop here?
Let’s first examine the google definition of GRIT. Courage and resolve; strength of character; firmness of mind or spirit…unyielding courage in the face of hardship or danger.
Why is it important? As most of you know things happen in our life that are hard, unplanned, not the way WE wanted it to happen, not a straight line, unpredictable, inconsistent. Looking back at my life thus far and I can certainly recall many things that fit in this box, which is truly why I wanted to explore this variable.
How we respond to this is often the key factor in your ability to reach out goals, desires, what you set out to do. To do this WE need a personality trait that demonstrates passion and perseverance towards our goal despite being often blindsided by significant challenges, obstacles, and distractions.
So, if we want GRIT and want to develop GRIT, we must first explore what the characteristics of GRIT are. The good news here is that we can develop GRIT in ourselves, but first must explore the idea/concept and apply performance feedback internally to identify these characteristics in ourselves.
1. Perseverance. Your ability to push through hard things, and times in efforts to achieve a goal, course of action or desire in your heart.
a. Have had several teammates, employees that have embodied perseverance while achieving great things. Variables were stacked against them, but they kept pushing. The desire in their heart pushed past the hard.
b. Have had several teammates, employees that in the face of hard decided it wasn’t for them and changed their goal or desire.
2. Resilience. Your ability to compete, adapt at a high level in the face of adversity, trauma, challenges to include stress.
a. Have had several teammates, employees that when met with these challenges find a way to share and connect with others…their ability to connect and be empathetic and understanding helped remind them that they aren’t alone…keep swinging, keep working towards the defined goal. Finding a way to connect with others, strengthened their fortitude.
b. Have had several teammates, employees that are prideful, arrogant, selfish and lack emotional intelligence, thus cannot connect to others as described above. This creates an individual who can’t compete, adapt in the face of adversity, because it’s ALL about them.
3. Courage. Your ability to do something that frightens you. Mental and/or moral strength to explore, push through and face danger, fear, or varying degrees of hard.
a. Have had several teammates, employees who dream, explore well beyond their perceived abilities, and take shots towards these dreams daily. Courage creates GROWTH. Stepping outside that COMFORT ZONE takes courage, but as they say where growth starts!
b. Have had several teammates, employees who stay in their comfort zones and as a result stay small…nothing wrong with this at all but know that if you don’t step outside that comfort your ability to grow will slow down drastically.
4. Passion. Love. Strong and barely controllable emotion. Strong feeling and enthusiasm or excitement for something or about doing something. Explore this early and chase it. You may find yourself thinking about this 247…that’s passion.
a. Have had several teammates, employees who chase their passions every day with a driven mindset. Talk with people about exploring this early. By exploring your passion, defining dreams/goals will get clearer and come more naturally.
b. Have had several teammates, employees lack passion and as a result are outworked, outperformed, and ultimately change course.
5. Conscientiousness. Is about how a person controls, regulates, and directs their impulses. Your ability to be present in all areas. To be responsible, careful, and diligent in all areas of your life. High in self-awareness and self-management.
a. Have had several teammates, employees who are present in most that they do, which has made they largely responsible and reliable to those they lead. As a result, here they often did very well in the face of obstacles.
b. Have had several teammates, employees who weren’t very honest, acted on impulse thoughts or feelings, which often resulted in discontent or unhappiness.
Would challenge you to review these components and self-audit yourself using a likert scale i.e., 1-5 or 1-10 with 5 or 10 being the highest value. If you find a few of these you score low, I would challenge you to do a few things to develop here:
Write out your OWN definition to this component. What does it mean to you?
Why do you feel like this lacks in your life?
Write out a few action steps that could create that component in your life.
Hold yourself accountable (think how and/or who can help here) to creating habits around these action steps.
Example. “I scored low in passion”
My definition. Passion: My ability to believe in something and spend countless hours doing it, pursuing it. Something I would do for free. There is a peace in my heart doing this.
Lacks: I haven’t been passionate about anything as strongly as I was about coaching college athletes. Feel like I’m passionate about coaching and when I’m not there is a void in my life.
A1: Find a way to coach someone, something this year.
A2: Study coaching…sharpen my sword towards coaching.
A3: Learn to listen better.
A4: Stay curious longer…ask questions.
A5: Write out what I would do for free.
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