Summer is flying by and many families are planning ahead for the upcoming academic year. Resilience, and lack thereof, have an impact on your student’s academic and social success.
What is Resilience?
According to the APA Dictionary, resilience is “the process and outcome of successfully adapting to difficult or challenging life experiences, especially through mental, emotional, and behavioral flexibility and adjustment to external and internal demands.”
This brief video, The Science of Resilience, offers an excellent overview.
Why is resilience important for students?
Resilience is important because it’s needed to process and overcome hardship. Those lacking resilience get easily overwhelmed and may turn to unhealthy coping mechanisms. Resilient people tap into their strengths and support systems to overcome challenges and work through problems. Neurodivergent students who have faced adverse childhood experiences (ACES) have difficulty bouncing back from challenges and that is where strengths-based coaching is helpful.
How Coaching Helps
Coaches can help students identify and lead with their strengths while acknowledging that they may have areas of weakness, as we all do. Humans are not perfect, yet neurodivergent learners commonly see themselves as “less than” their peers, colleagues, and family members. Using a strength-based coaching approach provides a new perspective for students who don’t see, or deny, their strengths. Leading with strengths in coaching will help neurodivergent students see the “good” in themselves and use their strengths to move forward.
Research on Strengths-Based Coaching
- Using and developing strengths might lead to better outcomes than the traditional approach to overcoming weaknesses (Kaufmann & Scoular, 2004; Peterson & Seligman, 2004).
- Recognizing and using our character strengths has a positive impact on a wide range of outcomes including well-being (Biswas-Diener et al. 2011; Wagner, 2020), health (Hausler et al, 2017), life satisfaction (Peterson et al, 2007) and resilience (Martinez-Marti&Ruch, 2017).
- The efficacy of evidence-based coaching to support academic achievement and the well-being of students is well researched, demonstrating increases in cognitive hardiness and hope and a significant decrease in levels of depression (Dulagil, Green & Ahern, 2016; Green, Grant & Ryndsaardt, 2007).
I urge you to consider strengths-based ADHD coaching and begin your process of interviewing ADHD coaches today to help your student become more resilience, happy and successful this fall.