What to Do When Everything Becomes Too Much

Uncertainty is always lurking around a corner —?especially in today’s hyper-connected world. The unknown can easily cause a lot of anxiety among job seekers and people looking to build a successful career. After all, how do you plan when people are talking about inflation, a recession and global unrest? Fortunately, researchers have been studying this specific area. They have also developed evidence-based exercises to guide you through uncertain and difficult times.

Gemma Leigh Roberts, who is an organizational psychologist, sat down recently with LinkedIn News editor Andrew Seaman for the latest episode of Get Hired with Andrew Seaman. They discussed her new book Mindset Matters: Developing Mental Agility and Resilience to Thrive in Uncertainty – also the name of her successful LinkedIn newsletter. The two also discussed what you can do to weather uncertainty and develop resilience.

Check out the episode on Apple Podcasts or wherever you like to listen. If you like the show, be sure to leave a rating and review. Your praise helps other people find the podcast.

Transcript: What To Do When Everything Becomes Too Much

Andrew: From LinkedIn News, this is Get Hired, a podcast for the ups and downs of our professional lives. I'm Andrew Seaman, LinkedIn senior news editor for job searches and careers. Each week on Get Hired, we talk about leveling up. Sometimes we talk about finding work, other times we talk about excelling where you are right now. And through it all, we focus on how to stay true to yourself in the process.?

It's no secret that the job search – and building a career – is hard. It often takes longer than you think it will and it's full of unexpected obstacles. One crucial factor that can get you through those hard times and over to the other side is resilience. My guest today, Gemma Roberts, is an organizational psychologist and the author of the incredible LinkedIn newsletter Mindset Matters, and an upcoming book of the same title. She's an expert in helping people build that resilience. We spoke a few weeks ago about how all of us can be better prepared to face challenges in our career and job search.?

Thank you for joining us. I'm so excited that we're chatting, because I always enjoy chatting with you. The first thing I wanted to talk about is, really, your background. Because you are a psychologist, but you're an organizational psychologist and I was wondering if you could tell us a little bit about what that is.

Gemma: Basically, an organizational psychologist is anything to do with organizations of people. So, a group of people. It could be a work organization or it could be a committee, or it could be a place where you take part in hobbies, for example. Or a place where you study, that's an organization. So, I very much look at the individual, so what's going on with the individual from a psychology perspective, but within a social context and a wider context as well.

Andrew: It seems like maybe the past few years have been a really exciting time to be an organizational psychologist, because of all the shifts that are happening in society due to the pandemic.

Gemma: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, there has been so much change over the last two years, so probably more than we've seen in a decade before that. Some of it really positive, lots of opportunities there about shaping how we want to work, the kinds of roles that we want to be in. Also some challenges there as well. Even people that study this, even people that are experts, we've never seen shifts like this before.

Andrew: You specifically have been working in this space, really, for a while. Your specialty has been resilience and helping people through trying times. How did you come to that area of expertise?

Gemma: I started out way back when, doing my undergraduate degree in psychology, so it was psychology and sociology. That's probably where that social part comes in for me as well. I started working in HR then got a bit deeper into learning and development. Then occupational psychology, which is also quite broad, or organizational psychology. Then leadership, and I kind of kept diving deeper and deeper into the things that interested me. I ended up thinking about uncertainty, resilience. Why is it that some people thrive at work and other people don't? What is it to do with the individual? What is it to do with the environment? It just so happens that that was my area of research, my doctoral research, which I was getting to the end of as the pandemic hit. So, I knew straight away that there was going to be an opportunity to share that information with a wide group of people. Because I don't think we've ever heard the word resilience as often as we have over the last two years, when we are thinking about our working lives and actually, lives in general.

Andrew: What is it specifically that we're talking about when we say resilience?

Gemma: Believe it or not, there's no one definition, even in the world of research. The definition that I use, and it's based on research, is "thriving following adversity". We have to face challenges and we can learn something from going through those challenges, if we use that learning to grow, to develop. And that means that we are more likely, in the future, to be able to tackle challenges. To be able to face adversity, but also build a confidence in ourselves as well, that we don't have to have all the answers when challenges come our way, but we can be confident that, somehow, we'll find the answers. Whether that be within ourselves, whether that be from other people or with support from others. Sometimes, when it comes to your own resilience, you need to stop. You need to accept the challenges. Sometimes, you actually need to break down to be able to build up to move forward again. It's very personal for everyone. It's also very changeable, at different points in time. So, what I need, to be resilient today, may not be what I need tomorrow or in three weeks' time. I know it can be complicated, but it really is about starting to build your self-awareness and understanding what you need to deal with adversity effectively and use that experience to grow.

Andrew: When you say thrive in the definition of resilience, that, I assume, is a sliding scale, right? It could mean that you faced a challenge and you knocked it out of the park and you're really soaring, or it could mean just that you survived that experience, right?

Gemma: When we think about resilience, one end of the scale, we have kind of a coping end of the scale. This could be survival, this could be getting through your challenge, it could be getting through a tough week. It could be getting through a tough day or a tough experience, but you've got through it. That's the coping end. Then, we've got the thriving end. Where a challenge, for some reason, helps you to expand. Whether that be your knowledge, how satisfied you are with something, it helps you to grow and really thrive and get better at something. This is the other thing to know about resilience, is that you can't manufacture those challenges. You can't totally manufacture your resilience. We can't make all challenges help us to thrive. We can't avoid challenges that put us in survival mode. These things happen around us. So, I always say to people, when we talk about building resilience, that the end goal isn't really to be more resilient. Because if you’re chasing that goal, you're probably going to fail, because we can't be resilient all the time. Because we don't know what's coming our way. Sometimes it could be focusing on building up your energy. Other times it could be focusing on things like gratitude, or other times it could be acceptance, accepting where you are, accepting what you've got control over and what you haven't. They're very different techniques and very different tools, but when you're building resilience, the idea is to have a bank of these tools available to you, that you feel comfortable using and you've tested out, ready to use in different situations. The end goal, really, is building that toolkit. Not being as resilient as you can be.

Andrew: Totally, and you're incredibly successful at teaching people what tools to use to be resilient. You have an incredibly popular newsletter, you are about to debut a book. It seems like the book is meant to give people almost a guide to say, "Okay, we all go through trying times." Like you said, you can't figure out what challenges are likely around the corner. It could be anything from having a difficult couple months at work, to losing a loved one or something like that. But, you're trying to give them, it seems the, like you said, toolkit. To say, "This is at least what you can work with to help get through those difficult times." Can you tell us a little bit about your new book?

Gemma: Yes, absolutely. The book is actually a follow on from the LinkedIn newsletter that I started publishing just as we went into lockdown in the UK. The first lockdown, in 2020.

Andrew: A lot of people needed resilience then.

Gemma: I know, and that's exactly why the newsletter started. Because I had all this, I guess, experience and these tools and strategies and it's evidence based. I'm a practicing researcher. And the idea of the newsletter was making that accessible to people. Particularly making sure that things were evidence based, because as we went into the pandemic, there was a lot talk about things like resilience, and there was lots of stuff that was being published that wasn't necessarily accurate. My concern was, "What if this actually does more harm than good?" That's actually where the newsletter came from. The book is actually a follow on from that, but it dives a bit deeper into some of the coaching strategies that you can use. I've pulled out five key areas that we need to think about in the world of work today, to help us to thrive in uncertainty. Sometimes, it'll be getting through uncertainty, sometimes it will be thriving. Things like resilience being one of those, cognitive flexibility. Being able to view situations from different perspectives. Things like meaning and connection, which so many of us are craving at the moment. I talk a little bit about purpose around meaning as well. Those five key areas that research is telling us that we really need if we want to create a working life that we are satisfied with and at times, hopefully happy with as well. Then, for each of those areas, there are coaching strategies. Things like “six exercises that will help with emotional intelligence,” or “six exercises that will help with resilience.” It's great learning about a growth mindset and amazing expanding your knowledge about that, for example, but how do you apply that in the real world? How do you apply that in the workplace? What does it really mean? That's what the coaching strategies are really for.

Andrew: We're going to take a quick break. When we get back, Gemma takes us through developing a gratitude practice and recharging your resilience batteries.?

We're back with organizational psychologist and Mindset Matters author, Gemma Roberts.?

Andrew: Gemma, you mentioned that your new book has some exercises for building resilience. Can you give us an example of one of them?

Gemma: One of them is actually reflection, which I know sounds really simple, but yes, sometimes we do just need to strap ourselves in, buckle down and get through things. Of course, that's part of some of the challenges that we face. That's part of life sometimes, but equally, if we are not reflecting on how that's working for us, what's working, what's not working at different points in time, then how do we know if that's the best approach? How do we know if, actually, we are pushing ourselves to the limit emotionally, or even physically sometimes? That, maybe we need to take a break, maybe we need to take a step back. Maybe that's causing you to respond to different things, like family or friends or other relationships outside of work in a way that doesn't really work for you. The only way you're going to understand that is by taking some time, sometimes, to pause. To think about what's working and what's not working. One of the exercises I talk about, one of my favorite ones actually, is thinking about this idea of building a support committee. When we look at resilience research, we look at what the individual can do to build their resilience. Is it personality? Is it how we're made? Is it the types of challenges we face? We've got quite a lot of data on that, but we don't have a huge amount of data on the factors going on around you that can impact your resilience. Probably because it's hard to measure, because it's so contextual. So one of the things I talk about is this idea of building a support committee. We know that support is a crucial factor in building resilience. Where you get that support from will be very different for everyone. For some people, it could be colleagues. For others, it could be friends, family, partner, a manager, coach, mentor. But, if you can start to map that out, so visually, think about, "Okay, who are the people that I go to for support?" and probably a little bit more interestingly, "Why do I go to that person? What kind of support does that person provide? What kind of support does this other person provide?" And you can start to map out where you've got support when you hit challenges. Who do you go to for honest advice? Who do you go to for a sympathetic ear? Who do you go to for practical tips? When you start to map this out, you can really see where some of the gaps are. You might see where you have some over-representation, so that's a really interesting exercise to think about, "Okay." I call it kind of a board, a bit like a board of directors you would have if you were starting a business. Who are your board of supporters? Who are those people you go to? That can be really interesting. Another exercise I talk about in the resilience part of the book is gratitude. Sometimes when challenges hit, it's very easy to go to a place where we are so focused on what we need to get through, what's not working, what we need to figure out, what's really hard. But actually, there's a very powerful way of switching that thinking. And thinking, actually, "What's going right in my life? What are some things I could be grateful for?" Now, this could be as simple as walking to get a nice coffee. It could be as simple as a quick chat with a friend on the phone that you haven't spoken to in a while. Or, reading a bedtime story with your children, or just the fact that it's a really gloomy day, but, "Hey, I've got a half-an-hour break and I can take a walk in the rain under some trees somewhere or see some flowers." It's not about avoiding challenges, it's not about minimizing the pain or discomfort that can come with those. But it's about opening your perspective so you can see the other side of the coin as well, and it is possible to look at what's going right as well as what's not going so right at the same time. Often, it's these really, really simple things that we can do and change your perspective. It doesn't take the challenge away, it doesn't mean that you can cope with everything that's thrown your way. But, it does mean, for a moment of the day, you are directing your thinking towards something positive rather than only thinking about the things that aren't going so well.

Andrew: Yeah, and I know a few people, in fact, one person comes to mind and they do a gratitude journal. Basically, every day, at the end of the day, they write down a few things good that happened. And then, when they have a bad day, they told me that they go back into the journal and they read those. They could just sort of flip to anywhere in that journal and they say, "Oh, these were things that really brightened my day a few months ago." It seems like it really gives them the fuel to power through difficult situations.

Gemma: Isn't that lovely, to have something written down that you can flick through and get that little boost of, “actually, there are some good things that are happening”? Actually, sometimes it helps to think about who you are a support system for as well. Because sometimes, when we face challenges, if we can take ourselves outside of what we are facing and think about how we can help others, and things that other people might be facing, that changes our perspective as well. Again, it just gets us out of that pure focus on what's going wrong. Being a support for others can also help to build your resilience as well. Imagine, we're talking about a gratitude journal. Wouldn't it be lovely to think that helping someone else, whether it be a friend, a colleague or even a stranger, you might end up in someone else's gratitude journal, brightening their day one day?

Andrew: I think that really leads into my next question, which is you. How does resilience play a role in your life? Because I'm assuming you're human. So, I'm assuming that you have struggles and challenges. That you have to work on this just like everyone else, right?

Gemma: Absolutely. I have to work on this every day. Sometimes I don't. Sometimes life rolls by and that's lovely, but generally speaking, this is stuff that I have had to work on. Part of the reason why I've studied this topic is because I've had to use resilience in my life. I come from a background that was fairly challenging, when I was younger, but not overwhelming, necessarily. And there's research to suggest, actually, that the optimum way to build resilience, if we had a choice, which we don't, but if we did, is to have challenges that stretch you, push you outside your comfort zone, but don't overwhelm you for too long. I can certainly see that in my life, which is probably why it's a topic that's interesting for me. But, I had the same challenges as everyone else. I think back to when we went into the financial crisis and not being able to get a job. I remember just thinking, "I'm applying for all these jobs” and I wasn't even getting rejections, it was just nothing. I'd moved back home, so I'd just done my masters. I was in a bunk bed in my childhood room. It was quite soul destroying, when I look back. I've lost people close to me. Also, parenting. I find parenting so hard, because I want to be really good at it and I don't have all the answers. I also want to grow my career and I want to focus on that as well. I very much have the same challenges as everyone else and I have to work on figuring out what resilience means for me. It's probably why I'm so passionate about finding your own way with this, rather than there being a one-size-fits-all. Because I can look back over my life and think some of the things that would've helped me when I was 20 aren't necessarily the same kinds of things that are going to help me now I'm literally approaching 40. Equally, some of the things that weren't so useful when I was younger might be more useful now, when I'm facing different kinds of challenges.

Andrew: Yeah, and I think that's actually one of the reasons I always love talking to people who study this and then sit down to write it. Because when you deal with things where you're talking about overcoming adversity or powering through challenging situations, it's so humanizing because everyone faces it. I always think the people who study this, like you, they're almost the people leading you through a dense forest. They're whacking away at the brush and the cobwebs that are at the front, and there's still forest around you, but they're making it a little bit easier. And we, obviously, in this podcast, deal a lot with job searching and careers, which are challenging. For people who are listening right now, what would you suggest is maybe one or two things they could do that might make their journey, whether they're facing difficulties in their career, maybe they feel like they're not being recognized at work, or maybe their job search is lasting longer than they expected, to power through and maybe recharge that little resilience battery that they have?

Gemma: I think some things that can help with this, sometimes challenges are going to come our way. There's not always a lot we can do about it, but what we can do, what we do have control over, is how we think about them. I know this is perhaps sometimes easier said than done, but it can be really helpful to not make that your world. Again, I've been there, where it's literally about applying for jobs, applying for jobs, applying for jobs, no reply. Because it's so important. It's your livelihood at the end of the day, which can impact so many other parts of your life. But it is really important to have a piece of you that isn't about that. Whether that be focusing on other things like exercise, for example, going for a run, going to the gym. Whether that be connecting, because it's so easy when things get overwhelming, it's very easy to stop connecting with people as well. People like family, friends, colleagues. Making sure that you are keeping some of that connection there with people. Whether that be for support or whether it just be to connect with people. Yes, you want to be giving your energy, because you want to be problem solving. You don't necessarily want to be in a phase where, "Oh, it's just not working. I want to give up." You've got to keep trying. That's the only way we change things, is if we keep trying. We do make mistakes along the way. Everyone does. I do, I still do. But, thinking about, "Okay, what do I need for my energy?" And when this big challenge sometimes feels like it's completely draining you, when we look back at these really challenging events or, where we sometimes think that we've failed at something or we didn't do the right thing, it's understanding that, actually, there will be something to learn from this. It might go on for a long time, it might go on for longer than you want it to. But, as long as you're trying, it doesn't matter if you get things wrong, if you make a mistake. If it's not the right next step or it's not quite working out, the point is, you are trying. There will be something that you can take from that experience later. Sometimes, we've just got to hang in there and keep going. But, it's also okay to sometimes make a break with what's going on and accept that, "Actually, this is really tough. It's okay for it to be tough, it's a big challenge for me. Whether it's a big challenge for someone else or not doesn't matter. But for me, this feels like a big challenge." That's okay as well. That's part of resilience. It's not always just pushing through. Sometimes, we have to stop, think about your energy and understand that sometimes, we will learn something from an experience. Even when it's challenging.

Andrew: I think those are such amazing suggestions. Because there are so many people who, when they feel like they are going through a difficult time in their careers, their job search, or really any part of life, I feel like they almost make it worse. Because they feel that any joy means that they are not focusing on the task at hand. I always think life is difficult enough on its own. I don't see any reason why you should double down and make sure that you're feeling the difficulty. So I think that whole idea of taking time and doing something else that you love and expanding your identity, and then just opening yourself to joy is such a huge part of enduring, really, any part of life, but, especially when you're going through a job search or a difficult time in your professional life. I think that is such great advice. Thank you, Gemma.

Gemma: Amazing. Thank you.

Andrew: That was Gemma Roberts, organizational psychologist and author of the new book Mindset Matters. Building resilience takes time and support. So, to help you on that journey, that's right, it's time for the Career Coach Corner. This week's pro tip comes from leadership development coach, Chelsea Jay.

Chelsea: Stop building your career based on someone else's standards. Remember, what works for one person may not work for you. When it comes to your career, you really do need to run your own race. That means take the time to think about the things that excite, motivate, fulfill and challenge you in a role. Then go after it and ask for all those things, unapologetically. Trust me, your future self will thank you.

Andrew: Thanks Chelsea. If you try out that tip or another tip you've heard on Get Hired, let us know how it goes. Send us a voice memo to [email protected] to tell us what worked. We'd love to celebrate you on the show. Remember, it's up to you to put our advice into practice. Still, you always have a community backing you up and cheering you on.

Connect with me and the Get Hired community on LinkedIn to continue the conversation. You can also join my weekly Get Hired Live show every Friday at noon, Eastern Time, on the LinkedIn News page. And if you liked this episode, leave us a rating on Apple Podcasts. It helps people like you find the show. And of course, we'll continue this conversation. Next week, right here, wherever you like to listen. Get Hired is a production of LinkedIn News. The show is produced by Michele O'Brien. Joe DiGiorgi mixed our show. Florencia Iriondo is head of original audio and video. Dave Pond is head of news production. Dan Roth is the editor-in-chief of LinkedIn and I'm Andrew Seaman. Until next time, stay well and best of luck.