What do I do now?
We are no strangers to the concept of Resilience, it is often spoken about in the context of coping with change in organisations and society.
The need for Resilience applies to people just entering the workforce, those progressing through and those reaching retirement and planning a new direction. It applies equally to entry level roles, supervisors, executives and Board members.
The question is how do you make yourself resilient?
Given our differing backgrounds in nature and nurture, we all have differing capacity and aptitude to cope with change. How do we optimise our inherent capability?
We can attempt to describe the future and compile a plan to meet that prediction. The problem with this, as the famous and incisive cartoonist Robert Storm Petersen observed is: “It’s hard to make predictions, especially about the future.” Preparing yourself for an outcome that does not eventuate is plainly silly.
The future is hard to accurately predict, so we are unable to envisage the specific roles that will exist but there will always be a need for a variety of roles requiring a variety of skills and personal attributes. We will always need people who can attend to detail, people who can cope with ambiguity and people who are practical and outcome focused.
In short, we will always need the full gamut of skills and attributes that abound in today’s workplace.
Building Career Resilience
- How do we enable ourselves to cope with the unknown future?
- How do we maximise our resilience?
We need to be indvidually informed about ourselves
Knowing what you need so you can thrive
This entails clarity about:
- who we are and our most suitable work environment
- what we enjoy and are good at
- what we have to offer to prospective employers or clients
If we are clear on these issues, we can select roles and work environments that suit us personally; our particular skills, interests and attributes.
This means we need clarity about:
Our values
Our values must match those demonstrated be the dominant party
The role
- Our track record indicates whether we can perform the role
- Our career stage and aspirations dictate the personal purpose of the role
- Our personality dictates the style and key focus of the role
Our fit within the team
Our personality and style cannot change significantly; we need to know what we need in our environment so that we can thrive. By knowing what we need, we can ensure we accept roles that suit us and hence we will be successful.
Three aspects that must be aligned to our needs for us to thrive
As the world around us changes rapidly in all aspects including societal communications, work roles, prevailing values and issues, international tensions and economic performance, we need to be able to assess available roles and choose those that suit us, not accept those that serve others’ agendas and do not accommodate us.
When we are confident about who we are and what we have to offer and why we want the role, we are more authentic to ourselves in meetings, interviews and negotiations.
This self-knowledge enables us to be ourselves with confidence and focus on what best suits us to perform well.
Situations where this self-knowledge is fundamental to success include:
- Determining your primary career choice.
- Seeking a new role or new organisation
- Seeking a promotion or elevation in responsibilities and opportunities to perform
- Assessing redeployment opportunities
- Returning to the workforce after a prolonged absence.
- Recovering from retrenchment by rebuilding your confidence and personal clarity
- Settling into a new role with a new cohort
- Understanding other team members in a dysfunctional unit and repairing the dysfunction
- Planning a new lifestyle that previously was referred to as retirement.
You can download this brochure here > > NLC – Career Resilience Brochure
The information provided in this article is of a general nature only and not intended to be advice