1. Cultivating Motivation, Resilience, and Emotional Intelligence
In this lesson, we’ll be looking at how your level of motivation, skills at managing difficult situations, and willingness to recover from frustrations will affect your college success. Let’s get started!

2. The Importance of Motivation, Attitude, and Mindset
Motivation: your desire to make an effort
Intrinsic (internal) vs. Extrinsic (external)
Attitude: the way you think and feel in relation to surrounding events
Influences motivation and shapes behavior
Mindsets: what you believe about yourself
Fixed mindset (believe characteristics and abilities will not change) vs. Growth mindset (believe you can change)
At some point in your college career, something will go wrong, no matter how carefully you plan. In these situations, how you think can make all the difference.
Your motivation – your desire to make a difference – involves having a high level of commitment and energy focused on a goal. Motivation comes from different places for different people. Depending on what you need and want, your motivation may be different. In general, there are two kinds of motivation: intrinsic motivation comes from an internal desire, while extrinsic motivation comes from the hope of an external reward or the fear of an undesirable outcome.
A student who goes to nursing school out of commitment to helping others is intrinsically motivated. A student training for a management position out of fear that his days as a manual laborer are ending is extrinsically motivated. Often, however, intrinsic and extrinsic motivation work together.
Your attitude has a lot to do with how well you stay motivated. Both positive and negative attitudes often come from our previous environments and experiences with others. You can work towards a positive attitude by:
Thinking about what you can learn from difficult situations you overcame
Giving yourself credit for your good choices
Recalling times when things didn’t work out, and thinking about what you could have done better
Asking positive individuals where their optimism comes from
Taking advantage of opportunities to explore the affect of your attitude on desired outcomes
Being mindful of your attitude
Your mindset – what you believe about your personality, intelligence, or talents, also affects your motivation. People who have a fixed mindset are often trying to prove themselves, and are sensitive about being wrong. They think that having to make an effort indicates a lack of talent. People with a growth mindset see no harm in being wrong, as they know they can improve. They think the effort they put into something is what makes them talented.
Which type of mindset do you think you have? Do you have different mindsets about different things?
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3. Resilience
Resilience: not giving up or quitting when faced with challenges
10 Ways to Build Resilience
Motivation requires clear vision, courage, and persistence. It also take resilience – not giving up or quitting when faced with challenges. Students who are resilient are more successful in college and later in life.
There are several terms used to describe resilience and determination. “Grit” is a combination of perseverance, passion, and resilience. The Finnish term “sisu” dates back hundreds of years and means going beyond one’s mental or physical ability, taking action even when things are difficult, and displaying courage and determination in the face of challenge and repeated failure.
The American Psychological Association has developed a list of “10 Ways to Build Resilience:”
Make connections. Accepting help and support from friends, family, and other support networks helps build resilience.
Avoid seeing crises as problems that can’t be overcome. Instead of giving up in the face of stressful events, change how you view and respond to them.
Accept that change is part of living. Accepting things that you cannot change can help you focus on what you can change.
Move towards your goals. Instead of focusing on tasks that seem impossible, ask, “What’s one think I know I can accomplish today that helps me move in the direction I want to go?”
Take decisive actions. Don’t wait for problems to disappear, do something to get rid of them.
Look for opportunities for self-discovery. Consider what you’ve learned about yourself from going through tough times.
Develop a positive view of yourself. Developing confidence your ability to solve problems and trusting your instincts helps build resilience.
Keep things in perspective. Avoid blowing things out of perspective.
Maintain a hopeful outlook. An optimistic outlook enables you to expect that good things will happen in your life.
Take care of yourself. Pay attention to your needs and feelings.
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4. Understanding Emotional Intelligence
Emotional intelligence: the ability to identify, use, understand, and manage emotions
Consists of two general abilities: perceiving and managing emotions
Perceiving: understanding emotions and predicting how others might feel
Managing: modifying what you feel
Emotional intelligence (EI) is the ability to recognize, understand, use, and manage moods, feelings, and attitudes. It shouldn’t be surprising that emotional intelligence is related to resilience, and can affect your motivation. After all, how you think and feel makes all the difference in whether you succeed or give up. Being aware of your emotions can help improve your thinking, making you more effective at problem solving, decision making, and creativity.
There are two parts to EI: Perceiving emotions and managing emotions.
Perceiving emotions involves the ability to monitor and identify feelings correctly and to determine why you feel the way you do. Once you are able to perceive your own emotions, you can also predict how others might feel.
Managing emotions is based on the belief that feels can be modified and improved – much like how a growth mindset is based on the belief that you can change. At times, managing your emotions means you need to stay open to how you feel, and use your emotions to take action. At others, you may need to disengage from an emotion and return to it later. For example, anger can make you act in negative and antisocial ways, or can be used positively to help you take a stand against injustice. Managing emotions can put you in the right mood to handle different situations.
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5. Assessing Your Emotional Intelligence
Look at how you handle emotions in your daily life
Naming and labeling emotions improves emotional intelligence
Emotions will have less control over you
You will be able to confront your fears
Use logic rather than emotional reactions to evaluate a situation
Emotional intelligence may be a new term for you, but your emotions have guided you for your whole life, whether or not you realized it. Naming and labeling emotions improves EI. This is something that you can do in your daily life.
You can use EI throughout your daily life. For example, anger management is an important EI skill to develop, as anger can either hurt others and harm your health or help you stand up for what is right. Likewise, healthy EI can help you prioritize by deciding what’s most important to you and how you want to allocate time and energy according to your priorities.
If answering these questions shows that your EI has room for improvement, don’t worry! Reflecting on your attitudes and behavior and learning why you have the emotions you do will improve your emotional intelligence. Studying unfamiliar subjects and interacting with new and diverse people will challenge your EI skills. Make sure to step outside your comfort zone in order to grow as an individual.
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6. Identifying Your EI Skills and Competencies
Bar-On Model of Emotional Intelligence
Intrapersonal skills
Competencies: Emotional self-awareness, assertiveness, independence, self-regard, self-actualization
Interpersonal skills
Competencies: Empathy, Social responsibility, interpersonal relationships
Adaptability
Competencies: Reality testing, flexibility, problem solving, resilience
Stress management
Competencies: Stress tolerance, impulse control
General mood and effective performance
Bar-On emphasizes the importance of optimism and happiness
Reuven Bar-On developed a model that shows how categories of emotional intelligence directly affect general mood and performance. Each skill leads involves several competencies.
Intrapersonal skills encompass the following competencies:
Emotional self awareness: Knowing how and why you feel the way you do.
Assertiveness: standing up for yourself when you need to without being too aggressive.
Independence: Making important decisions on your own without having to get everyone’s opinion.
Self-regard: Liking yourself in spite of your flaws (and we all have them).
Self-actualization: Being satisfied and comfortable with what you have achieved in school, work, and your personal life.
Interpersonal skills encompass:
Empathy: Making an effort to understand another person’s situation or point of view.
Social responsibility: Establishing a personal link with a group or community and cooperating with other members in working towards shared goals.
Interpersonal relationships: Seeking out healthy and mutually beneficial relationships – such as friendships, professional networks, family connections, mentoring, and romantic partnerships – and making a persistent effort to maintain them.
Stress management encompasses:
Stress tolerance: Recognizing the causes of stress, responding in appropriate ways, and staying strong under pressure.
Impulse control: Thinking carefully about potential consequences before you act and delaying gratification for the sake of achieving long-term goals.
Adaptability involves:
Reality testing: Ensuring that your feelings are appropriate by checking them against external, objective criteria.
Flexibility: Adapting and adjusting your emotions, viewpoints, and actions as situations change.
Problem solving: Approaching challenges step-by-step and not giving up in the face of obstacles.
Resilience: the ability to bounce back after a setback.
General mood encompasses:
Optimism: Looking for the bright side of any problem or difficulty and being confident that things will work out for the best.
Happiness: Being satisfied with yourself, with others, and with your situation in general.
What skills do you think are your strongest? Which ones can you work on improving?
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7. How Emotions Influence Success and Well-Being
Emotions are strongly tied to physical and psychological well being
Strong EI links to college success:
Emotionally intelligent students get higher grades
Students who delay gratification tend to do better overall
EI skills can be enhanced in a first year seminar
Emotions are strongly tied to physical and psychological well-being. People who are aware of the needs of others tend to be happier than people who are not. A number of studies link strong EI skills to college success.
Students with intrapersonal skills (emotional self-awareness, assertiveness, independence, self-regard, and self-actualization), adaptability skills (reality testing, flexibility, and problem solving), and stress management skills (stress tolerance and impulse control) do better academically than those who lack these skills.
Strong EI makes students more willing to persist in college, and students who delay gratification tend to do better overall.
Further, students who can’t manage their emotions struggle academically. Some students experience panic attacks before tests, and many turn to risky behaviors (such as drugs and alcohol abuse) in order to cope. Even students who succeed academically despite EI difficulties can be at risk if unhealthy behavior patterns follow them after college.
If you need help developing some EI skills, take advantage of this class, and consider visiting your academic adviser or a wellness or counseling center on campus.
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8. Tech Tip: Building a Digital Persona
Manage your online image to ensure it sends an appropriate message
Be honest, but don’t overshare
Be proactive and aware
Delete old accounts
Stay one step ahead
So much interaction today happens online. As such, it is increasingly important to manage your online image. Here are some tips for creating an appropriate digital persona:
Be honest, but don’t overshare. Colleges and employers – present and future – can look you up online, so make sure you don’t post things that could get you in trouble.
Be proactive and aware. Make sure to set your privacy settings on Facebook. Be careful about expressing controversial opinions online. Ask friends not to post or share material that could harm your or someone else’s reputation. It isn’t that you can’t be yourself, but that you should be able to be proud of your digital person. Operate under the assumption that anything you post online is public forever. On the internet, nothing is ever really permanently deleted, and once you make a post, it can be hard to control how it spreads.
Delete old accounts. If you rarely check a site, you may not notice if it has been hacked.
Stay one step ahead. Google yourself regularly. Make sure you know what potential employers can see.
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