Lack of confidence can stem from various factors. Even an able and proven professional can often come across situations where he finds himself lost and with no confidence to move forward. It is to identify the challenge that you are facing accurately and take the necessary steps to recover.

In 2010, Mark Angelo, was asked by the CEO of Hospital for Special Surgery in New York to create and implement a program to improve quality and efficiency. Mark was relatively new to the organization. He had worked as a business fellow for the previous year but had recently taken on the role of director of operations and service lines. Even though he had background in operations strategy from his days as a management consultant, he was not familiar with the Lean/Six Sigma principles he’d need to use for this project and didn’t feel equipped to build the program from scratch. He was particularly concerned he wouldn’t be able to gain the necessary support from the hospital’s physicians and nurses. What would they think of a young administrator with no hospital experience telling them how to improve quality and increase efficiency?

For five months, Mark struggled to get the project on track and his confidence suffered. He knew that his apprehension was in part due to his lack of knowledge of Six Sigma. He read a number of books and articles on the subject, talked to consulting firms that specialized in it, and spoke with hospitals that had been successful in developing and implementing similar programs. This helped but he realized he still didn’t know if he would be able to get the necessary people on board. “I was anxious and stressed because I had no idea how I was going to transform the organization. I knew I couldn’t do it on my own. It was going to take a collective effort that included our management team and all of our staff,” he said.

He talked with the CEO who had supported him since the beginning. He also looked to his family for emotional support. Through these conversations he realized that his anxiety stemmed from a desire to be liked by his colleagues and therefore to avoid conflict. “After many discussions with my CEO and observing how he handled these situations, I learned that it is better to strive to be well-respected than well-liked,” he said.

This was a turning point for Mark. Instead of worrying so much about what others thought of him, he focused on doing what was best for the patient and the institution. In December, he presented the vision for the program to the entire medical staff. While he was nervous about how it would be received, he knew this was a critical moment. “I was able to get up in front of one our toughest constituencies and present the vision that we had been developing over the past few months,” he says. His presentation was met with applause. “In the end, my confidence grew by leaps and bounds and we were able to design a program that has since taken off with great success across the hospital. I was able to overcome my mental blocks and knowledge deficits to build a program that will truly help transform how we approach performance improvement and patient care,” he says.

Source: Harvard Business Review, Amy Gallo

In life, we are often faced with various challenges that put us down; draining our confidence and belief. Usually, however, all it takes to come back from this is to get back on your feet and realize your potential. Build your confidence back up and better things start happening.

Jane had successfully owned her own business, a café, for over 25 years and was actively involved in the day-to-day operations until a serious health issue was diagnosed. The condition was directly linked to years of working in a kitchen and she was advised that she could no longer continue working in this environment. Eventually, Jane was forced to sell her business. Having been divorced for a number of years and in her early 50s, her personal circumstances dictated that, financially, she would have to continue working.

Jane discovered a program that offered support in helping unemployed adults over the age of 50 to explore their potential and assist them back into employment. She initially felt that she had no skills or experience and was beginning to really worry about what employment opportunities were available to her. The program encouraged her to look at the skills she used in running her own business. Before long, she had a list that included dealing with the public, customer service, marketing and promotion, recruiting and managing staff, dealing with complaints, as well as an array of financial skills.

This helped build Jane’s confidence and shaped her CV as well as a number of job applications. She also started to think about what she enjoyed doing in her spare time and realized that the tourism sector was something she would be interested in exploring further. She applied to work in a local hotel as a breakfast assistant. However, her employer was so impressed that she was offered a supervisory position due to her wealth of experience. Jane worked in the job for around six months and continued to learn and develop her personal interest, which was focused on becoming a tour guide.

Having continued to pursue her ideal job, Jane has now successfully realized this goal and is currently working as a tour guide for a local tourist attraction, where she thoroughly enjoys meeting and guiding tourists and gains a great deal of satisfaction from the work she does.

Resilience, the process of adapting well in the face of adversity, trauma, tragedy, threats, or even significant sources of stress — such as family and relationship problems, serious health problems, or workplace and financial stressors. A ‘bouncing back’ from difficult experiences.

In a practical sense, Resilience is a set of skills—sometimes learned, other times innate—allowing you to persevere, manage stress, and triumph in the face of challenges. Faith’s at the core of these skills. For many women, resilience is a strength considered essential. Both women and men need resilience to deal with difficulties in life. But, women often need more resilience than men to overcome traditional obstacles placed in their way, in order to advance in the business world. Many women, however, are not aware of the amount of resilience they do possess.

Kanika Tiwari is the co-founder of JetSetGo – India’s first online marketplace for private jets and helicopters launched in 2014. Leveraging her more than eight years of experience in the aviation industry, Kanika realised the frustration of customers while dealing with charter brokers and operator due to the fact that due to sheer lack of transparency and non-availability of charter planes, customers pay astronomical amounts. It was from here, that the idea to develop JetSetGo started.

JetSetGo is fundamentally re-defining the private aviation business, by seamlessly creating marketplaces that join the dots between charter customers and operators on one hand and service providers with operators on the other. It recently raised funding from Yuvraj Singh’s debut startup fund, YouWeCan Ventures, in July this year. For Kanika who has beaten cancer too and is now entering unchartered territory, the flight to greater heights has just begun.

Psychological resilience is defined as an individual’s ability to successfully adapt to life tasks in the face of social disadvantage or highly adverse conditions.

Jack Ma, who founded Alibaba and is its Executive Chairman was rejected from as many as 30 jobs, including a job at KFC before he became the richest man in China. His e-commerce company, Alibaba attracts 100 million shoppers a day and his real time net-worth is a whopping $21.9 billion. But, being the richest person in China didn’t come easy to Ma. He went through a lot of rejection before seeing all the unprecedented success.

For starters, Ma revealed in a recent interview that he failed a college entrance exam three times. Unfortunately, it didn’t just end there. Ma faced more obstacles when he founded Alibaba in 1998. The brand didn’t turn profitable for the first three years, and Ma had to get creative.

One of the company’s main challenges was that it had no way to do payments and no banks would work with him. This is when he decided to start his own payment program called Alipay. The program transfers payments of different currencies between international buyers and sellers.

People called the idea of Alipay stupid at that time. Today, 800 million people use Alipay.

Organisations have become increasingly interested in how to develop employee engagement. The success of such an intervention is not only dependent on its quality, but also on the organization of the intervention and the process. Read on to see how resilience is an important predictor of engagement.

In a randomised trial by Jo-Anne Abbott, Britt Klein, Catherine Hamilton and Andrew J Rosenthal, an internet-based online resilience building program was evaluated among sales managers at Australia. This program was designed to enhance resilience by teaching seven skills to help improve ability to cope with challenges and setbacks and maximize potential achievements. Sales managers found the resilience training very enjoyable and believed it would improve their work performance and life skills.

At an individual, employee level, personal resources such as self-efficacy and resilience and job resources like social support and supervisory coaching may be important predictors of engagement. The conclusion will be that these factors should be optimized at the personal level.

You become resilient by dealing with small-scale stress’s that you’re able to learn from. Women have many more opportunities to do that in their lives than men do, in part because they have more exposure to the stresses that come from being excluded from the privileges that come automatically to little boys and that continues throughout women’s lives as they carry different burdens and expectations from men. Women still carry more child rearing responsibilities. They carry more of the emotional load in families. The gender biases that exist either beat you down, or you develop a sense of yourself and others as being okay.

Chanda Kochhar is the managing director and chief executive officer of ICICI Bank. She is widely recognized for her role in shaping retail banking in India.

Kochhar joined ICICI as a management trainee. In 1993, she was appointed as one of the core team members who were assigned the responsibility of setting up the bank. She was promoted to assistant general manager and then to deputy general manager. In 1998, she was promoted as the General Manager and headed ICICI Bank’s major client group, which handled relationships with ICICI’s top 200 clients. From 2007 to 2009, she was the bank’s chief financial officer & joint managing director.

This journey was no easy task. In her career which extends to over three decades of experience, she remained strong willed and alert. Her determination to make it to the top only grew from year to year. Kochhar’s career growth can be traced along with the expansion of the bank over the past several years. In 2009 she was appointed the Managing Director and the Chief Operating Officer of ICICI bank and in 2011 she was awarded the Padma Vibhushan.

When people value a goal as more valuable, meaningful, or relevant to their self-concept they are willing to expend more effort on it when necessary. The influence of individual differences in resilience results in different levels of effort.

The aim of a study by Tracy Ann Hudgins was to identify relationships between resilience, job satisfaction and anticipated turnover among nurse leaders.

This quantitative study by used a sample of 89 nurse leaders (bedside, department, division and organisational) from a multi-hospital health-care system in southwestern Virginia.

There were significant relationships between resilience, job satisfaction and anticipated turnover. Additionally, it was found that the variables of job satisfaction and anticipated turnover significantly overlapped in their meaning and created a new construct of intent to remain (ITR) that has a statistically significant relationship with resilience.

The conclusion of this study was that with higher resilience, nurse leaders are more likely to intend to remain in their leadership positions.