Helping children do well even when they’re having a bad day!

The idea of mental resilience is well established and since Covid-19 it’s definitely become top of mind for many educators. But resilience is not just your ability to bounce back from a difficult situation, it’s also your ability to be able to carry on and do well, even when you’re having a bad day.

The good news is that mental resilience is a skill, and skills can be learned and practiced, so we all have the ability to do better, even when faced with challenging circumstances such as a global pandemic!

You can’t control what you can’t control!

It’s important to remember that there are some things we can’t control, and whilst these things may overwhelm us sometimes, the key to moving forward, is where we focus our attention.

When we feel overwhelmed and anxious, we tend to catastrophise our feelings and focus on the thing that we can’t control. The key is to shift our attention to what we can influence as this helps us to keep on moving and doing better, even when we’re having a bad day.

Grab a pencil!

Grab a pencil and make a really tight fist. Now making sure that you keep your fist tightly closed (and not letting go of the pencil), try and pick up another object. How did you do? Was it easy?

The above exercise helps us to:

• Recognise that holding on to worries or feelings that we can’t control will not get us anywhere

• Accept that it’s OK and normal to feel the way we do and choose to let go and move forward

This simple exercise is a way to step back and see the bigger picture, and can be the starting point to a clear and focused mind that can make the difference between acting to the best of our abilities in a difficult situation, or feeling stuck!

Have a go at the above exercise and tell us what you think. To find out more about how we can help teach your students some practical techniques to help improve their mental resilience, please get in touch.