02/01/2025

Cultivating Core Competencies of Resilience for Better Career Decision-Making

By Jocelyn Chan

Perceived career obstacles and failures can cause clients to ruminate, overthink, and catastrophize about the worst possible outcome. Career practitioners can help clients increase their agility in the workplace by introducing resiliency tools to bounce back easier and learn from challenges to make better career decisions.

Defining Resilience and its Core Competencies

According to the American Psychological Association’s dictionary (n.d.), resilience “is the process and outcome of successfully adapting to difficult or challenging life experiences, especially through mental, emotional, and behavioral flexibility and adjustment to external and internal demands.”

The University of Pennsylvania Positive Psychology Center points to several important core competencies of resilient people (Penn Arts & Sciences, n.d.):

• Self-awareness: Paying attention to one’s thoughts, emotions, behaviors, and physiological reactions.
• Self-regulation: Changing one’s thoughts, emotions, behaviors, and body reactions in the service of a desired outcome.
• Mental agility: Looking at situations from multiple perspectives and thinking creatively and flexibly.
• Strengths of character: Using one’s top strengths to engage authentically, overcome challenges, and create a life aligned with one’s values.
• Connection: Building and maintaining strong, trusting relationships.
• Optimism: Noticing and expecting the positive, focusing on what one can control, and taking purposeful action.

Tools and Strategies

The following are some tools and strategies career practitioners can use with clients to better gauge their emotional state and build those core competencies.

1. Understanding Mood

The Positive Affect and Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS) measures the way in which people view their positive and negative moods. By understanding their tendency toward positivity or negativity, clients can pay attention to what they are experiencing and how emotions may influence how they act. People whose positive affect outweighs their negative affect are more optimistic and resilient, and are better able to handle challenging circumstances in a mostly favorable way (Minute Tools, 2021).

By using the PANAS assessment, career practitioners can help clients understand how their moods influence their career decisions. For example, if a client has a negative outlook, practitioners can help the client identify a role model who has a more optimistic outlook and ask the client to problem-solve the situation from the role model’s perspective. By practicing mental agility, clients can think more creatively.

2. Recognizing Emotional Triggers

By being able to recognize, understand, label, and express feelings, clients can regulate their emotions better. The ability to use one’s emotions wisely impacts their creativity, decision-making, performance, well-being, and resiliency (Brackett, 2019).

The How We Feel app, a tool created by Marc Brackett, Ph.D. and his team at the Yale University Center for Emotional Intelligence, helps users identify a nuanced emotion vocabulary with 140  emotions on two continuums: pleasantness and energy. As clients identify their emotional patterns and triggers, practitioners can help them to anticipate and prepare for difficult career situations. For example, if a client notices a higher frequency of low pleasantness and low energy in the afternoons, a practitioner might suggest avoiding holding important career discussions with their manager in the afternoon.

3. Challenging One’s Thoughts

When a client’s self-awareness and self-regulation are low, they can fall into a downward spiral of catastrophizing about an upcoming job interview or an issue with their manager. Practitioners can challenge the client’s behavior by asking questions that invite self-reflection. These include:

• Evidence-Based Questions: Is it really true? What evidence supports your thinking? How might you re-interpret the situation using data?
• Reframing Questions: What would be a better way of seeing the situation? How might you view the situation in a more positive way?
• Contingency Planning: What would be your contingency plan for the worst-case scenario? The best-case scenario?

4. Assessing Strengths

Strengths assessments such as StandOut, CliftonStrengths, and the VIA Character Strengths can help clients identify when they are at their most powerful and what makes them feel strong. Practitioners can help clients use those strengths and values as levers to improve their resiliency in the job search or workplace.

5. Deepening Connections

A strong, trusting relationship network within one’s career can provide an excellent support system of encouragement, advice and guidance, resource sharing, and feedback. The Social Capital Quiz (Greater Good Science Center, n.d.) scores how many people in one’s life are available for emotional and practical support. Career practitioners can help clients outline their current network and explore where they may want to deepen relationships and professional connections.

6. Increasing Positivity

Fostering positive emotions - such as joy, gratitude, hope, pride, inspiration, and awe - broadens one’s capacity and fortifies their capabilities to absorb adversity, pivot more easily, and see greater possible solutions (Fredrickson, 2009). The goal is not to be positive all the time; rather it is to have a better balance between positivity and negativity. Clients can take a self-assessment to determine their positivity ratio.

Activities practitioners can suggest to help clients improve their ratio include: 

Increase positivity  

• Get exposure to nature at least 20 minutes a day.
• Savor good news by sharing it.
• Practice gratitude regularly, such as journaling five things you are grateful for each day.
• Participate in random acts of kindness.
• Dream about the future with the best possible outcomes.
• Increase warm, trusting connections with others.

Reduce negativity

• Set time limits on complaining.
• Detach from emotionally-charged situations.
• Minimize consumption of negative media and social media.
• Distance oneself from negative colleagues and friends.

Career Practitioners as Catalysts for Self-Reflection

Career-resilient clients bounce back better from adversity because they believe in a positive future. They see potential stressors as challenges and try to learn from failure. They acknowledge their emotions and actively make choices to shift their mind as needed. They foster positive emotions by opening their heart and mind, and they are willing to see challenges from different perspectives. Career practitioners can help clients reflect on their own emotions and build the skills they need for facing career challenges.

References

American Psychological Association. (n.d.). Dictionary of psychology: Resilience. APA Dictionary of Psychology https://www.apa.org/topics/resilience

Brackett, M. (2019).  Permission to feel: The power of emotional intelligence to achieve well-being and success. Celadon Books.

Brackett, M. (n.d.). How we feel app. https://marcbrackett.com/how-we-feel-app-3/

Expert Program Management. (2021, February). The PANAS Scale. Expert Program Management. https://expertprogrammanagement.com/2021/02/the-panas-scale/

Fredrickson, B. (2009). Positivity: Discover the upward spiral that will change your life. Crown Publishers.

Fredrickson, B. (2009). Positivity self test. https://www.positivityratio.com/single.php

Greater Good in Action. (n.d.). Social capital quiz. Greater Good Science Center. https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/quizzes/take_quiz/social_capital

Minute Tools. (Feb. 2021). PANAS scale (positive and negative affect schedule). https://expertprogrammanagement.com/2021/02/the-panas-scale/

Penn Arts & Sciences. (n.d.). Resilience skill set. Positive Psychology Center. https://ppc.sas.upenn.edu/resilience-programs/resilience-skill-set

Jocelyn Chan, certified master of career services (CMCS), is a senior advisor of career planning and development at Southern California Edison, where she manages career development, mentoring, and executive coaching services for employees. She has worked in the field of talent management and development for over 20 years and brings her creativity, innovation, and drive for excellence to her work. Additionally, Jocelyn coaches independent clients to navigate career transitions and develop leadership skills by creating awareness of strengths, resiliency, values, emotions, personal branding. Connect with Jocelyn on LinkedIn at linkedin.com/in/jocelynchan-losangeles/