Rubber Ball come bouncing back…

When I was setting up Spinning Plates I did a bit of mental inventory of my skills in order to work out how I could best fit the needs of my clients. It’s the kind of thing you do when you’re writing a CV – showcasing all the things you have experience in and are good at.

For me that’s things like marketing, organisation, teamwork, managing my own time (I could go on but you can always read my website if you want to know!) but the sorts of things I never considered as being important skills have proved to be invaluable are traits like resilience.

It’s one of those things that we don’t really talk about – those slightly negative traits that we all have to develop as we go through life in order to cope with changes and knock backs. Announcing that you’re good at listening to feedback implies that you’ve had to be given a lot of feedback over the years; saying that you’re good at coping with rejection shows that you’ve had a lot of rejection over time; claiming experience in pivoting your ideas could mean that you perpetually have bad ones… but the truth is that these difficult experiences and moments help shape us into a stronger person and make us more able to cope with new situations.

Resilience is definitely one of those that I have had to work at – especially when I was starting out – because it’s really easy to take rejection of your proposals or changes to your work to heart. That is even more the case when your very income dependent. This can lead to a bit of imposter syndrome where you start to doubt yourself – but you can’t let it. You need to look at every no or every bit of feedback (criticism!) as a lesson:

·       Maybe it’s a chance to understand better how a client likes things to be done or how they like to be communicated to

·       Maybe it’s an opportunity to learn a new and different (even a better) way of doing things

·       Maybe it’s a way to learn how to deal with people questioning your work

It’s important that you understand how or why you’re feeling things in response to a rejection or a criticism and frame that properly in your mind as an opportunity because that is the definition of resilience – learning to use those (potentially) negative moments to create positives. You’ll still have bad days but work at adding resilience to your mental CV is a good thing!