Session 10

Resilience

Resilience is a skill of using setbacks, mistakes and failures as a lesson to recover back to a useful perspective and positive action. The best part about Resilience: failure is actually embraced, even expected, and thus useful in learning and moving forward faster with more confidence.

The point of the Academic Life Coaching program is NOT so students never fail and always have a positive perspective or fantastic attitude. We all get bummed out and need to process tough truths. The real point is being able to develop the self-awareness to identify when you’ve been stuck in a useless perspective and are literally working against yourself by seeing things as overly difficult. Building resilience allows a student to recognize when they’re at the top of their game and how to quickly return back to that state after a minor fallback.

In essence, Resilience is tapping back into hope and moving into action. This concept is so powerful, especially at the end of the program, because it helps students address how they can continue to use the concepts of the program to face larger challenges in the future. The whole purpose of the Academic Life Coaching program isn’t necessarily to look at the challenges that are facing the student currently, but to give them skills to face those challenges as they arise.

Celebration

Celebration is an underrated – and misunderstood – skill. Most people don’t take the time to celebrate meaningful action undertaken in their lives. Celebrations help people lean toward a style of motivation which is useful, healthy and more sustainable over the long run.

In this exercise, I will guide you through another wheel of life. It’s useful to compare this wheel of life with the one that you instituted earlier in the program. It’s usually been about three or four months since you started the Academic Life Coaching program and you’ve had opportunities to shift around some major values and goals.

When you’re looking at the Academic Life Coaching program or are engaged in any kind of sustained personal growth, sometimes it’s a challenge to be self-aware and evaluate the changes happening around you and within. This exercise is useful because it takes a conscious look at what has been so useful and what action steps you have taken over the past three months.

This concept also is extremely useful in helping students continue to be motivated toward what they want, in moderation, which is more sustainable over the long run.

Designing the future

At this point in the Academic Life Coaching program it’s time to plan the future. The first step is to create an outline of what further steps you can take, while incorporating all of the skills and tools of the Academic Life Coaching Program. The concept is to look at what further well-designed actions (aka well-formed outcomes) can aid in you in continual progress.

This concept is useful at this point because you will generally have some outcomes that you will want to achieve while pursuing the community project. It’s useful specifically because it gives the idea that this is a cyclical process, and takes practice to integrate into your life.

Completion

Completion is an opportunity for you and I as your coach to celebrate the program and finish the Academic Life Coaching program mindfully.

Completion is useful because it helps mark the end of a program and the beginning of the next phase. It’s also a chance to express any last thoughts and an opportunity to acknowledge the contribution and effort both people have made throughout the program.