Facing Challenges
Imagine yourself in the following scenarios:
You just started summer vacation. On your drive home the day after commencement, your car breaks down on Interstate 5. You manage to pull over and call a tow truck. It turns out that a mouse has chewed through the oil line and fried the engine. Your car is dead. Way beyond repair.
Then, a few weeks later, you’re out hiking and slip and fall on the trail – 2.5 miles from the trailhead. You hobble out, and discover that you’ve broken your ankle, which requires immediate surgery.
Then, a few weeks later, you are driving your new-to-you car to physical therapy and a car pulls out in front of you. You crash, and your car is totaled.
Rough summer.
Meeting Challenges
Our ultimate success depends on how we deal with life’s difficulties and messiness – what matters is how we meet challenges, how we react, and ultimately, what we learn and how we move forward.
Many studies have shown that positive psychological capital – the positive and developmental state of an individual – can impact on your attitude, behavior, performance, and well-being. It is characterized by these four components:
- Hope – The will (agency) to reach a certain goal, and ideas (multiple paths) of how to attain it.
How do you find hope? Find ways to break down complex, difficult goals into bite-size portions. Make sure the goals are yours and not ones that are someone else’s that you’ve adopted; you will be more motivated by your goals. Or find alternate ways of meeting your goals. Car broke down? You can bike, or take the bus, or get a ride to where you need to go.
- Efficacy – Task-specific self-confidence, or feeling confident that you can do what you need to do to achieve a specific goal in a specific situation.
Low self-confidence? Recognize that fatigue, resistance, and fear are natural human responses to challenges – they often will help sharpen your abilities. Also, focus on your past successes, appreciate times where you achieved something difficult (like getting into UW! ;-) )
- Optimism – Faith in your own ability to improve a situation; the belief that failure is not innate but rather based on things external to you.
Feeling pessimistic? Recognize that the future holds many possibilities; it is a source of opportunity for you. In the meantime, appreciate what you can about the current moment
- Resilience – The ability to recuperate from stress, conflict, failure, or change by putting the temporary challenges in perspective and learning from the experience.
Losing steam? Perhaps you can improvise and find a new way to reach your goal, or take time to connect to why this goal is meaningful or important for you. Finally, stay motivated by accepting reality, and having realistic expectations about how difficult things may be and how long it may be before the situation changes; but don’t worry, it will change eventually!
Any type of complex issue that impacts someone’s academic success or personal well-being can be brought to a student care appointment and our professional staff can help students problem solve and get connected to the appropriate resources needed to address what is happening. Also, Peer Wellness Coaching is a perfect place for students to get the peer validation they often need when life is messy, and also learn skills in a 1-1 setting for managing the “messiness” intentionally and effectively. Both services can be scheduled within a few days usually and of course, are always free to students
A UW Story: The Rocky Path to Success
Even world-renowned researchers navigate unexpected difficulties. Mary-Claire King, UW professor of genome sciences and medicine who discovered the “breast cancer gene,” tells her story of perseverance in the face of enormous challenges. Read or listen to her story.