Tenacity is the act of being gritty, persistent, and resolute. Tenacity is a critical trait to have to reach success in entrepreneurship, elite level sports, and to beat many life threatening diseases that require complete lifestyle changes.
You can often observe someone over time and conclude that they are tenacious, if you see them in the right situations. But what if those right situations haven’t come up or you’re unsure? Here is an idea you can use to test if your child is tenacious:
- Come up with a task that sounds easy, but once you start at it you realize that it is extremely time consuming and requires several days/weeks/months of dedication to complete. Maybe something like memorizing and reciting word for word a 20 minute speech given by someone famous in history or finishing an intricate 2000 piece jigsaw puzzle.
- Come up with a reward your child really, really wants. Something that you know is their heart’s desire, but they can’t get without your help.
- Offer up the reward to your child if and only if they complete the task in #1.
- Don’t give them all the details to be sure they can’t estimate the effort. Don’t provide them with a time limit, structure, or pressure to complete the task. Don’t provide any advice or tips. Offer up the incentive with a cavalier attitude being sure to hint that the tasks should be relatively easy and you are indifferent if they do it or not.
- Once they agree to the offer, don’t provide any reminders or say anything else about it.
It’s likely that your child will begin right away working on completing the task so they can earn their reward as fast as possible. They will quickly realize that the tasks is not going to be as easy as it first sounded.
- If they are tenacious and gritty, you will see them continue to make progress day by day and eventually complete the tasks.
- If they are not, it’s likely they will give up after a day or two and never mention it to you again.
- If they work on it a few days or weeks, and give it a fairly good shot before they give up, then they are somewhere in between.