Coaching and Antifragility
I wanna pitch a really fascinating way of understanding your immense strength.
ANTIFRAGILITY
"Antifragility is beyond resilience or robustness. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better." - Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder.
Here are some tips from Nassim Nicholas Taleb on how to cultivate antifragility, along with some self-reflective questions for you as university coach trying to help your students:
Embrace randomness and uncertainty.
"Antifragility is based on the fact that certain things benefit from shocks; they thrive and grow when exposed to volatility, randomness, disorder, and stressors."
Self-reflective question: How can I help my students develop a more positive attitude toward uncertainty and change?
Seek out small stresses and challenges.
"Stressors are not necessarily bad for you; encountering manageable threats allows your body and mind to adapt and grow stronger."
Self-reflective question: How can I encourage my students to take on new challenges and push themselves out of their comfort zones in small but meaningful ways?
Be open to experimentation and iteration.
"The antifragile is beyond the resilient or robust. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better."
Self-reflective question: How can I foster a culture of experimentation and iteration among my students, where failure is seen as a necessary part of the learning process?
Prioritize diversity and redundancy.
"Robustness comes from redundancy, and antifragility from optionality... A system with redundancy is not merely more reliable; it can also be more efficient, since it need not waste effort on fail-safe mechanisms."
Self-reflective question: How can I help my students build diverse and redundant support networks, so that they have multiple sources of feedback, guidance, and mentorship?
Embrace simplicity and minimalism.
"Simplicity is a prerequisite for reliability... The antifragile loves randomness and uncertainty, which also means—crucially—a love of errors, a certain class of errors."
Self-reflective question: How can I help my students simplify their lives and prioritize the things that truly matter, so that they have more time and energy to pursue their passions and explore new opportunities?
How can I model antifragility for my students by embracing uncertainty, taking calculated risks, and learning from my failures and mistakes?
With Arete,
Sean