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By Emily Courtney
What Is Career Resilience?
Resilience is a trait that will serve you well in every aspect of your life, including your career. With alarming unemployment rates and continued layoffs and furloughs as the pandemic continues to take its toll on the job market and economy, millions of Americans are struggling with how to change careers or launch a search for a new job.
Thankfully, this is where career resilience comes in handy. Career resilience is the ability to adjust to career change, whatever the circumstances may be, and to navigate all the ups and downs and twists and turns on your career path. In today’s world, career resilience is no longer just a “nice to have,” it’s a core professional competency.
Not feeling very resilient lately? Don’t worry! Resilience can be learned and, much like a muscle, it’s a skill that’s honed and perfected when “exercised” during crises and tough times. That means that right now is the perfect time to work on your career resilience skills.
Dr. Lucy Hone, resilience researcher, author, and co-director of the New Zealand Institute of Wellbeing & Resilience, shares the below three strategies for developing resilience in her popular TED Talk, “3 Secrets of Resilient People.”
1. Understand That Suffering Is Part of Life
In this day and age when anyone can create a sparkling (but not always realistic) social media presence, many feel entitled to a perfect existence, sans any pain or suffering. But resilient people know that tough times are part of every human life. When you understand that bad stuff can—and does—happen to everyone, you are much less likely to feel discriminated against when misfortune does knock on your door. Instead of, “why me?” a resilient person may ask, “why not me?”
2. Direct Your Attention to the Positive
Focusing on what can be changed and accepting the things that can’t is a common trait of resilient people. Human beings are hard-wired to notice and respond to threats and weaknesses. From an evolutionary perspective, this was crucial to survival. But in modern society, that bias toward the negative can make people less able to adapt to change. Our brains don’t know the difference between a real threat to our survival (read: tiger) and a perceived threat (think: a toxic colleague). More often than not, we interpret too many things as serious threats, and our stress response switch gets stuck in the “on” position.
Resilient people have figured out how to find the good, despite negative challenges they face. Termed “benefit finding,” the ability to switch the focus of your attention to include the positive can be a really powerful strategy. Give yourself permission to feel grateful and make an intentional, deliberate, and ongoing effort to tune in to everything that’s good in your world. As Hone eloquently puts it, “Don’t lose what you have to what you’ve lost.”
3. Ask If Your Thoughts and Actions Are Helping
Asking yourself, “Is what I’m doing helping me or harming me?” is another powerful tool for resilient people. Taking a moment to stop and ask yourself if a certain thought or behavior is helping you or causing further harm, and then choosing to be kind to yourself every time, gives you control over the decisions you make. This simple exercise of focusing on helping yourself can mean the difference between staying stuck in a painful situation and moving forward.
