I’ve hit a fork in the road while editing my next book, about career resiliency. Rather than try to figure this out myself, I’m asking my readers—I’m asking you—What do you see as the key to resilience? Different ways I think about this topic include…
- Do I consider myself resilient? By what measure(s)?
- Do I have an intended life path? How confident am I that I can make it unfold as intended?
- What do I worry about—what seems to get in my way?
- Day-to-day, how do I deal with the fear of an unknown future? When do I take solace in structured beliefs (religion, politics)? What makes me tune out the future in a que-sera-sera kind of way? Or escape via vacations, TV, movies, etc.?
- What has my experience been with resilience—An active struggle? A war of attrition? Continual, incremental improvement? Holding on to my dreams in the face of doubt?
- What relationship—if any—do I see between career resilience and my personal brand or story?
- When I think about resilience, do I think about my career per se, or do I think about the little things I need to do to achieve resiliency, like getting good at a skill, building relationships, handling politics, etc.?
Whichever way you take the question, I look forward to your responses… post them below, tweet at me, email me, post to Facebook or LinkedIn… but please, take a moment to answer… Thanks!
{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
It’s amazing what we overcome in our careers when we are paying attention to other things in our lives. Illness, births, marriages, death. All these things happen in our lives and OH YEAH RIGHT I WORK FOR A LIVING.
Resiliency starts with having your priorities in order. Knowing your goals. Having character. Behaving with integrity. Those people who crumble easily? They need to work on their own personal infrastructure.
Resiliency results from unwavering persistence and faith that one’s efforts will yield more positive outcomes than negative; increased confidence is a natural result. Like muscle tissue, our professional performance limits need routine stretching to grow; and, like the callouses necessary to play a stringed instrument, need time to develop. First and last, there must be patience.
To me, career resilience sounds like going after what you want, no matter your obstacles. Behind that there’s a belief that hard work is required but you will perservere and get what you want in the end. I think it is achieved through continuous self-improvement – including an honest look at your strengths and weaknesses, and then working toward a goal to improve yourself … I think overcoming career obstacles in the past would strengthen your career resilience. And i like the perspective of your fourth bulletpoint.
My take on career resilience is in knowing how to recognize opportunities when they present themselves. I chuckle sometimes when I hear young people, especially undergrads, talk about an entire career trajectory as if it’s preordained. I say this to them: “Pay attention to the buffeting winds.”
It seems that people who know how to recognize and capitalize on opportunities get ahead most. That doesn’t always mean becoming a CEO. “Getting ahead” can also mean finding your bliss. I always liked the idea of “Do what you love and success will follow.” Sadly, many people trudge on in a job that they detest doing work that lulls them into ennui. Those are the people who are surprised and inelastic in their career choices.
The more a person is aware of what he or she loves to do, the more career resilience there is. Paying attention to that, and building on it, is essential. Since very few of us do what we studied in school, it seems that resielience comes with keeping on eye on the horizon.
I’m looking forward to your next book and your continued thought leadership, Jason.
It sounds like resilience to you means marrying your personal and career goals with a bit of can-do attitude with a dash of going with the flow. Personally, I think it is about knowing yourself, where you want to be and seeing the opportunities to get there. It also has something to do with diversifying how you meet that end goal and the attitude you take when things don’t work out.
What brings this all together is an answer that I like to give people to make them think. “It depends!” That simple statement creeps up and is the answer to so many questions as time goes on. How you make yourself resilient is not about other people so much as it is about how you define yourself and your actions.
Quick follow-up to my response to your LI question: turns out that the “Chinese ideogram” thing about change=crisis+opportunity is a myth — although it’s been a pretty durable trope, over the years.
Discovered my mistake when I went in search of a reliable source for a blog post, and found solid refutation instead: http://www.pinyin.info/chinese/crisis.html. This is actually a pretty famous post in the esoteric world of linguistic specialists: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1212. Live & learn!
Nonetheless, I still believe that a massive change — like a job loss — presents us with both a temporary crisis (of confidence, of finances, even of identity) AND an opportunity to make life-course corrections or adjustments in response. There’s just nothing in Mandarin orthography to back me up
).