Word Magic: All About Books: 10 Things You Might Not Know About How to be Resilient in Your Career: Facing Up to Barriers at Work by Dr. Helen Ofosu

An essential guide that equips readers with a knowledge base to make informed decisions around building and sustaining a thriving and resilient career.

Title: How To Be Resilient In Your Career: Facing Up to Barriers at Work

Author: Dr. Helen Ofosu

Publication Date: February 23, 2023

Pages: 196 (7 hrs. 30 min. on Audible)

Genre: Business / Careers / Management / Leadership

How To Be Resilient in Your Career: Facing Up to Barriers at Work shares vital career advice to help professionals navigate common "internally disruptive" career experiences such as harassment and bullying, imposter syndrome, membership in an underrepresented group, toxic workplaces, discrimination, and more.

Dr. Helen Ofosu draws on twenty years of helping employers acquire talent and coaching professionals through difficult career choices to unpack these layered and complicated issues in an easy-to-follow way. Dealing with the dark side of management, the book outlines various issues that can occur in the workplace, or during a person's career journey, and offers practical advice on how to overcome these obstacles and setbacks. Using her considerable HR experience, Dr. Ofosu also offers coveted insights from the employer's point of view. For people who have already tried other options to resolve their complicated career issues, this book offers an essential guide that equips readers with a knowledge base to make informed decisions around building and sustaining a thriving and resilient career.

How to be Resilient in Your Career: Facing Up to Barriers at Work is a reliable resource presented with nuance, depth, and specificity. Psychologists, psychotherapists, social workers, and HR professionals who are looking for effective advice when supporting people struggling with these issues, will greatly benefit from this book, as will early career professionals, and established earners looking to resolve their career issues.

You can purchase your copy at Amazon at https://t.ly/_rspc.

Other Buy Links:

Audible | Barnes & Noble | Indigo

Book Excerpt:

As a Work and Business Psychologist, I have seen the immense value of using psychometric testing to support my clients’ efforts. Psychometric tests provide test-takers with objective feedback about themselves. Depending on the test, it can give insights into someone’s personality and how that may impact their relationships with their peers, subordinates, superiors, clients, etc. In terms of personality tests, I prefer those that measure or are linked to the "Big Five" Factors or traits of personality sometimes known by the acronym OCEAN or CANOE. Regardless of the preferred acronym, the letters stand for Openness to experience (intellectually curious, imaginative, and spontaneous vs. practical, confentional, and preferring routine), Conscientiousness (discliplined, dependable, and careful vs. spontantaneous and disorganized), Extraversion (warm, sociable, and emotionally expressive vs. reserved and thoughtful), Agreeableness (trusting, helpful, and empathetic vs. critical, suspicious, and uncooperative), and Neuroticism (anxious and prone to negative emotions vs. calm, even-tempered, and secure). Each of us will fall somewhere on a continuum for each of these traits and these qualities are stable across our lifetime.

10 Things You Might Not Know About

How to be Resilient in Your Career: Facing Up to Barriers at Work

By Dr. Helen Ofosu, Psychologist, Consultant, Career and Executive Coach

1.      This book was inspired, in part, by someone in my business network who said he planned to write a psychology book. He had no work experience or formal training in psychology. I thought, “If he can do it, I can definitely do it!”

2.      The book started as a pandemic project to give me something to do that wouldn’t bother my husband or son during the lockdowns.

3.      Fourteen publishers rejected this book before Routledge accepted it. Although that sounds like a lot, many famous authors had their first books rejected many more times. Stephen King, Alex Haley, and James Patterson are a few examples.

4.      My approach to writing is based on advice from a close friend named Amber. She's a former journalist and an extraordinary writer who helped me find my authentic voice when I started blogging in 2013.

5.      I wrote this book for many reasons. One of them is that I believe if I had learned the lessons shared in this book earlier in my career, I’d have been more successful much sooner.

6.      My original title for this book was simply The Resilient Career. The marketing folks at Routledge strongly encouraged me to change it to How to Be Resilient in Your Career: Facing Up to Barriers at Work.

7.      Although I am very proud of this book, the ideas and content I set aside for future projects are at least as compelling—but also more niche and possibly more provocative. Lately, I’ve been reflecting on leadership challenges unique to people who are part of traditionally marginalized groups. If you’re curious, check out my recent blogs and podcast interviews.

8.      How to Be Resilient in Your Career: Facing Up to Barriers at Work has been nominated for a 2024 Trillium Award! This prestigious award is the province of Ontario's leading award for literature. Past Trillium winners include Margaret Atwood (author of The Handmaid's Tale) and Michael Ondaatje (author of The English Patient). The Trillium Award is open to books in any genre: fiction, non-fiction, drama, children’s books, and poetry. I could not be more excited.

9.      Through the magic of analytics and algorithms, it’s clear that the key messages in this book are not reaching the people who could benefit—especially if they have traditionally been marginalized. This book does not spark outrage or polarization—it’s mostly helpful and affirming. This means my book’s reach has been limited.

10. This book is also available on Audible. When my young adult son started listening to it on Audible, he said it felt amazing, like I was talking just to him. Other listeners who are not close to me have said the same thing.

About the Author

In good times and bad, resilience is one of the major keys to success – including career success. Dr. Helen Ofosu believes this applies to employees and entrepreneurs, individual contributors, subject matter experts, leaders, and executives.

That’s why her approach to career and executive coaching is to help people get ahead in a way that insulates them from future setbacks – or recover if things have gone sideways. This is also why, as a consultant, she helps organizations become stronger and more resilient, so they are ready for both the anticipated and the unexpected challenges that all organizations face at some point.

Part of what sets her apart from many career and executive coaches is her experience on the inside, as an HR and professional development professional, within large corporate workplaces and her intimate knowledge of typical HR processes and systems.

Clients come to her when the stakes are high. They can count on her to share insights and customized services that few others can deliver. They love that she has developed countless hiring tools and helped to resolve many HR problems over the years.

Her “insider” experience gives her clients an edge in getting hired and promoted in the public (and private) sector, and in managing their careers as they progress.

And as an Industrial/Organizational Psychologist (her field is more commonly known as Work and Business Psychology), she takes an evidence-based approach by using the latest research and best practices to increase the odds of her clients’ success.

Author Links