Toughening Up – How Risk Makes Us Resilient
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Focus
One of the reasons that risk taking is so powerful, is because it creates a process in our minds called “Toughening Up”. It might sound simplistic, but this is one of the most amazing things. Simply by facing challenges, we build deep, lasting resilience which changes us in the most fundamental ways for the better.
Summary
Facing and embracing everyday challenges builds resilience, adaptability, and improves overall well-being. By engaging with manageable risks, both young people and adults develop confidence, stress management, and mental toughness.
- Small risks and discomforts prepare us to handle future stress confidently.
- Avoiding challenges diminishes resilience, leaving us unprepared for adversity.
- Neurobiological changes from facing challenges improve clarity and stress tolerance.
- Daily manageable challenges foster mental, emotional, and even physical resilience.
- Programs like Risky Kids offer structured risk experiences, promoting growth with minimal negatives.
Fear and Familiarity
Facing challenges, while uncomfortable, is essential for building resilience and familiarity with adversity.
- Embracing small fears builds resilience and eases future stress.
- Resilience fades without regular exposure to fear and anxiety.
- Overcoming discomfort strengthens our ability to handle future challenges confidently.
When we’re facing challenges, it creates uncertainty, fear, stress and anxiety. For some of us, this could be applying for a new job, reaching out to a new friend or for younger generations just answering the phone!
Each time we do though, we become more familiar with those experiences, and with the positive outcomes of facing them. One of the reasons why resilience has begun to diminish in young people so dramatically is because there is an unfamiliarity with fear and anxiety.
Living comfortable lives, whilst comfortable, isn’t healthy. We need to experience adversity and adventure so we know what it feels like! Being unfamiliar with the simple experience of anxiety will make us fear it.
Learn More About Mastering Fear
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Taking risks and facing challenges are essential for developing problem-solving skills and confidence.
- Risk-taking builds strategies we can rely on in future challenges.
- Facing failure and success reinforces the value of hard work in growth.
- Avoiding risks weakens confidence by preventing skill and resilience development.
When we face challenges and take risks, we also have to start building, testing and trialling strategies to overcome them. We learn what it means to be successful, to face failure and more importantly we begin to build a repertoire of these approaches that we can use again in the future.
Risk taking teaches us critical thinking about navigating problems and also creates reinforcement. The more we challenge ourselves, the more we experience success, the more we understand that in order to grow and be our best, we have to work hard!
The opposite is just as true, and when we avoid risk and challenge we never build up these skills, which diminishes our confidence that we can overcome obstacles as we don’t even know where to start.
Building Better Ways Of Thinking
Strategies For Success
Katrina has been in the program for a few years, she started as a Gutsy Girl, made her way up to Ultra Classes all the while working on strong Mindsets. Now she participates in the Momentum Young Adult classes each week, discussing challenging topics around morality and community while learning advanced movements.
What Katrina might not be fully aware of is that her time in those Gutsy Girls classes years ago taught her fundamental strategies. She learned how to face the fear of failure while learning basic movements, or putting forward ideas about simply concepts like “Be Aware” and those same feelings are easily navigated now when she talks about her fears of fitting in.
She built strategies to manage this that work for her, like reminding herself that the point of the sessions is to learn, and that learning only happens by being at least partly wrong!
Small Changes, Big Impact
It’s more than just the behavioural and cognitive impact though. At a neurobiological level our brains and bodies change for the better. They become more capable of managing cortisol, the stress neurochemical, and other neurochemicals, allowing us to think more clearly and be less affected by fear.
Over time, this allows us to face greater and greater challenges, not without fear, but with the ability to think more clearly and navigate better to success. When this is combined with strategies and familiarity on how to face challenges, we start to become unstoppable!
The Global Effect
Facing challenges positively reshapes our brains and bodies, enhancing stress management and resilience.
- Risk-taking improves cortisol management, reducing fear’s impact on clear thinking.
- Regularly overcoming challenges builds our capacity for even greater resilience.
- Combining neurobiological growth with strategies fosters unstoppable confidence and capability
But it’s even MORE than just the cognitive, behavioural and biological! By facing challenges, and experiencing this “toughening up” process, our entire nervous system undergoes a change which touches on every part of our biology.
Higher levels of this resilience and toughness also create a set of impacts throughout our bodies, most impressively on our immune system. We know that this mental toughness can increase its efficacy, making us less prone to illness and disease.
We’re just starting to scratch the surface on this now as well, as more and more we’re learning that there are deep connections between stress, anxiety, resilience and our wellbeing.
Want To Know More About Risk?
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Everyday challenges, when embraced, build resilience and growth without extreme risks.
- Daily, manageable challenges can strengthen resilience and confidence effectively.
- Guided programs like Risky Kids balance growth benefits with reduced negative outcomes.
- Embracing risk benefits both young people and adults in skilful, supportive ways.
Of course what to do with all of that! Do we put people in a lab and expose them to stress and anxiety? Of course not, there’s no need. There’s challenges around us every day that we can face, from trying new things to deepening relationships or even just working out! It doesn’t need to be scary or traumatic, even small doses of every day challenges are enough.
For kids, healthy, facilitated and guided risk like that at Risky Kids is a new, exciting and emerging space. We’re seeing all of the same benefits of natural risk taking, but with fewer negative outcomes like injuries, and more success more often.
Most of all though, we need to embrace risk! In our lives as the guides for young people, and in challenging ourselves.
Richard Williams
Risky Kids Founder, Director of Programming
Richard Williams is a fitness industry consultant, gym owner, business coach and professional stunt actor with more than a decade of experience in the health and fitness industry. With an education in psychology and criminology, Richard blended life experience as a fitness industry consultant with Spartan Race, gym owner, elite-obstacle racer, ultra-runner and professional stunt actor to create the Risky Kids program.
Richard has a passion for enacting meaningful social change through all avenues of health and wellbeing and believes that obstacles are the way. Some of Richard’s key achievements include:
- Key consultant/coordinator Spartan Race/Tough Mudder/Extreme Endurance
(Australia/NZ/Global) - OCR World Championship Finalist – Team & Solo (2015)
- OCR World Championship Silver Medallist – Team Endurance (2018)
- Professional film and television stunt performer for 15 years
Considered one of Australia’s foremost experts in the fields of fitness, wellbeing and behavioural science, Richard is frequently in demand as a guest speaker for relevant government and non-
government bodies and organisations. Speaking engagements centred on the success of the Risky Kids program, philosophy and approach have included:
- Expert speaker/panellist Sports & Camp; Recreation Victoria and Outdoors Victoria forums
- Closing expert speaker at the Australian Camps Association National Conference
- Expert speaker at the National Fitness Expo, FILEX