Reflect on Our Beliefs and Examine Our Mindsets

We can start with ourselves by reflecting on our beliefs about resilience and examine our mindsets and expectations.

Sara Truebridge (she/her) reminds us—resilience begins with beliefs. Fostering resilience begins by believing that all individuals (organizations, communities) have the capacity for resilience (1). 

Sara guides us to: 

This also helps to spark curiosity and create a space for others to share their own stories of resilience. Click here for a guided visualization exercise to help explore how the messages we heard and important relationships and opportunities contributed to our experiences.

For example, Positive Youth Development is an approach with the underlying belief that ‘all young people can develop positively when connected to the right mix of opportunities, supports, positive roles, and relationships’ (2).

Doing strengths assessments in juvenile justice reflects this shift in beliefs by assuming strengths are present and accessible if given the opportunity to activate them (3).

“We tend to ask them about what [crime] they did – deficit based – the Youth Competency Assessment tool gives a good way to change this. Seeing people as people, not a charge” (4).

This module is based on a strengths-based view that helps shift from defining children, youth, families, and communities as a problem to focusing on how a system can better support the creative strengths, resources, and relationships that already exist to help address problems. Within this shift to a strengths-based view, strengths, relationships, and resources are critical assets for addressing the challenges that people and communities face (5). 

A positive view of the strengths of individuals, families, and communities does not ignore problems or difficulties they may face. The key assumption of a strengths-based approach is that individuals, families, and communities are defined not by their difficulty, but rather by their multiple strengths.

What we believe about resilience frames our expectations of ourselves and others. It is thus also important to reflect on our mindsets and expectations. 

Here is a story that illustrates the power of a strengths-based view of communities.

Image by Islam Elsedoudi, licensed under Creative Commons.

Image by Islam Elsedoudi, licensed under Creative Commons.

A group of six neighbors called the Matchmakers was born after Naomi Alessio witnessed a simple act of kindness: A friendly, older neighbor named Mr. Thompson invited her son Theron into the metal-working shop in his garage and taught him how to fashion a few pieces. Naomi and the Matchmakers wanted to pair up other like-minded members of the community and began taking stock of their neighbors’ various talents. Click here to read more (6).

hrt.png

We can work together to uproot limitations created by expectations, biases, and labels and see possibilities and potential—“when the glue that makes labels stick dissolves in our processes of relating” (7).

 

Sources:

  1. Sara Truebridge (2013) Resilience Begins with Beliefs: Building on Student Strengths for Success in School. Teachers College Press.

  2. Butts, J., G. Bazemore, and A. Meroe (2010) Positive Youth Justice—Framing Justice Interventions Using the Concepts of Positive Youth Development. Washington, DC: Coalition for Juvenile Justice.

  3. Laura Burney Nissen (2006) Bringing Strength-based Philosophy to Life https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Bringing-Strength-Based-Philosophy-to-Life-in-Nissen/a748ab713e133ec91bc2a1e6db95fc09341c3f92/figure/0

  4. Burton & Butts (2008) Building on Strength: Positive Youth Development in Juvenile Justice Programs https://jeffreybutts.files.wordpress.com/2008/08/building.pdf

  5. Maton, Schellenbach, Leadbeater & Solarz (2004). Investing in children, youth, families, and communities: Strengths-based research and policy (p. 7). Washington, DC: APA Books. 

  6. Margret Aldrich (2011). A Functional Family, Just Outside Your Door. UTNE Reader. https://www.utne.com/mind-and-body/functional-neighborhood-family

  7. Sara Truebridge, 2013, p. 69