Resilience has become a buzzword, but what does it actually mean? What does it look like in practice? How do you build it? Renowned behavioral scientist Dan Ariely offers valuable insights into the nature of resilience and practical ways to cultivate it, particularly in the context of job hunting and career setbacks.

The Job Search Challenge

Getting laid off or looking for a job can be extremely demoralizing. Applying online for jobs is even worse. You feel like you send your résumé into the ether and most times you don't even get a response back. This can happen over and over until you feel like giving up - what Ariely refers to as "learned helplessness." We begin to lose hope.

When we feel stressed and begin to lose hope, we need resilience. The current AI-powered job screening market demands resilience because it sucks. I’ve been there. If you're going through job applications screened by AI, you may understand the pattern of hopelessness that AI recruiting practices are creating among people who feel that a machine is deciding their future. Listen to our interview on The Anxious Achiever:

Understanding Resilience

Ariely defines resilience as our natural antidote to stress, and it's something we need to build every day. "Resilience is not just how we react to a very negative event. Resilience is how we manage our life in general. I think of it like an insurance policy." Resilience is something we cultivate with others and in ourselves.

As stress increases, if we have plenty of resilience, we can absorb it, says Ariely. Stressful conditions tax our cognitive bandwidth, reducing our ability to think clearly and exercise executive control. Stress also hurts our ability to make rational long-term decisions that require delayed gratification. Resilience buffets the belief that we can keep going and things will be okay.

Community Resilience

Here are two scenarios that demand different approaches to building resilience:

1. Imagine your whole team gets laid off. It feels terrible, but there's camaraderie. You know it's not about you. Everyone's in it together and can support each other through next steps. There's a natural resilience in the community that helps get everyone through.

2. Now imagine you get laid off, but your colleagues doing the same job did not. You worry: is this really about me? You might ask, "Why did I get laid off, and no one else on my team did? How do I know this will not happen again? How do I ever get the energy to try? Maybe I'm not good. Maybe I won't find another job."

In the second scenario, you're anxious because you're worrying and projecting into the future. With low resilience, it's hard to absorb that stress and think clearly, absorb the shock, and determine next steps. Feeling alone, you might give up - you're now experiencing learned helplessness, notes Ariely.

However, relationships and belonging increase our ability to manage stress and build resilience. If you have supportive people on your side, you can say, "You know, I can manage, I can get the energy to try again," says Ariely.

Being in a community where we feel a sense of trust and support acts as a buffer against the detrimental impacts of stress, lack of agency, and scarcity. This is why investing in community and relationships is so important.

Cultivating Personal Resilience

Ariely's interest in resilience stems from personal experience. As a young man, he spent three years in the hospital after 70% of his body was burned. He still lives with pain and disability. This experience led him to explore how people find meaning in loss and develop resilience in the face of adversity.

When Ariely was hospitalized, the pain and injury were only half the battle. Equally challenging was his lack of control or agency. Doctors and nurses made all the decisions. He was at the mercy of everyone else.

Returning to the job search example, many people at work currently feel a lack of agency, which is extremely stressful. There are layoffs, and uncertainty about when AI might replace jobs. It's easy to start feeling helpless. Here again, resilience is the antidote.

Building Resilience in Stressful Situations

Ariely recommends a powerful way to build resilience in stressful situations: Do the best you can.

He explains, "If you don't have resilience, it can create a vicious cycle where you become afraid to take any action. You might think the chances of getting through a job interview are 50%, but after a traumatic work experience, you might lower that to 20%. If you manage to go for an interview but don't get the job, you might see it as proof that you don't deserve it and will never find a new job."

The mechanism to combat this, according to Ariely, is to reward yourself for doing what you can do. He relates this to his personal version of karma. "If I do something good, the chances of something good happening are slightly higher. I'm 100% responsible for the quality of what I produce."

Ariely suggests setting small, achievable goals and rewarding yourself for meeting them, regardless of the outcome. For example, if you commit to sending three resumes a day before breakfast and achieve that, reward yourself with an espresso or something you enjoy.

"I'm not going to wait for the world to react to it. I have done my role," Ariely states. "It's not about how the world reacts, it's about having a standard and rewarding ourselves. We need to change the focus from success to doing the thing we're supposed to be doing. And the more the world is noisy and probabilistic, the more we need to do that."

By focusing on what we can control, rewarding our efforts, and building strong support networks, we can develop the resilience needed to face life's challenges head-on.

Morra

P.S.: When I am feeling hope dwindling and my own anxiety rising, I take a small meaningful action just like Ariely suggests. I’ll do something that doesn’t require high brain input, but feels very satisfying. This might be organizing my computer desktop folders, going through my wallet and cleaning out receipts, cleaning out my car, or going through my email. Getting organized helps me regain a sense of agency and face courage for the bigger questions and threats that lie ahead. What do you do?