Resilience / Staying Positive

Even when it may seem like a problem will not go away, resilience and staying positive can help you keep going, deal with your problems positively and continue on towards your goals.

How you're developing your Resilience and positive attitude

You may not notice it, but you're probably already doing a lot of things that show you're resilient. If you're not, then here are some suggestions of how and when you can develop your resilience.

• Being able to tell when I'm feeling positive or negative

• Continuing to try, even after something has gone wrong

• Staying calm when something goes wrong

• Trying to understand what happened when something does go wrong

• Avoiding sentences that start with 'what if' - these are usually negative

• Looking for opportunities in difficult situations (e.g. attending online lectures and careers talks during lockdown)

• Supporting other people to remain positive in difficult situations by helping them to see opportunities

• Learning from my mistakes and seeing it as an opportunity to do better next time

• Treating any kind of 'failure' as an opportunity to learn and do better next time

develop your resilience

By using online courses, you can better understand employability skills and take extra steps to develop any skills you need work on.

To develop your resilience, try these sessions by Barclays Life Skills (you will need to make a free account)

You can keep track of anything you do to develop your employability skills on UNIFROG.

Understanding Resilience

Putting resilience into action

Build your evidence

You need to be able to prove to future employers or universities that you have the skills they want. Try preparing an example answer to the question: "Tell us about a time you've shown your resilience" (You might like to start with 'during lockdown')

Use the STARRS technique:

Situation

• Explain the situation you were in.

• Aim to answer the questions ‘what/where/when’, for example, “In the third year of my business studies degree” or “when I was working as a retail assistant in a shop last summer”.

Task

• What did you do, and what did the task or role involve?

• Explain your tasks and responsibilities briefly.

Action

• What did YOU do to meet the objective of/complete the task?

• You might want to cover what you did and how you did it, including what skills you used.

Result

• What was the outcome?

• Did you make a difference?

• Can you quantify this?

Reflection

• What did you do well?

• What didn’t go as well as you’d hoped?

Strengthen

• After reflection, what would you have done differently?

• What could have been improved to achieve an even greater success?