Make a DC 17 Wisdom Save

You enter a structure. It's brightly lit, warm, comfortable, and the people are friendly. They offer you refreshments. Yet your unease grows. You are escorted to a room. They ask if you're comfortable, and you say that you are. That's a lie. A discussion begins. Things are going well so far. You prepared for this but you're worried you will walk into a carefully concealed trap. You're on high alert. You parse every word carefully, looking for danger. Your preparation has paid off. You are doing well!? And then, disaster! You suspect this would happen but it takes you by surprise all the same. The Interviewer casts "A question for which you have no answer."? You roll your wisdom save.? 12!? Not bad. But not enough. You are afflicted with disadvantage on your persuasion and performance abilities for the next several minutes as you battle the crippling effects of lost confidence and the sting of impending failure. You have only just begun the interview, and you have already lost the job. You might as well see yourself out and save everyone the time and embarrassment of watching you spiral for the next hour into sadness and humiliation.

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Maybe you don't play any table top role playing games, so the concept of a save or a spell may not mean much to you. However, I suspect the story resonates with you all the same.

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I recall a time when I had a performance review for some company I worked for, and on it was this "competency" called Resilience. It was poorly explained. Nobody really understood what it meant. My peers each had their own takes on what it meant.? Most thought it was HR fluff that didn't matter. The manager at the time couldn't explain it either.? Some attempt was made to identify its meaning of course since I had to be evaluated on this competency, but I left feeling like I didn't understand what it properly meant, and that it was just something everyone does and not to worry about it.

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Resilience is a skill that everyone has, but few of us pay it much heed until we're faced with dire situations. It's picking yourself up when you're down for whatever reason. Climbing out of the hole. Getting back on the horse. Putting yourself back together when you're broken. How effectively and efficiently you can do this is an important skill to grow, but how do you do it?

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The first thing I want to say about resilience is that being undone is okay. It happens to everyone. It could be an acute event, like losing confidence in an interview when you're completely lost on what to do next. It could be more of an imposter syndrome thing where it's a persistent feeling of inadequacy over longer periods of time. You cannot live in those feelings forever.? You will recover. The first thing you can do to recover is accept that it's okay to be there in the first place. It happens to everyone, and it will happen to you again, and again, throughout your career and your life in general.? There is never a gold standard strategy to recover from all things; each situation needs its own recovery plan.? That said, just like you prepare for an interview, you can prepare to recover from situations that take you out of your comfort zone or bring your fears to the forefront.

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When you have recovered from tough times in the past, how did you do it?? Maybe you let the tough times process and eventually made a new plan or strategy and tried something new. Processing is good, but what if you need to recover fast? What if you could find a way to make the new strategy and proceed sooner instead of later? The thing about people is that we're all people. Some interviewer may or may not have sympathy for the situation you're in.? Here's an especially hot take: They may or may not even recognize that you're in a spiral at all. A lot of what you think is obvious isn't obvious at all.? If you recover quickly enough, it's likely that nobody will have known you had moments of doubt or despair. It just looked like you took some time to think about it.

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Resilience is thought to be some sort of innate ability that people figure out, and maybe part of that is true. But there is approach also. How you tackle problems you can't tackle counts as well. Resilience has emotional and practical components. My own resilience is rooted greatly in my confidence that when something goes wrong, I have tools and processes that I've developed that I know and trust to help get me out of it. Knowing that I have those is itself part of my own recovery. Knowing I can fix a problem is encouraging in helping me recover quickly from a setback to put my plan into action.? Like Harry Potter in the prisoner of Azkaban casting a patronus charm when it really mattered. He knew he could do it because he had already done it. What is your plan to recover when things go squirrely?

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I'll give you my secret. Big problems are impossibly big. But small problems are solvable. The ability to break down any big problem into a bunch of small ones trades complexity for time, and time is a currency I have. Yeah, right, nobody has time. I know, I don't have an abundance of it either, but what I have lots of is deferral. Many crises don't need "the big complex problem" solved right now, just elements of it. Break it down, identify the critical bits, fix those, and defer everything else until later when the crisis has passed. There is usually not a lot that really has to be fixed right now. When I say that time is my ally, I fit the problem size I have into the time I have to fix it, and defer anything else to later.

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Next, calm some emotions. Maybe your own, maybe someone else nearby who is freaking out about the situation. It's easy to freak out when the problem is significant or when there is no plan. Ask for clarification on the current issue. Be sure of what you need to solve and what you don't. I find a lot of the time that people get flustered thinking about too many things that don't matter right then and there. Explain your thought process.? Even if your plan is a good one, sometimes people cannot read your mind or understand how it all solves the issue at hand. They may not have confidence in the plan because they are working on resilience themselves. That's okay. You have it sorted out. Explain how it's all going to work out, and it will reassure not only the people you're talking to but yourself as well. When people see that there is a viable path forward, the emotions often subside.

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Break it down. Clarify expectations. Explain your plan. Remain calm. Turn any problem you can't fix into several smaller ones that you can fix, even if you can only conceptually describe how you're going to do any of it.? That's the fun part about abstractions. They don't need details until they do. If you defer things that aren't urgent, you defer the need to know how to figure out those other parts of the problem as well.

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People get flustered when they think they need a solution. No. You need a plan that can be turned into a solution. Abstractions are wonderful. Live in them as long as you can because you only need a solution at the last moment, not before that time. With respect to recovery, it's easier to think of an abstract plan than it is to think of a concrete solution in the heat of a moment. Trying to come up with a concrete solution is what probably go you flustered in the first place, so don't assume it will work better the second time.? Do "this", then "that" then "the other thing" is a lot easier than "fix the whole problem at once".? Being resilient is not preventing disaster. It is being confident that you can recover from it when it happens, and it's totally doable.?