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July 25, 2020

How an ‘Anti-Resume‘ can help you make an amazingly successful career

How an ‘Anti-Resume‘ can help you make an amazingly successful career.

How many times have we been told to focus on our successes whenever we hit an obstacle? There are probably millions of articles and quotes that tell us to keep our chin high, and to keep our eyes on the goal as we pick ourselves up to march forward.
But what if there is another way to work our way up; one that requires us to embrace and list down all our failures and rejections in life?

That’s exactly what playwright and award-winning author Monica Byrne did.
On the anti-resume that she published on her website in 2013, she mentioned that from all the submissions and applications that she made in her professional life, her success rate was only 3%. This means that she failed 97% of the time and if we look at the rejection rate at face value, the number can be disheartening. But for Monica, she used her failures to help propel her to success and even bag an award from The North Carolina Arts Council later on.

But how exactly does highlighting our failures help us in our careers and open our eyes to view success differently the way it did for Monica and the others who have followed suit?

What is an Anti-Resume?

An anti-resume is basically just a document where you list down and highlight all the failures and rejections you’ve encountered while trying to achieve your goals. This is not for the purpose of putting the companies who rejected you in a bad light, but rather for you to retrospect on, and gain strength and wisdom from.

How can an Anti-Resume help you become better?

While it may be uncomfortable to face our past failures head-on, changing how we look at them can ultimately help shift our perception of success and how we better react to situations in the future.
It is human nature to want to get better and succeed at what we do because we have this inherent need for acceptance or recognition. Gaining an achievement is like getting a dopamine shot which then drives us to work harder and get better because we need to be able to continue filling this need.

However, in job hunting and in our career life in general, not everything goes our way and it is normal that we encounter rejections as we work our way up the corporate ladder. As a matter of fact, we most likely will receive more rejections than acceptance in our entire lives.
These hiccups may set us back and cause us to feel frustrated simply because a need was unmet. However, it is important to learn how to process these failures from a more constructive perspective because doing so can have a big and positive impact in your career growth.

But it is possible to shift our mindset from automatically sweeping failures under a rug, to consciously seeking understanding of why and how they happened. This enables us to reflect on our skills, competencies, the approach that we use, and our career objectives as we move forward.

Transformative Learning

According to sociologist Jack Mezirow, adults can open themselves up to higher and deeper learning by changing their viewpoint or by developing a different way of understanding a certain ‘disorienting dilemma’ or a situation. Known as transformative learning theory, it uses obstacles or failures as opportunities to make way for more meaningful choices and better actions in the future.

Application of this theory in our career not only helps us understand our personal capabilities better, it also helps us identify our learning process as adults which is a very critical item when it comes to skills development.
Although this learning theory was developed and used to educate people in the past, it is now being adapted and used in workplaces today and is acknowledged as an effective way to develop employees.

Application of Transformative Learning in your career development

In a career setting, this ‘dilemma’ can either be a job loss, a rejection of application, or declined promotion requests, among many others. How many applications have you sent in that never got positive results? How many times have we hoped for a promotion only to watch it be given to someone else? And how many times have we shifted our career paths simply because the last one did not work out?

While it is tempting for us to brush these off as things of the past, they have the potential to become positive learning experiences for us if we take the time to identify the critical items. You can start by asking yourself meaningful questions like, “Why am I applying for this job?” Or “What is the purpose behind this work or action?” This way, you are reminded of your motivations and the reasons why you followed this career path in the first place, then use that as one of your guiding references when mapping out your future plans.

Another thing that you can do is to request feedback for the purpose of self-improvement. Why did you not get the job? Reach out to the recruiter and ask for feedback. While not everyone might respond, some companies do provide interview feedback when requested. Why did you not get the promotion you were hoping for? Find the right time and avenue to request a feedback session from your manager.

Look at situations like these as opportunities for you to identify your strengths, as well as your areas of improvement with the help of another pair of eyes. Reflect on the strategies you used to get to this stage and come up with better action plans that you can apply in the future for better results. Failure can be a great catalyst of learning and has the potential to be a great teacher when perceived and processed constructively.

Foster self development using the Anti-Resume

Transformational learning happens when you are able to internalize and reflect on the “dilemma” and then use this new understanding to guide your next steps. Here is how you can utilize an anti-resume to foster self-development and career growth.

▪️ Identify the disorienting ‘dilemma’ — You do this by listing down all past failures in your anti-resume. It does not matter how long or how short it is, the goal is to put everything you consider as ‘career fail’ into writing. You can either write them on paper, in a journal, or online, as long as you see them in print.

Keep in mind that in order to turn a failure around, it requires mental strength, positive perspective, and perseverance because you need to be able to talk about these challenging experiences without shame or guilt. You should be able to talk about them openly with pride knowing that those uncomfortable situations can push you into innovating yourself to become better at the things that you do.

▪️ Conduct a self-examination — Look at each item and acknowledge your feelings towards these so-called setbacks. Look for that cathartic release by taking full responsibility for your actions and their outcomes. This helps remove the stigma that you may feel about each one of them and this can help slowly change your perception towards these items as failures and to start seeing them as opportunities or new challenges that you can undertake.

▪️ Assess the situation — Once you have listed all of them down, try to identify the things that you did that led to that result and what you could have done differently, as well as different approaches that could have yielded a different result. Now this is not for self-blaming, but for you to have a clear view of the changes that need to be made in the future.

From there, you then identify your new course of actions based on this now clearer view of the situation. New action items can include application for new roles, different career path, or different approach towards job hunting such as adding your resume to LinkedIn or any career development.

▪️ Acquiring skills and method adjustments — Now that you have identified your new goals, take the time to acquire skills necessary and apply additional preparations which you think may help you achieve your new goals. This can be making effective changes to your resume, or brushing up on your interview skills. This can even be acquiring new knowledge by signing up for training and certifications related to your field. The goal is to become more equipped and better prepared for what’s ahead.

▪️ Testing out new action plans — You do this by moving forward with your job applications, new career path or whichever it is that you wish to pursue. With a better understanding of previous ‘fails’ and having done the necessary changes, you now put what you have learned into action by applying them in the new tasks at hand. Remember that there is no real learning until a skill has been put into practice.

▪️ Gaining confidence and mastery — You will soon realize that you are slowly becoming more competent in your new set of skills and with your new perspective in life as you move along your career path. This becomes your reality now. You become more open to changes and reflective as a person because by doing so, you know that your actions are guided by continuous conscious learning and adjustment.

▪️ Continue to grow — Learning does not end; continue to look at things as opportunities for you to learn and grow as a person and career-wise. Continue to be an advocate of learning and change because the more we learn, the better we get at adapting and in delivering what is expected of us and even more. This type of thinking permanently alters the way we conduct things for the better.

This process requires a lot of patience, critical thinking, and most of all, immediate meaningful actions for it to succeed. It can even mean that you will have to experience mental and emotional conflict within yourself as you come to terms with your authentic self-realizations, some of which may be a little hard to swallow and accept in the beginning.

This means that it must come from a place of sincere desire to improve, but once you allow these perspective transformations to happen, you will soon realize that it creates a positive environment; one that allows exponential growth when it comes to self-actualization and adaptability to the world around you.

Applying this can seem tasking and even out of the ordinary, but it can be an extremely powerful tool to incorporate in your career life. 

How an Anti-Resume can help you redefine success

Because you now have a clearer view of the things that you had to overcome and you are aware of the changes that you had to make in order to get to where you are, even the smallest of success becomes a reason to celebrate and to continue pushing forward.
Highlighting failure can help you redefine success. Even the failures from the past are no longer seen negative, but instead viewed as building blocks to help you become a better version of yourself.

It also helps you value even the smallest progress. You will be able to see right through even when the results are not ideal because you are more focused on the fact that this allows you to have a better understanding on how to make it better in the future.

We need to see that the world is one big classroom, and that when building our careers, the sometimes uncertain steps on the career ladder can be the best place to learn and understand our limitations, our determination, and our ability to adapt and change for the better.

— Ann Hayes is a writer and a contributor to contentcampfire.com. She likes writing about job-searching and career-related topics in hopes to give a clear meaning to the journey of looking for work or changing careers.

• Posted 7.25.20 at 05:47 am by Roy Osing
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