6LG 2013: Resilience - Greg Mitchell

Today we had a guest speaker come and visit all Year 6 students to talk about resilience. He asked the boys to analyse ways they behave and see themselves, before giving real life examples of how to change their own perspectives. Greg also showed the boys resilience being shown by people with disabilities, who faced natural disasters and people less fortunate than us. He left us with the 10 skills to build resilience, which are:

Hold high expectations!
Change your focus.
Learn that people are not born smart.
Failure often leads to success.
Remember its not just about you, everyone else feel that way too.
Bad feelings are normal.
Bad feelings don't last.
You will make mistakes.
You were born to be real, not perfect.
Learn optimism.

After our visitor had left we returned to our classroom and discussed what impact Greg's presentation had on us personally. Boys were then asked to share who they thought was resilient in our class and why. A lot of responses ended NAME is resilient because ......

they used humour to deal with difficult situations
they faced challenges head on
they had a positive attitude, even when something doesn't go their way
they just get on with things
they don't sit and dwell on problems, they move on
they take pride in themselves and don't take to heart what others say

As I said to the boys, quite often others see things in you that you don't even see in yourself. Some boys whose names were mentioned were quite shocked that people thought they were positive, considerate and resilient. It was also nice to hear so many boys mentioned who weren't even here today as boys who showed fantastic resilience.

I have asked every boy in our class to set themselves a goal to become more independent and resilient this week. Some suggestions were: