Setbacks

Most career journeys feature some kind of setback. There will be times when you meet difficult hurdles. Some of these may be outside of your control, like industry changes or stressful projects. Others might be influenced by your own actions or mistakes. Your ability to be resilient enough to overcome these issues is essential to progressing toward your professional goals and learning about who you are as a person.

This resilience in the face of adversity is commonly known as grit. It’s actually quite an apt term. It’s the friction between your feet and the road as you push against hypothetical winds and continue your journey forward. It’s gritting your teeth as you weather challenges and intelligently pivot in new directions. Let’s dive a little deeper into this concept. What characteristics of grit help you to thrive and how can you best develop them?

Cultivating a Growth Mindset

A growth mindset is vital for grit. This is about recognizing that your traits and thought processes are fluid. You know that you can build on your current characteristics to become a more capable human being and professional contributor. As a result, cultivating this growth mindset can make you more resilient to the difficulties you face. It also helps you forge a personality that takes your hardships and finds ways to benefit from them.

A growth mindset is not something that comes naturally to a lot of people. Indeed, it can be quite challenging to make the shift if you’ve been stuck in a fixed state for most of your life. Some of the ways you can start to think differently and boost your growth include the following.

Embrace challenges

You need to stop avoiding challenges and instead actively embrace them. This isn’t about seeking out situations you know will be actively unhealthy or toxic to you. Rather, it’s about being willing to step outside of your comfort zone occasionally, rather than wait to be confronted off-guard by setbacks. This may help you to get used to working with elements that are outside of your usual experiences, to think differently, and to develop mechanisms that will help you when issues arise. 

Consider criticism

Constructive criticism is a key component of your growth. It can boost your self-knowledge and give you things to work on. Importantly, starting to accept criticism as a key to development rather than an attack is central to navigating the difficult feedback that can accompany bumps in your career. This can take time to cultivate, but separating your feelings around criticism from the message you’re being given by your critic can be useful in the long run. 

Keep learning

A growth mindset is dependent on your commitment to learning. Investing in leveling up your skills can also help you to keep thinking differently, gain greater confidence in your abilities, and boost your resilience. Equally, it’s important for companies to support continuous learning, as it doesn’t just fill skill gaps. It can also influence employee retention, innovation, and productivity. It’s wise to collaborate with employers that offer learning support by subsidizing education and providing access to mentors. Actively seeking out self-driven educational opportunities is also a powerful component of your growth mindset and your grit.

Developing Emotional Intelligence

Grit is often mistaken for emotional coldness. You are a human being, not a machine. The fact is that your job can affect your mental wellness directly and indirectly. Setbacks can influence stress, anxiety, and depression, which — without adequate support — can in turn contribute to burnout. When left unaddressed, your mental health can impact your performance and career progression. 

It’s difficult to overcome these cycles of poor psychological and emotional wellness if you completely shut yourself off from your feelings when you face setbacks. Rather, a true component of grit is to gain a better understanding of your emotions so you can more effectively navigate them. This involves developing a strong sense of emotional intelligence, often known as emotional quotient (EQ).

Some of the key components to cultivate when developing your EQ include:

Self-awareness 

Before you can navigate your emotions during setbacks you need to be able to recognize them. Take steps to not just name the emotions you feel, but also identify what types of stimuli trigger these emotions and how you tend to respond to them. Keeping a journal can help here, as can asking for feedback about your behavior from people close to you. 

Self-regulation 

Alongside awareness of your emotions, you need to learn how to manage them. This tends to involve being mindful of your feelings as you feel them. You must cultivate an ability to assess how best to behave in relation to these emotions both in the moment and later on. This might include adopting cognitive reframing to challenge the accuracy of your thought patterns and their connection to emotions. Starting a regular routine of meditation can be a good start. A few minutes each day sitting with your feelings and practicing deep breathing can strengthen your emotional management.

Remember that your emotional intelligence can and should develop over time. It’s good to occasionally check in with yourself to consider what your EQ was and how far you’ve come. Examine what techniques are working for you and identify areas you still need to focus on improving. The better you can assess and bolster your EQ, the more resilient and insightful you can become when faced with professional setbacks. It also tends to make you a more pleasant person to work with, alongside being considered an essential trait for good leaders.

Creating a Supportive Network

Another thing that grit isn’t: solitude. The idea that true resilience is the ability to take all difficulties on your shoulders and push through alone is nonsense. Yes, many of your challenges will represent personal setbacks and require individual growth. At the same time, internalizing your struggle can result in more stress. Creating a robust support network, on the other hand, provides you with a rich source of knowledge, assistance, and morale.

It’s important to ensure that your network is diverse. Relying entirely on a single supporter isn’t helpful for your resilience and can put an unnecessary burden on them. Instead, it’s better to cultivate a range of network members, each with different levels of experience, perspectives, and backgrounds. 

Peers often have a good understanding of the day-to-day difficulties of your role, so can be great sources of solidarity. More experienced mentors are likely to have faced similar challenges in the past and may offer insights into how they overcame them and thrived beyond. It’s also important to have personal supporters — outside-of-work friends and family — who can provide emotional guidance removed from the surroundings of your career. Building a network with a combination of these people and being open to forging genuinely close friendships with them all can be positive for everyone involved.

Conclusion

Developing characteristics associated with grit can help you be more resilient in the face of professional setbacks. Remember that these are not ways to ignore the issue or the emotions associated with them, but rather to better understand, manage, and respond to them. It’s also worth looking for inspiration from fellow professionals who you feel personify grit through adversity. Examine their approach and — importantly — how they take care of their well-being throughout their challenges.