Strive

Chapter 8Striving effectively: foreground behaviours

In our research exploring how people approach struggle, and how they can start to see it as an opportunity to develop rather than a threat, we examined many different groups of people. We looked at people in various organisations and various industries, and studied these groups to understand the common factors that helped them strive and handle struggle (known as a cross-sectional study). We then took these characteristics and trained different groups of people to get better at implementing them and measured if this increased their ability to strive and handle struggle over a long period (more than 12 months — known as a longitudinal study). Phew, enough science talk!

The good news is that it worked. The strategies I am about to share with you significantly increased people’s capacity to manage struggle and strive more. And as I outlined in chapter 7 the first step in effective striving is the attitude that struggle equals development.

Seeing struggle as development

The good news is I’m not going to leave you with that little piece of advice. This chapter and the next focus on how you can see struggle as the pathway to development. Our research dug deeper to understand the psychological dynamics of this, and we found strivers have two layers of specific behaviours that allow them to sit in struggle and develop from it. I call these two layers foreground behaviours and background behaviours.

Foreground behaviours, which ...