Do You Have Grit?

I talk/write/coach a lot about what it takes to have success with long term goals – commitment, determination, focus, a good plan, to name a few. Even with all of this strategy, the truth is that most people do not reach their long-term goals. Let’s face it, it is easy in the beginning to create a plan and to feel committed and focused. However, once you start putting in the work to reach your goal, it becomes challenging and most people quit. Some people are not up for the blood, sweat, and tears that it takes to see it all the way till the end. And then there are the people that do. The ones who can keep their eye on the prize and push through the hard stuff to reach their ultimate goal. Are they magical unicorns? What do these people have that other don’t? One word – GRIT. 

Angela Duckworth is the founder and CEO of Character Lab and a professor of Psychology at The University of Pennsylvania. Angela has studied grit as a personality trait and in a study done by her and her colleagues, they discovered that people who have grit maintained their determination and motivation over long periods of time regardless of adversity or failures along the way. 

In their research they found most people fail in their long-term goals because of one or more of the following:

1. They do not recover psychologically from failure,
2. They cannot get past adversity along the way.  
3. They set the wrong expectations so when it takes longer than expected to see results they tend to go back to their old patterns or give up on their long-term goal.
4. They may have a plan but have not built up a “gritty” psychology to help move them past 1, 2 and 3. 

Someone who has grit may experience the things above but see failures as opportunities and adversity as something to conquer in pursuit of their goals, as opposed to, something that stops them. Creating and achieving long term goals is challenging because it requires a lot more psychology than it does strategy. 

Angela offers a Grit Formula of what it takes to create grit in your own goal process. 

1. Practice. Deliberate practice means learning as you go, getting feedback from your experience as well as from others.  
2. Purpose. Purpose is anything you can develop an interest in over long term. 
3. Hope. Failure is often inevitable, but if we learn to embrace failure as an opportunity to learn, improve, and then get back up again, we’re more likely to succeed.
4. Time. The last part of the grit formula is simply time. Time to devote yourself to practice, purpose, and developing from failure.

In my opinion, people who create and achieve long term goals whether it be financial, career, relationship, physical or fitness goals – deserve the title of having GRIT. They get my admiration and praise. These people have proven that they have the right psychology to keep moving forward without stopping.

As a coach, the heart of what I do is help people build grit to successfully achieve their goals which proves that success isn’t about DNA – it’s about your ability to become gritty. 

So if you are reading this and feeling discouraged or thinking you don’t have grit I challenge you do do this exercise. Think about or write down a time in your life where you have demonstrated having grit. Think about how that felt, what you did, why it was different then times you have quit. You have it in you because you have done it before.

If you need some help getting your psychology right, I have online courses and coaching available to you always.

Your Life Coach – Traci

P.S You can watch a coaching on grit here. Never miss out on my Facebook live coaching – every Thursday at 7ct.