48 • PART I: A MODEL FOR SELF-REGULATION AND ENGAGEMENT
change that can help us understand what mindfulness and yoga practice has to offer students.
These include a positive, embodied practice, grit and perseverance, and a growth mindset.
Positive, Embodied Practice
Advances in neuroscience have helped illuminate exactly what our way of being and behav-
ing is doing to our brain (Cook-Cottone, 2015; Siegel, 2015, 2010). I think this is best explained
in a book that is an all-time favorite of my university students: Buddha’s Brain: The Practical
Neuroscience of Happiness, Love, and Wisdom. The authors, Hanson and Mendius (2009), make
a compelling case for how you can use your mind and your thought processes to change
your brain, and your experience of living, for the better. This book artfully, and in a very
accessible way, explains how your thoughts sculpt your brain. For those of us who work
with kids, it makes sense that what you practice gets stronger. In the same way that students
work to develop good writing and math skills, creating a healthy, happy sense of self can
happen with positive practice. There is now neurological evidence to support what Aristotle
is believed to have said many years ago, “We become what we repeatedly do.” In other
words, what you practice you become. Over time, you and your students can develop a reli-
able, positive, and supportive inner coach that helps you when things get tough, be it math,
physics, composition, oral presentations, or relationships. Accordingly, positive, embodied
practice is the essence of this text. There is much more on mindfulness, as well as a set of
practices, in Chapters 4 through 7. Further, for an easy-to-understand review of the neurosci-
ence underlying the changes seen in mindfulness practices, see Hanson and Mendius (2009).
To understand more about the neuroscience of the developing brain, see Siegel (2015).
Grit and Perseverance
In an effort to understand what factors lead to academic and life success, Angela Duckworth, at
the University of Pennsylvania, has been studying grit for many years (Perkins-Gough, 2013).
Her work on grit has garnered great interest. She is a winner of a MacArthur Fellowship for
her work studying grit (MacArthur Foundation, 2016). Her captivating TED talk on grit can
be found on the website: http://www.ted.com/talks/angela_lee_duckworth_the_keyto success_
grit?language=en. Duckworth became interested in the concept of grit after working as a
teacher in a challenging urban setting. She defines grit as something more than resilience
(Perkins-Gough, 2013). Duckworth argues that grit is a specific definition of resilience that is
connected to a sense of optimism, the ability to come from an at-risk or challenging situation
and thrive nevertheless (Perkins-Gough, 2013). Duckworth explains that what resilience and
grit have in common is the positive response to failure and adversity (Perkins-Gough, 2013). In
her measures of grit, about half of the questions are about responding resiliently to situations of
failure and adversity and about being a hard worker (Perkins-Gough, 2013). The remainder of
the questions is about having persistence toward a goal, consistent interests, and focused pas-
sion (Perkins-Gough, 2013).
Duckworth and colleagues devised empirical measures of grit and self-control for
both children and adults. The scales are available here: http://www.sas.upenn.edu/~duckworth/
gritscale.htm. Using these measures, Duckworth’s team found that these traits predict objec-
tively measured success outcomes, even when controlling for cognitive ability (MacArthur
Foundation, 2016). For example, in prospective longitudinal studies, grit predicted final
ranking of specific, actual participants at the Scripps National Spelling Bee, persistence at