Resilience is the capacity to bounce back and maintain a positive self-image and outlook after difficult circumstances, while having learned something from the challenge. We teach students different ways to build their resilience, such as maintaining an internal locus of control. A crucial way to grow and maintain one’s resilience can also be to strengthen one’s ability to be flexible. 

Flexibility plays a key role in resilience. With a quick Google search, you can find numerous studies demonstrating that flexibility is a foundational mechanism that drives resilience and benefits individuals when facing stressors.

Perhaps a less talked-about way that flexibility can impact resilience is the way it can be applied to our expectations, and in doing so, how flexibility can impact the degree to which our expectations change our responses and behavior.

Expectations can have an enormous impact on one’s ability to persist through challenge. When a student expects a challenge to be easy and it is not, having had that expectation becomes a big factor in that student’s response. It can make a student more likely to retreat and not push through and continue trying to succeed.

This might be the case for a variety of reasons, such as the need to protect one’s self-image or self-esteem, fear or embarrassment, or fear of the unknown. Therefore, when we teach students to develop greater resilience, it is meaningful to include strengthening not just a student’s ability to be flexible, but also to apply flexibility to their expectations.

Our minds make predictions and forecasts whether we ask them to or not, and the degree to which these expectations lay down an anchor from which our reactions and responses spur from cannot be overstated. Adapting to change can be particularly difficult for students with learning differences.

Whenever a student begins a task, particularly whenever there is an upcoming event or situation of some importance, that student has formed an expectation of how they think that scenario will play out. Therefore, it is hugely valuable to purposefully identify the forecasts that a student’s mind has made and identify the expectations of how they think a particular upcoming situation will turn out. By doing so, this can be a way to greatly increase that student’s ability to be resilient in the face of the upcoming situation or challenge.

To help students succeed in an upcoming situation or challenge, a great exercise can be to prompt them to identify what their expectations are beforehand; ask them what they think will happen and how they think things will play out.

Encourage them to really paint a detailed picture; the more they share, the better. Then, once those expectations have been written or discussed, encourage them to re-state their expectations but to do so this time while inserting a little bit of flexibility into those expectations.

This can be a more specific and digestible way to help students to adapt their expectations and to demonstrate a little flexibility. Rather than making a general comment about how, for example, a person shouldn't get their hopes up, or you never know how something will turn out, we can specifically point out opportunities in the expectations that they have already shared that they can throw a little flexibility into.

Having the students then actually re-state the expectations with the added components of flexibility can be hugely beneficial.

This allows the student to head into the situation with a greater ability to access the skills they have already developed and be resilient. Providing students time in advance to recognize that their minds have created a prediction and to gently adjust their hopes or assumptions can go a long way.

With this, we are not telling them that what they expect will not happen; we are sprinkling in a little flexibility so that they have time to consider how they would respond both emotionally and behaviorally to this unexpected situation.

Moreover, there will often be factors that arise that are unpredictable, and to intentionally state that we are prepared for that and will be able to overcome it can go a long way. This is not unlike thoughtful cueing and previewing, strategies WPS employs in the classrooms on a daily basis. With the re-stated expectations that now include little aspects of flexibility, the student has broadened the chances for a successful experience ahead.

That is such a key component of why this can be so impactful. The harshness of rigidity and inflexibility is that they narrow a student’s whole world and narrow their opportunities to succeed in any given situation, while even just a little flexibility can widen and expand those chances.

It is actually not uncommon for students to encounter a problem and assume the solution is rather complicated, whereas the simplest and most effective solution is to be a little bit flexible, and then once they do that, they might find that the whole other complicated solution that is being created would be rendered unnecessary. Our students' lives are always going to have challenges and stressors.

Resilience, and the ability to apply their resilience to their challenges, will be a vital factor in that success. Being flexible, and specifically, putting a little flexibility into their expectations, can be an effective way to strengthen their resilience and support student success. 

Interested in learning more about how to support students in building resilience in school and at home? Click here.