When asked, “What is resilience?” – you might think about adaptability, how one reacts to unplanned events, or even how quickly one recovers when things don’t go as planned.
Similarly, there’s also career resilience: the awareness and agility to tackle career challenges in order to achieve your goal and the strength to grow and learn from the hurdles you have successfully overcome.
Remember that resilience is a trait that you can strengthen with practice. Just like how you can improve public speaking skills through practising presentations, you can also improve your career resilience by tackling tough situations with the right mindset and learning how to adapt.
Why is resilience important?
Resilience is not about irrational positivity or burying your head in the sand. It is about learning to look at the big picture, not let temporary setbacks pull you down, and be confident enough in your strengths, to be honest about your own weaknesses.
Learning to maintain a resilient mindset is key to a meaningful long-term career journey. The World Economic Forum lists resilience as one of the skills employers need the most in the future! And a huge part of staying adaptable and nimble in the marketplace is actively cultivating a resilient mindset within yourself.
How to start building career resilience
With slow economic recovery due to the global pandemic, developing career resilience is now more important than ever. As resilience is about facing uncertainty with the right mindset, you can begin by accepting that change is the only constant in life, and learning to embrace it good-naturedly.
Alternatively, you can learn to approach mistakes and rejection positively, and see them as learning experiences or opportunities for feedback. Use them as stepping-stones for self-improvement, instead of burying them into the back of your mind or constantly reliving the pain. Your present setbacks are not an indicator of your future success!
Putting resilience to work
Now that you’ve started cultivating a resilient mindset, how do you make it work for you in your career planning, especially considering the “new normal”?
If you’re looking to sharpen your career resilience, you can turn your attention to picking up more skills. If your research shows that the industry you want to enter requires certain skills or knowledge you don’t currently have, take the time to go for courses or read up on those topics to add to your repertoire. These courses don’t have to be long ones – in fact, there are six-hour courses on popular sites such as Coursera or Udemy.
On the other hand, if you’re facing rejection, give yourself some time to grieve, regroup, and clear self-defeating scenarios from your mind before moving on. Remember that you are not defined by the rejections that you receive – being resilient is about having the will to acknowledge that you are better than that!
The bottom line is this – learning to approach your career journey with a resilient mindset is a key part of staying employable, in both uncertain or stable times. Make it a point to keep practising it every chance you get and see the difference it makes in how you think about yourself – both as a person and a professional.
This article is contributed by gradsingapore.
