Looking back on this last week, it has been mayhem, with what seems like a million upcoming deadlines, the weather changing from sunshine to hail in a minute and work being closed due to coronavirus I have struggled to find time for training. However I have still managed to complete my training (training plan shown in table below), I believe this demonstrates that I am a gritty person.
| Monday | Tuesday | Wednesday | Thursday | Friday | Saturday | Sunday |
| 3 miles | 6 miles | yoga | Pole fitness | Rest | 3 miles | 12 miles |
Grit is the ability to persevere in something you feel passionate about when faced with challenges. Grit was initially described by Duckworth & Gross as the capacity for hard work, they further added that this specifically entitled maintaining enthusiasm overtime. According to Duckworth, Peterson, Matthews & Kelly, Grit involves strenuous work towards challenges, and maintaining effort and motivation even when failure and adversity are present. Having grit is both a personality trait and an individualistic skill. Grit in running has been described as the ability to simply continue in long distance, the ability to ignore your muscles saying stop and to continue on in a race.
Grit has been correlated with predicting high levels of success among individuals. Grit allowed people to successfully predict achievement in a variety of contexts ;Robertson-Kraft and Duckworth observed that grittier teachers outperformed other teachers when meeting the demands of teaching. Eskreis-Winkler, Shulnal. Beal and Duckworth found that grittier individuals perform better in a variety of situations. In their study observed that grittier men are more likely to stay married, grittier employees are more likely to keep their jobs, and that grittier soldiers are more likely to advance in the ranks. Gritty runners are more likely to run longer distances with a shortened training plan.
The essential features needed to have high levels of grit are passion and perseverance. Passion refers to the reason for your goal, and can be developed through practice and determination. Practice helps build passion due to repetition of actions causing improvement, this success makes individuals more and more confident so more likely to enjoy the activity. Perseverance refers to continuing towards your goal even when adversity may present itself. This can further be demonstrated by the idea that usually difficulties damaged individuals views of their goals, whereas individuals who have a high level of grit tend to stay on track better.
Grit has been found to be highly interlinked with self control, which is seen as another predictor of success. Self-control can be defined as the ability to control one’s own behavior when faced with an alternative better option. An example of self control would be making myself go on a run instead of watching netflix in bed. Self-control is believed to be linked to willpower and can be described as the ability to regulate behaviours to help reach a goal. Duckworth and Gross commented that even though both models entail aligning actions to intentions, they both operate in different ways over different time scales.
Of course I went routing around the internet to find an online test to find out where I was ranked on the grit scale. As shown in the image below I ranked 3.4 out of 5, which is reported to be 40% above the average American. So what does this actually mean? This means I have the ability to persevere through some challenges towards my goals but I will struggle to remain training if the adversity continues. For example if there is bad weather I will still go training but if it continuously hails outside I will skip a run.
However seeing that I am not 100% gritty I did the logical thing and wondered how I could become more gritty. In a ted talk by Duckworth she discusses that the only known method is to develop a growth mindset. Growth mindsets are a part of the personal growth theory, developed by Dweck. It suggests that there are two mindsets; fixed and growth. Fixed mindsets are focused around the concept that talents are innate and that an individual has talent or they do not. Growth mindsets focus around the idea that success is due to effort and critical thinking (key features of growth mindsets are listed in the table below). In Dweck’s 2009 study sport coaches highlighted that the key feature to aid in sport is the fact that people with growth mindsets are less fearful of failure.
| Welcome challenges |
| Persevere through setbacks |
| Learn from past mistakes |
According to Travis some key ways to build a self-growth mindset are to actively put the effort in to change as it won’t happen alone. It’s suggested that you challenge the fixed mindset by confronting fears, as fixed mindset often come from fear of embarrassment or failure. Travis suggests that getting to the route of why you fear something can help you move past them. Travis further goes on to say that when you face failure to analyze it for what went wrong so that the same mistake is not made again. For example, if I go on a short run and don’t achieve a time that i would like, I will reflect back and look at whether my posture was wrong, whether there were lots of hills and go through everything individually until I figure out what went wrong and then figure out how I will improve this in the future.
Although Grit has found to be highly applicable over many situations it is limited towards individuals who have a more open and growth mindset, Jeffery has suggested that mindsets are harder to adapt than many individuals perceive . However contrastingly to their previous work Blackwell, Trzesniewski and Dweck also suggested that mind sets overlap and that individuals may possess traits from each mindset. Grit has also been criticised by Duckworth in her ted talk that grit is limited as there is only one known method of building grit, suggesting that it has become an isolated ‘in’ group that you’re either a member of or not. This idea is further when in a meta analysis by Areepattamannil & Khine grit was found to have measured items which were culturally biased, they went on to criticised that the scale was based on cultural nuances.
Conclusion
I will work on building a growth mindset to further my grit score and learning from my mistakes to aid my training in the future . It has been a long week but now that classes have been cancelled work has been closed and all my club sessions have stopped. I will use my grit skills to persevere this really demotivating turn of events and continue to try get on with my day to day life. I’m sure I will do nothing but run. God damn coronavirus.
References
Areepattamannil, S., & Khine, M. S. (2018). Evaluating the Psychometric Properties of the Original Grit Scale Using Rasch Analysis in an Arab Adolescent Sample. Journal of Psychoeducational Assessment, 36(8), 856–862. https://doi.org/10.1177/0734282917719976
Blackwell, L. S., Trzesniewski, K. H., & Dweck, C. S. (2007). Implicit theories of intelligence predict achievement across an adolescent transition: A longitudinal study and an intervention. Child development, 78(1), 246-263
Duckworth, A., & Gross, J. J. (2014). Self-Control and Grit: Related but Separable Determinants of Success. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 23(5), 319–325. https://doi.org/10.1177/0963721414541462
Dweck, C. S. (2009). Mindsets: Developing talent through a growth mindset. Olympic Coach, 21(1), 4-7.
Dweck, C. (2015). Carol Dweck revisits the growth mindset. Education Week, 35(5), 20-24.
Eskreis-Winkler, L., Duckworth, A. L., Shulman, E. P., & Beal, S. (2014). The grit effect: Predicting retention in the military, the workplace, school and marriage. Frontiers in psychology, 5, 36.
Robertson-Kraft, C., & Duckworth, A. L. (2014). True grit: Trait-level perseverance and passion for long-term goals predicts effectiveness and retention among novice teachers. Teachers College record (1970), 116(3).
My Born to Run Journey 