Supporting students to breakthrough the barriers to their current limitations has a powerful effect on their success at work, explains Jon Down at Grit.
Today’s young people have grown up in a very different world to previous generations, and when they enter the workplace, they bring deep-rooted beliefs about themselves, their capabilities and purpose.
For graduates this can play out when their expectations don’t match up to the reality of the workplace.
For employers it can be the mismatch between their own expectations of new graduates, and in particular, their ability to support new graduates from under-represented backgrounds – those who might be quick to believe that employers ‘don’t really want someone like me’. It can leave graduates feeling debilitated, paralysed, demoralised, isolated.
We know that graduates have the attributes and capabilities to thrive – after all, we have given them jobs, placements, opportunities. But we know, too, that for graduates likely to be feeling out of place and out of their depth, resilience is also critical.
For these graduates to bring all their talents and energies to the workplace, a sense of mattering and worth is key. It’s about belonging. It’s about taking ownership of their experience. And it’s about having the self-awareness to recognise the parts of themselves that could get in the way of their own success.
Supporting students to develop a mindset that breaks through the attitude and assumptions that are holding them back is key to their success.
This means identifying the blocks in their thinking that get in the way of them achieving what it is that they want to achieve, and looking at the assumptions they have about themselves, other people and the world around them.
Creating an environment to develop breakthrough mindsets
For more than 15 years, Grit has been working with students on these issues through group coaching programmes in over 50 universities. And the crucial word here is group.
Louise Banahene MBE, Director of Educational Engagement at the University of Leeds describes the process perfectly: “Grit creates the space to enable our students to share and normalise their feelings while building new connections.”
It is this normalisation, this sense of community, that generates belonging. And, when students start to feel like they belong, they are more ready to commit.
When students look into their beliefs, their mindsets and attitudes, when they get under the skin of what really drives them, they start to see the limitations, the blind spots in their thinking.
Once they’ve identified these limitations, they begin to create breakthroughs in how they see themselves, how they see others, how they see the world around them.
Reframing
Reframing notions of support can have a powerful effect and create breakthroughs. Most students believe that when they get to university, they should be fully independent, be able to cope. That asking for help feels like a sign of failure, that they will be judged as coming up short.
But what happens when, instead, we think about support as being about gathering what you need to be a success?
We wouldn’t expect an elite athlete to manage without a coach, nutritionist or psychologist. The same principle applies to students.
In this way, asking for support, becomes a positive resource for students to build success for themselves – for them to hunt out development opportunities, for chances to test and stretch themselves, to get out of their comfort zone.
Similarly, when students’ expectations of university bumps-up against the hard reality of everyday experience, a mindset rooted in disappointment will only lead to more disappointment. But when it flips, when the mindset is rooted in the reality of the way things are, behaviours change.
Students who make this breakthrough make different choices and decisions. Instead of wasting time and energy on wishing things were different, they see the world afresh, seize opportunities that they might have otherwise missed, create a positive experience for themselves.
And then there’s the issue of imposter syndrome. Feeling out of your depth can be particularly pertinent among students from under-represented backgrounds.
When their mindset is reframed, when students see themselves in a different light, when they are able recognise their own strengths and assets, appreciate what they have already achieved in their lives, they can come to see that they already have what it takes to be a success.
They understand that ‘it’s not just me’ who suffers with imposter syndrome, that it is something that impacts most students at some time or another and it is almost certainly impacts the people around them now.
Understand this and the world becomes a different place. Once students are able to articulate and explain the qualities they bring, they start to see what is really possible for them. They develop the confidence to go and make it happen.
As a student on a Grit programme recently put it: “by understanding what has made me, the experiences that have formed me, the resilience that has got me through, I realised my value. I’ve got new ways of thinking about myself.”
Skills for life
Let’s be clear. These conversations are not always easy. They can be uncomfortable and challenging. Questioning those bring deep-rooted beliefs about yourself, your capabilities and purpose, can be difficult. But when students experience these breakthroughs, they see ways to become better, more successful versions of themselves.
As Sophie Chadwick, Director of Enterprise and Employability, at Canterbury Christ Church University says “students develop their thinking skill set. They become confident with taking risks and managing them. These are skills and attitudes that go far beyond their university life.”
There is, of course, the other side of the equation: what it takes as a tutor, a manager, a supervisor, to get the most out of students and new grads. But that is another story.