International Women’s Day has new meaning for me this year because I’m now a mom to a beautiful little girl. She’s about to turn one, and I’ve spent most of my waking hours thinking about how to raise her to be a kind and generous soul in this world. While those traits and others are important, I also want her to take good risks in life. I want her to know what it feels like to fail and teach her how to sit with and process emotions like embarrassment, anger, and frustration. I want her to be resilient, emerging from difficulty armed with the belief that she has the capability and the resources to pick herself back up and think differently about adversity. I want her to be brave, not perfect.

But, how do I and other parents do this in a world that will give her both overt and subtle messages that perfection, youth, and beauty are paramount? That her value lies more in how she looks rather than in the chances she takes? The clues to help me answer this question emerged from two of my favorite, brave women: Reshma Saujani, the founder of Girls Who Code, and Heidi Grant Halvorson who wrote a brilliant article about the trouble with bright girls.

According to Saujani, this bravery deficit, as she calls it, is at the core of women’s underrepresentation in government, law, STEM, and the C-suite. Women have been socialized to be people-pleasers, to not rock the boat, to be perfect, and this socialization has downstream consequences. Bravery requires something different: a growth mindset, resilience, and vulnerability, and self-compassion.

Bravery Requires a Growth Mindset

Think back to how your eight-year-old self was praised. Research by Dr. Carol Dweck and her colleagues explains that young girls are often praised for being “smart” or “good,” while young boys are often praised for “trying hard.” As a result, many young girls who are given this type of feedback develop a fixed mindset – the belief that ability is fixed or static. They avoid challenges, try to look smart, give up easily if they can’t be perfect on the first try, and see added effort as fruitless. Meanwhile, young boys who are told to keep trying tend to develop a growth mindset – the belief that ability can be developed. They embrace challenges, persist during setbacks, and believe that with more effort or repetitions, they can master a task. Not all girls have fixed mindsets and not all boys have growth mindsets, but Dr. Dweck’s research certainly suggests that the way boys and girls are praised has consequences later in life. Girls stop raising their hands because they don’t want to be the only one who doesn’t get it or who has a question, and they stop taking as many good risks.

Bravery Requires Resilience

Resilience is your capacity for stress-related growth. Being brave and taking good risks go hand-in-hand with challenge and failure. Resilience doesn’t guarantee that you will be successful in every situation, but your capacity for recovery will be greatly increased such that you shift into adaptive behavior much more quickly when you encounter stress or a challenge. Resilient people tolerate change, stress, and uncertainty more effectively than those with lower levels of resilience, utilize healthier coping strategies, are motivated to achieve in many areas of life, and more easily draw upon their resources and high-quality relationships with others.

Bravery Requires Self-Compassion and Vulnerability

It’s hard for perfection, self-compassion, and vulnerability to co-exist. What happens when you realize that you’ve let yourself down? Do you automatically shift into self-criticism and beat yourself up over losing control or failing? Many people do, which fuels feelings of guilt and shame.

In one study, researchers asked a group of women to eat a doughnut within four minutes, then drink a glass of water so they would feel full. After eating the doughnut, some of the women received a message of self-compassion encouraging them to not be so hard on themselves for indulging. The other group of women did not receive this message. In the second part of the study, the women were then presented with bowls of candy and were invited to eat as little or as much of the candy as they wanted to.

The women who received the self-forgiveness message ate only 28 grams of candy compared to the 70 grams of candy consumed by the group that didn’t get the message. That’s a big difference! As it turned out, self-forgiveness didn’t give these women a license to eat more; rather, it turned off the pipeline of guilt and prevented them from overeating during the candy challenge.

According to health psychologist Dr. Kelly McGonigal, when you experience a setback, this three-step process can help to minimize the downward spiral of shame, regret, and loss of power:

1. When you’ve failed, take a moment to describe the emotions you’re feeling. Do you feel self-critical, and if so, what do you say to yourself? Slowing down to check in with yourself about this perspective helps you to understand what you’re feeling before you rush to escape.
2. Normalize the setback. I’m not the only person who has ________________ (fill in the blank – eaten an entire box of cookies; tripped on stage before giving a presentation), and it probably won’t be the last time.
3. What would you say to a friend who experienced the same setback? We beat ourselves up tremendously when we fail, but would you be just as harsh if your friend approached you with the same setback?

Companies are in desperate need of innovative and talented people who are capable of solving global, complex problems. We are leaving a lot on the corporate table by not bringing enough women along for the ride, and that starts by telling girls that being brave is more valuable than being perfect.

Paula Davis, JD, MAPP, is a lawyer turned stress and resilience expert. Having burned out at the end of her law practice, she now works with organizations and individuals to build stress resilience.

You can connect with Paula and learn more about her work here.

Tell me about a long-term goal you’re currently working on. Maybe you’ve started a business and you’re in the process of growing it. Maybe you want to lose 20 pounds. Maybe you’re climbing the corporate ladder. Maybe you want to keep your relationship strong for years to come. Succeeding at that goal is going to involve a lot of hard work and maybe some smarts, but it’s also going to involve grit. Grit is having both the passion and the perseverance to achieve a goal, and grit often predicts who achieves the highest levels of success in school and at work.

Gritty students outperformed their less gritty peers, and grit scores are associated with higher GPA’s (Duckworth et al., 2007). In one study, grit was a more accurate predictor of whether an incoming cadet would finish his or her first summer of basic training at West Point; more so, in fact, than self-control, academic GPA, Military Performance Score, and West Point’s own Whole Candidate Score, (Duckworth et al., 2007). Grit also predicted those students who would advance into the later rounds of the Scripps National Spelling Bee (Duckworth et al., 2007).

More recently, grit has been shown to predict the success of women lawyers in the country’s largest law firms (Hogan, 2013). This is a big finding in the legal profession because for years, men and women have been entering law schools and law firms as first year associates in roughly equal numbers, yet the number of women making it to the highest levels of partnership has remained static – and really low. As of 2013, the number of female equity partners was about 17%. What’s also troubling is that the percentages of women equity partners and women associates in the typical law firm have actually declined slightly in the past two years (Scharf, Liebenberg, & Amalfe, 2014). Encouraged by Hogan’s research, the American Bar Association Commission on Women in the Profession created the Grit Project to educate women lawyers about the science behind grit.

Here are 4 theories about how to cultivate this important trait:

1. Build self-efficacy. Self-efficacy is the ability to feel like you can produce results in your life. Is the effort you’re putting toward something actually paying off? Do you have the confidence you need to reach your goals? One way to build self-efficacy is by mastering tasks and experiencing success. Big successes are great, but self-efficacy is also built through experiencing frequent small successes. Start tracking the things you did well each week. Did you lose another pound? Write that down. Did you start writing the first chapter in your new book? Write it down! Collecting your successes clicks your brain into “I can do this” mode.

2. Develop a growth mindset. People with growth mindsets think that ability can be developed through hard work and learning, and see failure as an inevitable result of trying new things. As a result, people with a growth mindset try new challenges, take good risks, and use effort as a path to mastering something. One easy way to start building a growth mindset is to ask for feedback when something doesn’t go your way. Understanding what tripped you up will help you move in a better direction on your path to goal achievement (Dweck, 2006).

3. Talk about grit. Talk to your kids and employees about what grit is and how it leverages success. Share examples from your own life about times when you have been gritty. Emphasize that failure is going to happen during pursuit of tough, long-term goals and discuss what Plan B (or even Plan C) looks like.

4. Develop your resilience muscles. Resilience is your ability to bounce back and grow and thrive during challenge, change, and stress. You are going to experience lots of obstacles if you’re pursuing a long-term, challenging goal, and you have to be able to bounce back from setbacks. An easy way to build your resilience is to develop high-quality connections with others.

When the going gets tough, who’s in your corner? The recipe for success is about much more than smarts and talent. Grit is a powerful trait to cultivate in those you lead and teach and is worth focusing on as early as possible in your career.

For more strategies and tips to thrive under stress, check out our most popular ebook, Addicted to Busy: Your Blueprint for Burnout Prevention. You can also learn about our training and workshop programs here.

References:

Duckworth, A.L., Peterson, C., Matthews, M.D., & Kelly, D.R. (2007). Grit: Perseverance and passion for long-term goals. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 92(6), 1087-1101.
Dweck, C. (2006). Mindset. ­­­­­­New York: Ballantine Books.
Hogan, M.L. (2013). Non-cognitive traits that impact female success in big law. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Pennsylvania.
Scharf, S.A., Liebenberg, R., & Amalfe, C. (Feburary, 2014). Report of the Eighth Annual NAWL National Survey on the Retention and Promotion of Women in Law Firms.