SUCCESS Materials – English

Nurturing Resilience in Young People

One technique proposed to nurture resiliency can be illustrated in the broaden-and-build model (Fredrickson, 2001).  This suggests that humans have the capacity for expanding their momentary thought-action repertoires and building out their personal resources, as negative emotions restrict the mind to promote a fast response, where as positive emotions activate a wide range of thoughts and actions.  Positive emotions appear to be durable and add to a storehouse of personal resources. Moreover, strategies using self-enhancement might increase resilience levels. Self-enhancement is an individual trait-like tendency toward overly positive biases. Thus, it is suggested that self-enhancers are confident in any situation (Taylor & Brown, 1988).

Furthermore, strategies using attribution have been demonstrated to increase resilience levels. Attribution pertains to one’s perceptions of cause of an event (Kelly & Michela, 1980). People who are optimists may be able to emotionally dissociate from stressful scenarios, and in doing so, may be capable of adapting more adeptly to failures and setbacks (Bonanno, 2004).

Higher levels of career resilience are correlated with a variety of key abilities which facilitate career construction and progression such as hope, optimism, future orientation and career adaptability (Di Maggio, Ginerva, Nota & Soresi, 2016; Barto, Lambert & Brot, 2015). This correlation between career construction and development and resilience levels is particularly pertinent in today’s labour market, where employees are increasingly expected to take ownership and responsibility in the management of their own careers (Akkermans & Tims, 2015; Sweet & Meiksins, 2012). These expectations demand that employees are capable of reaching out and acting in a proactive manner in pursuit of more favourable career opportunities, even in the presence of potential risk of setbacks (Segers & Inceoglu, 2012; Vuori, Toppinen-Tanner, & Mutanen, 2011). By actively growing the capacities which underlie resilience through tailored and directed career guidance and counseling within the education system, young people will feel adequately prepared to tackle and adapt to challenge as they arise and engage in the calculated risk taking to advance their career prospects, as and when it is required.