Results from Resilience Workshop

As a part of the 2011MAPA Careers in the Media module, I attended a two-hour workshop called ‘Results from Resilience’. The workshop was presented by Ruth Guy and Euan McCall who work in Coventry University’s Career department. The workshop explained how resilience is not something we are born with, but instead something that can be developed. Resilience is the ability to bounce back from adversity, work through challenges, and overcome obstacles. In the workshop we were encouraged to think about times where we have demonstrated resilience. This reminded me of my struggle to overcome dyslexia and also the perseverance I needed when trying to acquire a short term and year long placement. We discussed things that affect our ‘Resilience Reservoir’. Things that help to increase our resilience, include a strong network, and things that deplete our resilience, include rejection. We learnt about the four key elements of resilience: confidence, purposefulness, social support and adaptability. These elements were then explored more in depth to look at how they could help us to improve our resilience. In one of the sections we took a quiz to calculate how self-confident we are. From this I discovered that I have high self-confidence and that I am good at learning from my experiences and not letting obstacles affect the way I see myself. I put this down to my journey of overcoming my dyslexia, learning to push myself, learning from my mistakes and not giving up when things were difficult. This has really helped to define me as a person and has given me great skills when it comes to resilience. The workshop was interesting, however, due to overcoming my personal challenges in the past, I feel that I did not really learn anything new from the workshop as resilience is a skill I have already developed. What this workshop made me realise is that my resilience is something that I can offer employers. This skill demonstrates I have ability to learn from experience and persevere which is very important in the working environment.

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