Safeguarding Your Professional Resilience
Many different things contribute to success in a professional context, ranging from a good degree of “hands-on experience,” to great time management skills. No matter how good you may be at your chosen career or in your current professional position, however, it is always going to be the case that certain professional challenges arise from time to time and need to be dealt with as reliably and as effectively as possible.
Perhaps most importantly, though, you also need to be able to maintain a high degree of professional resilience when you confront the assorted setbacks and issues that do arise – as becoming overwhelmed, burned out, or disheartened is a real risk, and can completely subvert the course of your career. Here are a handful of tips for safeguarding your professional resilience.
Know your rights and understand industry norms
One of the most important overall tips for safeguarding your professional resilience is to have a clear understanding of your rights, and of best practice industry norms, and to be the best possible advocate for yourself that you can be.
Part of this may involve such things as knowing, legally, how to handle retaliation from a boss or colleague against who you have made some complaint or undertaken some legal action. Or it may involve something as relatively straightforward as learning how to properly negotiate your contractor to ask for a salary increase.
In any event, you are not likely to have a high degree of professional resilience if you are not a good advocate for yourself, and don’t know what you are entitled to when it comes to your legal rights, among other things.
Support a high degree of professional resilience by maintaining key lifestyle pillars of well-being
Although people often perceive them as being entirely separate, professional resilience and personal resilience and well-being are essentially two sides of the same coin. In order to experience a high degree of professional resilience, it’s necessary to do what you can to maintain certain key pillars of personal well-being that contribute to granting you a sense of meaning and purpose, energy, and enthusiasm.
These pillars of well-being include things like sleep, good nutrition, and regular time spent interacting with loved ones.
Particularly when faced with difficult deadlines, and when trying to maximize productivity as much as possible, many individuals find themselves compromising on these core pillars of personal well-being in order to try and put their best foot forward professionally. Ultimately, though, this is unsustainable over the long term and ends up eroding, rather than building resilience.
Continually look for opportunities to grow within your profession
If you settle into your current job role and just “coast,” it is unlikely that you are going to have a great deal of professional resilience. Part of the reason for this is that you simply aren’t developing the kinds of skills that will keep you consistently secure in your professional life, and as circumstances change around you.
Continually looking for opportunities to grow within your profession can work wonders when it comes to helping you to build professional resilience, while also adding a lot more depth and meaning to your professional journey.
