Fighting Failure With Grit: Building the Perseverance to Accomplish Your Goals

Are you gritty enough to achieve what matters most to you?

In last week’s article, we explored how a sense of accomplishment can positively impact wellbeing and how adopting a growth mindset  can propel us to achieve more in life. This week, we’ll be exploring the role that grit plays in helping us achieve our goals so we can experience that sense of accomplishment and pride more often. 

What is Grit? 

“Grit is living life like it’s a marathon, rather than a sprint” ~Professor Angela Ducksworth 

When it comes to tackling our goals at work or in life, Angela Ducksworth suggests that for many of us enthusiasm is common, but endurance is rare. Let’s face it, being gritty enough to see things through can be hard work. And yet, researchers have suggested that grit is a key predictor of success.

Discover where you land on the Grit Scale by taking Professor Angela Ducksworth’s assessment here. 

Grit is the combined passion and perseverance for the pursuit of long-term goals. It’s the ability to stick with working towards something for years, in the face of setbacks, disappointments, and plateaus in your progress. As the Japanese proverb suggests, it’s the ability to fall down seven times and stand up eight. Grit is associated with your levels of achievement, resilience, and wellbeing. 

How to Develop Grit

• Set meaningful goals to guide and prioritize your efforts. The goals you set should be meaningful and important to you so you can develop the intrinsic motivation you need to keep going. Furthermore, you should practice breaking your goals down into smaller milestones so that accomplishing one keeps you motivated for the next. 
• Cultivate hope through the stories you tell yourself and focus on what is within your control. People who don’t have a strong sense of grit tend to blame external factors for their lack of accomplishment, essentially making them victims of their circumstances. If we keep in mind that there’s plenty we can do on our end to affect change then, we learn to take back control. 
• Practice a growth mindset and self-compassion to give yourself permission to learn. Be kind to yourself when you fail or fall off track, grit is all about getting back on the horse. When you’re hard on yourself, you’re more likely to convince yourself that you’ll just fail if you try again. 
• Engage in deliberate practice and moments of flow. Make time to build the knowledge and skills you need to have the best chance of producing the desired results you’re looking for. It’s only through practice and repetition that we become masters of our crafts. 
• Practice gratitude by focusing on the people who have helped you each day. Our success is often aided by the support of others. So, whether a coworker or manager helped you close that deal, or whether friends and family cheered you on as you started your own business, it’s important that we take time to reflect on how we got to where we are. 
• Leverage authentic pride by humbly developing the skills that people around you value and keep track of your progress. If you’ve been eyeing a promotion or are looking for ways to provide more value to others, you may want to consider developing skills and traits that can help you stand out and be of more help. 
• Surround yourself with other gritty people who encourage you to stick to your goals. The people we surround ourselves with greatly influence our attitude toward life. When we surround ourselves with people who are driven by goals and accomplishments we’re more likely to push ourselves and, with the support of others, we’re less likely to fail.

Being gritty doesn’t mean you never give up. It means using your passions to guide and prioritize your efforts so you know when to persist and when to look for viable alternatives. Caroline Adam Miller believes the key is to pursue authentic grit – the passionate pursuit of hard goals that cause you to emotionally flourish, take positive risks, live without regret, and inspire others.

You can take her free grit challenge here. 

Keep going, keep growing…

Related posts:

How To Embrace a Growth Mindset to Accomplish More in Life

Not Everything You Think is True: The Power and Limitations of Your Thoughts