Maria Konnikova, writer for The New Yorker recently quoted Emmy Werner  as saying “perhaps most importantly, the resilient children had what psychologists call an “internal locus of control”: they believed that they, and not their circumstances, affected their achievements.” Werner has been conducting a longitudinal study on a large group of children in Hawaii and is looking into strength factors that help children “at risk” succeed despite their circumstances.

At SFLC we have been doing strength-based programing for nearly 20 years and have known that developing an internal locus of control in our participants is one of the key benefits of experiential learning approaches. It doesn’t matter if you are 6 or 60, when you express your authentic self, look inward for a reward or take a breath and ask yourself a question or apply your decision making steps to the issue at hand, you find alignment and strength abound.