Recently, I bought my friend the book, Gritty Ninja: A Children’s Book About Dealing with Frustration and Developing Perseverance by Mary Nhin, as a baby shower gift (that’s what you get for being friends with a therapist). Before I wrapped the book, I gave it a quick read. Gritty Ninja is the type of ninja who let frustrations get the best of him. From a friend, Gritty Ninja learns about perseverance and changes his attitude, and reaches his goals. That is grit.

This got me thinking, how could DBT help us get that grit?

Build Mastery:

In DBT, we want you to build that grit meaning build your resilience! We encourage you to build mastery everyday so that you can feel great about yourself.

Building Mastery is doing something that challenges you habitually so that you can gain that self confidence we all wish we had a bit more of.

By pushing yourself a tiny bit each day, you are inching yourself towards mastery.

For example, let’s say you want to be a runner. Setting a goal of running 1 mile under 8 minutes doesn’t make a lot of sense at the beginning. However, if your goal was to run for 15 minutes straight, then walk for five, that’s a little more achievable. Then, using mastery, you slowly up your run time to from 15 to 20 minutes, and lower your walk time. By doing this, you’re pushing yourself out of your comfort zone. Not too little and not too much.

Troubleshooting: How do we practice building mastery?

Building Mastery may take some time to integrate into our already busy enough lives.  

We might not be motivated, we might not have the time, or might not even see the point.  

The keys to integrate the skills into our lives is to: 

1. Work within your means  

2. Be gentle with yourself 

If you think you’re too on the go to squeeze these skills in, consider your productivity. Ask yourself if you perform better after feeling proud of yourself, or if you are feeling stressed. Our productivity goes up when we feel good about ourselves.

Building Mastery can be as simple as tackling your to do list (your partner will thank you). To do list build mastery activities include: 

1. Cleaning a room in your home 

2. Fixing something that’s broken 

3. Organizing the garage, junk drawer, etc. 

This message was sponsored by your honey. Just kidding, but again, building mastery doesn’t mean you have to learn a new langrage or develop an understanding of the stock market. And no, you don’t have to go out and buy a treadmill. Building Mastery skills can be small and give you a nice boost in your self-confidence. This is working within your means.

Be Gentle on Yourself

I skateboard. Typically, when us skaters mess up a trick, we’ll respond with our disapproval outwardly, like saying, “Well, I’m an idiot,” or another string of curse words my boss would kill me for. Anyway, does this sound familiar? Beating yourself up after you mess up? Over time, this negative self-talk has an impact on our self-esteem.

This means this negative self-talk has the potential to talk us out of reaching our goals.

In DBT, we encourage you to be compassionate with yourself. Accept the mistake, then move on. That is okay. We’re human. Tomorrow, when you approach the build mastery point in your day, make the task slightly easier so you can achieve it. Even if it took two tries, you still were able to get it completed. Over time, our resilience grows, and we’ve begun to build up our grit.

I will leave you with a hot tip on grit, found below. Grit allows us to persevere and achieve goals, no matter how hard they may be. Grit gives us a sense of pride, builds resilience, and allows us to feel a little better about ourselves.

Hot tip: Some sports teams encourage players who mess up to use the toilet flush method after a mistake is made during a game. The player (and other players on the team) make a flushing motion with their hands. This sends the signal to “flush” or, forget the mistake. By forgetting the mistake, the athlete can recalibrate and bring their focus back on the current game.