Everything Exams

In my last post, I discussed the findings of research which shows that children who are optimistic in outlook tend to have better mental health and more academic success. You might however be asking the totally reasonable question, “What if my child isn’t really a naturally optimistic sort of person?” The good news here is that research also shows that optimism is a strength that can be learnt. 

Based on what I’ve read, I’ve put together a set of actions below which parents can take so that their children harness this strength. I hope you find these ideas useful and, indeed, adults can benefit from them too!

Actions

Part 1

Lead by example. One of the most powerful ways to show our children how to be optimistic is to live this way ourselves. Having goals, milestones, and objectives to work towards, planning and looking forward to events, plus talking positively about the future are all ways in which we can demonstrate optimism. Almost more importantly, the way we handle more challenging situations provides another opportunity to show young people how to become more optimistic.

When something doesn’t go according to plan, there are usually a number of factors at play which all contribute to the outcome. When I make a mistake, often my immediate, instinctive go-to inside my head is to blame myself fully for what has happened, dismissing other factors as I feel bad about it. “I’m such an idiot; why did I do that?” is a phrase that has passed through both my mouth and mind on more than one occasion. It would not be good to express out loud when trying to model optimistic behaviour, for sure. When I say something like this, I’m not being totally fair to myself either and it is not a thought process I’d want a young person to replicate. When speaking out loud, it is far better to say, “That didn’t turn out as expected so I think I need to devise a way of making sure I do a better job next time.” Young people notice what we say and how we phrase things and the subtle change here makes a huge difference to how they see us handling our mistakes. The message in the second way of phrasing it is that the task is just something we need to work on and is something we will be perfectly capable of mastering in the future. It’s not a personal reflection of our lack of skills as an individual, as in the first example.

It is good to look at things from a wider perspective and come up with ideas about what could be done to improve the result next time. Some people are great at going straight to this; others, like me, need a moment to refocus and reset their thinking onto a more optimistic path. What’s done is done and there’s no point beating yourself up about it; all you can control is how you perform the next time you are in a similar position and make sure you learn all you can in the meantime to prepare for this, if appropriate to do so.

In everything that you do, try to be optimistic about achieving your goals. I’ve had a few rather intimidating job interviews with high-profile clients and have frequently felt unsure of myself, but I always push myself there with an expectancy that I will succeed. I haven’t always, but I feel that those positions I wasn’t offered would not have been a good fit for me – they were useful learning experiences, though, which helped me secure positions I did enjoy – an example of an optimistic way of viewing an outcome. I have had ups and downs with optimism but as long as we are aware of the importance of modelling our behaviour, hopefully, we end up with more ups than downs and can pass on some great habits to our children.

Part 2

Teach your children the importance of failure and how they can use it to their advantage. Last year I read a book by Matthew Syed in which he discusses different industries and how they approach failure – in particular, he looks at the airline industry, which has a culture of transparency about failures in the system. Employees are encouraged to report failures, which allows the industry to develop new procedures that improve safety. Syed contrasts this with the healthcare industry, where a culture of ‘cover-up and continue’ prevents safety issues from being identified and preventative procedures from being put in place. Failures happen, but the great thing is that we can use the experience of failure in a good way to create positive change. 

The author also mentions two celebrity figures, David Beckham and James Dyson. He stresses that highly successful individuals like these didn’t suddenly arrive on the scene with a plethora of skills to give to the world. Rather, they experimented very slowly, step by step, experienced thousands of small failures and eventually produced top-quality end results. Beckham kicked many a football in the wrong direction before managing to consistently send it where he intended it to go, and similarly, Dyson produced a stack of unsuitable prototypes before fine-tuning the successful product he is well known for the world over. For each, failure was intrinsic to success and very much part of the process – if success is the product, failure is the factory in which it is manufactured.

If a child can’t draw a dog as well as their friend, they need to carry out some research, practise and learn how to draw a better picture of a dog. If they get a poor grade in a test, they need to experiment with different study methods next time to help them retain the information better and practise answering similar questions. 

Each time your child experiences failure and struggles with negative feelings about it, help them to list things that contributed to the situation. If it was their performance in a test, for example, they might say that they’re just bad at the subject, but try to pin down more precisely what went wrong. Perhaps they panicked and found it difficult to remember what they had revised. Maybe they forgot to have breakfast and were distracted by hunger and fatigue during the test, or possibly, they didn’t allow themselves enough revision time in the weeks leading up to the test. All these specific issues can be addressed. If they missed a goal in a football match, precisely what practice could they do to help them increase their accuracy for the next match? Teaching them how to work out how to harness failure in order to produce positive results will empower them to become more optimistic and grow as individuals.

Part 3

Help your child take ownership of their optimism. Feeling positive about how things will turn out in the future doesn’t happen overnight and children need to train their minds to think in this way. Encourage your child to think of a small, achievable goal which they would look forward to completing. Record the goal somewhere – perhaps on a notice board, the fridge or in a special notebook or journal. Examples of goals might be: saving up for a special game, learning how to make bread, learning how to draw anime characters, shooting ten hoops in a row, or getting full marks in their weekly spelling test. 

Celebrate with your child when they achieve their goal and encourage them to come up with a new goal to work towards. Each time they reach their objective and experience success, their optimism will be strengthened and their confidence will have grown.

Part 4

Employ the worst-case scenario method in really tricky situations. Fear can very much grind away our happiness, potentially making us feel terrible inside and encouraging us to run away and retreat from the world. Children have limited experience to draw upon when confronted by troubling things such as failure, loss or confrontation with their peers and can find it difficult to rationalise situations or see the possibility of easier times or resolutions in their future. When things look bleak for them, it’s great if they can talk about it with someone, but they may not always feel comfortable doing so. It would therefore be useful if they knew a technique they could use to help them process what they are feeling and increase their optimism going forward.

It can be good to turn around and face things we are afraid of head-on. Explain this to your child and then ask them to answer the following questions:

What is the very worst thing which they fear might happen?

Would they survive this?

What would be the best outcome?

What things could they do to move the outcome from the worst case to the best case?

Usually, when children confront the worst case that can happen in a given situation, their fear lessens and they can begin to see that they are still alive, the majority of things remain the same and the most precious people and pets in their lives are still there for them. Confronting and acknowledging fear can bring relief and allow an individual to see beyond the current difficulty, easing them back more quickly to an optimistic way of thinking.

References

1. Patton GC, Tollit MM, Romaniuk H, Spence SH, Sheffield J, Sawyer MG. A prospective study of the effects of optimism on adolescent health risks. Pediatrics. 2011 Feb;127(2):308-16. doi: 10.1542/peds.2010-0748. Epub 2011 Jan 10. PMID: 21220404.

2. Syed, Matthew. Black Box Thinking: The Surprising Truth About Success (and Why Most People Never Learn From Their Mistakes). New York: Portfolio/Penguin, 2015.