PSYC1005 Chap.8 Personal Growth, Resilience and Mindsets
Personal Growth, Resilience and Mindsets
Personal growth, in Ryff’s model, is the extent to which people use their talents and keep developing their potential. This chapter explains three routes to growth, without awareness, with awareness and with intentionality, then looks at adversity: how common adverse childhood experiences are, what trauma and resilience mean, the pathways people take after adversity, and posttraumatic growth and its five domains.
It covers the mindsets that promote growth, the experiments showing that supportive relationships encourage growth-seeking choices through self-confidence, a two-decade study of adults, and two methods: Gibbs’ reflective cycle for learning from setbacks and the best possible self exercise.
What this chapter covers
- 01
Ryff's personal growth
- 02
Three routes to growth
- 03
Adverse childhood experiences
- 04
Resilience and its pathways
- 05
Posttraumatic growth
- 06
Fixed and growth mindsets
- 07
Relationships and growth
- 08
Gibbs' reflective cycle
Worked example · free
Reading the share of adults with two or more adverse childhood experiences
- 1Check the shares add to 100: 36 + 26 + 16 + 9 + 13 = 100.
- 1At least one is everyone except the none group: 100 − 36 = 64%.
- 1Two or more adds the last three groups: 16 + 9 + 13 = 38%.
Key terms
- Personal growth
- The extent to which a person uses their talents and continues to develop their potential.
- Adverse childhood experiences
- Childhood adversities such as abuse, neglect, family violence, household dysfunction and poverty.
- Resilience
- Adapting competently despite significant adversity or long-lasting trauma.
- Growth mindset
- The belief that abilities can be shaped and developed, which leads people to embrace challenge.
- Reflective cycle
- Gibbs’ six-stage framework for learning from an experience: description, feelings, evaluation, analysis, conclusion and action plan.
Personal Growth, Resilience and Mindsets FAQ
What is the difference between resilience and posttraumatic growth?
Resilience is adapting competently despite significant adversity, which can mean resisting stress or recovering after it. Posttraumatic growth is positive change after trauma that goes beyond returning to how things were, such as closer relationships, new possibilities or a greater appreciation of life. Growth is one of several resilience pathways.
How common are adverse childhood experiences?
In the CDC data shown in the lecture, 36% of adults reported none, 26% one, 16% two, 9% three and 13% four or more. So nearly two in three reported at least one, and 38% reported two or more. The lecture also notes Michael Rutter’s view that resilience is the rule, not the exception.
What is a growth mindset?
Dweck contrasts a fixed mindset, which sees abilities as set, avoids challenges and competes with others, with a growth mindset, which sees abilities as developable, embraces challenge and competes with oneself. A brief online growth-mindset intervention raised students’ academic performance, with lasting effects where peer norms matched the message.
How do relationships promote personal growth?
In Lee and colleagues’ experiments, recalling a supportive relationship made people more likely to choose a job that required learning over a familiar one, and the effect ran through increased self-confidence. In a two-decade study of 6,432 adults, positive relationships had the largest effect on increasing personal growth, an effect that grew stronger with age.
What is the best possible self exercise?
You imagine your future, here your academic life at university, in which everything has gone as well as it could, write about it for ten minutes, then spend five minutes on a goal and a first small step. A review of 30 studies suggests it may lift optimism, wellbeing and positive affect, more so with repetition.
What are the three routes to personal growth?
The lecture distinguishes growth without awareness, where reaching developmental milestones triggers change; growth with awareness, where factors in the environment stimulate it; and growth with intentionality, where a person actively and willingly works toward it. The methods in this chapter, such as the reflective cycle, serve the third route.
Exam move
Learn the three routes to growth with an example of each, then the ACE distribution well enough to compute subtotals. Separate resilience from posttraumatic growth in one sentence, and list the five domains of growth from the week’s paper. Memorise the six stages of Gibbs’ cycle in order, because a question can describe one stage, such as explaining why something happened, and ask you to name it.
Finish with the design of the job-choice experiment and its mediator.
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