Is Persistence Teachable?

18 March 2025

Persistence is not about sheer strength of will or aggressively pushing forwards by disregarding setbacks. While discipline is what happens each time you sit at your desk to write, persistence has to do with the choices you make in between those moments.

In that respect, it’s far more existential. It can’t just be beaten with habits and a routine, because at some point, you will question everything. So how do we prepare students for this? Is persistence something we can teach?

We will experience failure, we will not reach our goal when we expect to, we will struggle at times to find pleasure in the simple acts the same way as we once did. In these moments we will ask, “why do we persist?”

And it is in these moments we offer students the vital scaffolding they need, by helping them to answer that question. Not by lifting them over the hurdle they face, but by reminding them why it is important they make the effort to get over it on their own.

Tolerating Uncertainty

It is not enough to give them hope. If we have become focused on a particular outcome and we have failed to reach it, we may look back and question whether the journey was worth it. Popular thinking around this usually points to hope being the highest virtue. That we should maintain a belief that if we continue, we will reach our goal.

But it’s important to recognise that hope is still outcome oriented, and if we persist in the belief that our faith will one day be rewarded by external recognition, we may struggle to persist during the times where our expectations do not live up to reality. In these moments, our hope can falter.

So, in order to instil the persistence required to continue for a lifetime, we need to shift our attention from a reward at the end of the process, to the gifts of the process itself.

These gifts may not seem as tangible at first, but are in fact much more real, and much harder for anyone to take away from us. The only way that they can, is for them to put a halt to our pursuit altogether.

These gifts will make us feel more confident, more secure, happier, more generous, more in control of our lives and more deeply connected to those around us. When we analyse our deepest desires and the reason we started on this path in the first place, we will realise that this is why we were doing it all along.

So, what is this intangible power that dwells in the process of pursuing a creative goal, or any such path where we set our own intentions and the outcome is uncertain?

We will find this power in who we become during the process, in our actions and intentions, as opposed to what we may receive at the end of it.

Sticking with Difficulty

Our ability to stick with difficulty is reinforced when we better understand the gifts of the process. I’ve highlighted 3 key actions below, which I believe we benefit deeply from.

1. Choice: When given the space and time to create freely, we find ourselves making autonomous choices, unincumbered by the plans or expectations of others. We choose our intentions and guide how these will play out.
2. Connection: In order for others to understand and feel the full impact of our intentions, we must learn to connect, using our empathy and understanding to draw a bridge between the world we imagine and the minds and emotions of others.
3. Craft: Crafting is a process of self-reflection. We create and make real what we hold in our minds, assessing what comes into being against the direction we set out for ourselves. We learn to guide ourselves and make choices about how we want to represent ourselves.
   
   

The cumulative feeling derived from these three acts is a feeling that we exist and are present in the world.

Our choices build into a sense of identity.

The connections we make can grow into a community of people who understand us.

By practicing a craft, we empower ourselves to take control of the path in front of us, enabling us to make real that which exists only in our imaginations.

This is why we persist. Because the act of pursuing a path that we define, where the outcome is unknown, offers us a feeling of certainty, not of where we are going, but of who we are.

Security 2.0
I believe there are two types of security that we can find in this world. A lot of education prepares us to find fiscal security in order to protect our physical existence in this world and ensure we are meeting the needs for our survival.

But there is also a second form of security that we can prepare students to develop. One that makes their internal existence also feel safe, as though it has a place in the world we all share, so that they are able to thrive. I refer to this as ‘Security 2.0’.

When we highlight the importance of this to our students, communicating to them the different facets of it and making conscious these deep-seated human needs we have, we reinforce the value of creative behaviours, which feel all too easy to disregard, especially when the pursuit of external rewards feels so much more tangible.

Daring to be Different

The act of making our own autonomous choices, connecting with others, and crafting our own path doesn’t feel like we’re being different. It feels like we are being ourselves.

Intentionally pursuing our own unique motivations fuels us with a joy that will always give us the energy to keep going, if we believe it to be enough.

When we allow external rewards to fuel our motivations, we can quickly discover a limit to how far that energy will take us. But when we start pursuing verbs rather than physical things, we become much more in control of our fate. We will find solace in the fact, not just that we know what we’re looking for, but that we know where to find it.

We will feel buoyed by the act of creation itself and by every moment we invest in our unique capacity to create and express what exists inside us.

We will not want an outcome, but simply to be able to continue, and that we can do. This will become our purpose, our guiding light when we feel lost, our compass in the dark. It will be why we persist when it feels hopeless and it will carry us when the barriers in our way seem insurmountable.

Our Teaching for Creativity programme supports teachers to put into practice significant theory and research around teaching creative skills to their pupils across the curriculum. Find out more about the programme, and explore our Teaching for Creativity resources.