The Most Important Perseverance Skills (With Examples)

When obstacles are piling on top of each other and everything in the pursuit of a goal is going wrong, it’s a nifty little quality called perseverance that pushes people to keep going.

Perseverance boils down to the drive and determination to complete an objective, regardless of the time it takes to finish or the challenges that emerge. Persevering people demonstrate resilience to obstacles in their way and persist tirelessly towards their set goals.

Key Takeaways:

• Perseverance helps you get through adversity. This is critical to achieving goals in both your professional and personal life.

• To develop your perseverance become more comfortable with failure, make improvement a priority, and keep your reasons in mind.

• Demonstrate perseverance on your resume by listing accomplishments, promotions, and other leadership responsibilities.

• Perseverance is a common theme in interview questions.

Nine Ways You Can Improve Your Perseverance Skills

1. Start rejecting the urge to quit a goal before it’s finished. Perseverance is a mindset that can be achieved. The first step to doing so is consistently rejecting the urge to quit a goal or task. It’s something that happens eventually with every project, whether or not it’s work-related.

   At its core, perseverance just means persisting despite this temptation.

2. Get more comfortable with failure. Many people lose their motivation to complete a task, job, or goal because they’re intimidated by the looming possibility of failure. A simple way to improve your perseverance skills is by getting acquainted and comfortable with the reality of failure.

   Understand that, even though failure might likely happen, it’s not necessarily a bad thing. One day you may find that failure contributed positively to your life in retrospect.

3. Create an action plan for every objective. Another pesky reason that a person’s goals can go unfinished is that they never put the effort into creating a detailed action plan. It’s insurmountably more difficult to complete a goal that isn’t well planned out because you’re never quite sure where you stand or what the next move is.

   Before committing to a project or objective, create an action plan that accounts for your entire journey to completion. An action plan makes it more simple to map out your success, plus it gives you an end in sight to the goal.

4. Build your professional network. A big reason that a goal becomes overwhelmingly difficult is that the person completing it doesn’t have the necessary resources. Oftentimes, some of the most useful resources in the professional world are the people around us. Work on building your professional network.

   It might strengthen your perseverance, and other important resume skills, because you’ll have more places to turn to ask for assistance the next time things get tough while completing a goal.

5. Maintain an optimistic mindset. Optimism is helpful when attempting to achieve a goal. Since a great deal of perseverance and persistence has to do with overcoming a negative or challenging circumstance, an optimistic mindset can do wonders for making it through.

   It’s a lot easier to finish an objective when you’re thinking positively than when you’re putting yourself down and have a pessimistic attitude.

6. Make improvement a priority. Many common goals that people shoot for, such as degrees and personal projects, have an undertone of bettering oneself. If you’re looking for ways to strengthen your perseverance, then making improvements on yourself a priority is a good start.

   By making this simple mindset shift, you’re effectively holding yourself to a higher standard than you did before.

   When it comes time to get through difficult goals that aren’t part of your own personal growth, like work projects, it won’t seem as hard because you will have already trained your perseverance.

7. Do things you care about. Most of us are familiar with the feeling of being forced to complete a task that we just simply aren’t interested in. It’s frustrating and makes quitting all the more attractive. However, this feeling can be overcome by doing things that you genuinely care about.

   When you’re at a job and finding that you couldn’t care less about the work you’re doing, this feeling is likely to start affecting your perseverance abilities. It might be time to find another option that interests you more to maintain or improve your persistence when completing professional goals.

8. Keep the reason you’re doing it in mind. At the beginning of committing to every goal, there’s a moment of reasoning. Maybe you’re going back to school to get your degree and be qualified for a better career.

   Or, perhaps you’re starting work on a long-term project at work to strengthen your company and build your professional portfolio of accomplishments.

   Whatever the reason that you’ve made it a priority to accomplish a particular goal, keep it in mind throughout the entire process. This helps you persist during difficulties because you always have that reasoning to fall back on.

9. Believe in yourself. There are many causes behind a person abandoning a project or goal. One of them is that the individual doesn’t have enough confidence in their abilities to get it done.

   Letting go of this attitude about yourself can improve your perseverance because your confidence keeps pushing you forward towards completing the goal.

Why Is Perseverance Important?

Nobody’s life is free from difficulties. If it was, then they never stepped outside of their comfort zone, pushed themselves to complete a goal, or challenged themselves in any way. Since challenges are practically an inevitability in the professional world, perseverance is extremely valuable. It’s more than a professional skill; it’s a life skill.

A person without perseverance and persistence isn’t tied to the need to accomplish their short and long-term goals. They often quickly abandon projects and jobs that become a challenge, and rarely improve their circumstances or skills. Lacking perseverance means also being devoid of a growth mindset. This has negative repercussions on professional and personal life.

Alternatively, an individual who demonstrates perseverance in their life, despite the difficulty, usually has a litany of accomplishments to show for it. Persistence in the face of obstacles is indicative of leadership qualities. That makes it a behavior that companies actively seek out in the people they hire.

Demonstrating Perseverance on a Resume

Showing an employer that you’re skilled in the art of perseverance on a resume is likely to earn you a phone call for an interview to hear more. Employers need people on their team who won’t crumble under tough circumstances, and rather power through. Below are a few ways you can demonstrate perseverance on a resume:

1. List it in the skills section. The most obvious way to let a hiring manager know that you’re up for persisting no matter the circumstance is to list perseverance as one of your soft skills. The word often catches attention and encourages the HR representative to read further and see what other attributes the candidate is bringing to the table.

2. Include your proudest achievements. When going for a more subtle approach, include information about your proudest achievements instead of or in addition to listing ‘perseverance or ‘persistence in your resume skill section.

   The achievements that you’re the proudest of often coincide with a goal you’ve persevered towards. This can be done by creating a resume portion out your educational background, awards received, or any other accomplishment that could send the message of being a persevering personality.

3. Mention any promotions or leadership responsibilities. Most candidates have been through leadership experience to a certain degree. Whether you were a manager at your last company, got a promotion, or were the captain of a college sports team, the experience gave you valuable leadership skills.

   Leadership experiences and promotions demonstrate to a hiring manager that employers have been impressed with your perseverance before, enough to give you more responsibility.

Example Resume Demonstrating Perseverance

Questions About Perseverance During a Job Interview

Once a hiring manager has spotted signs of a candidate who has perseverance, they’ll probably prod into this more with questions during an interview. While an interviewer might be straightforward in their approach to questioning an applicant’s persistence skills, they can also be more subtle.

Below are a few examples of questions that an interviewer might ask you to assess your perseverance

1. Tell me about a project or task that you finished, despite numerous setbacks. This interview question is about as direct as it can get when it comes to the topic of perseverance. It asks the interviewee to recall a difficult scenario in their career and explain how they persisted towards completing the goal despite this.

   When answering, give a clear description of what the project was and what setbacks you experienced. However, focus mainly on telling the interviewer about how you overcame this situation and demonstrated perseverance, instead of just talking about what a drag it was.

2. What is your proudest accomplishment? Usually, a person’s greatest accomplishment is an endeavor that took a lot of effort. The explanation of why you consider a particular achievement to be your greatest and how you managed to do it says a lot about your perseverance skills and grit.

3. How have you turned your dreams into a reality? There is no easy path towards turning your dreams into a reality, and an interviewer knows this. By asking you about how you’ve created the life of your dreams, a hiring manager is actually looking more into the struggles you’ve faced in the past and how you’ve persisted.

   When responding to this question, stick to one specific professional dream that you’ve continued with, regardless of challenges to turn it into a reality.

Frequently Asked Questions

1. What is perseverance?

Perseverance is the ability to focus and complete a goal when faced with challenges and setbacks. Perseverance occurs when you face a problem that interfere with you current desires or needs. In this situations you can have the choice to give up, but with perseverance you will carry on. In some people, this can take a lot of effort.

2. What qualities do I need to persevere?

Some qualities you need to persevere are desire, willpower, and habit. Perseverance takes a combination of theses qualities and others to help you get through challenges. Note that perseverance is as much as maintaining a constant belief in yourself as well as maintaining routines to help you succeed.

3. Is perseverance a soft skill?

Yes, perseverance is a soft skill. Like many soft skills, perseverance can be transferrable between professions and is not directly related to specific task. Perseverance is one of the most important soft skills you can develop because regardless of your career choices, you are always going to face setbacks. You must learn how to carry on and pursue your goals.

Author

Sky Ariella

Sky Ariella is a professional freelance writer, originally from New York. She has been featured on websites and online magazines covering topics in career, travel, and lifestyle. She received her BA in psychology from Hunter College.