Your most impressive résumé isn’t on paper

Maybe you’re managing a team while being a caregiver, or breaking sales records while working remotely as a single parent. Each challenge carves a mark on your journey to growth, purpose, and legacy, and earns a spot on your résumé. 

A résumé of challenges is not a list of defeats, but a record of victories: the battles you’ve fought, the lessons you’ve learned, and the resilience that will carry you forward. Having an awareness and understanding of your résumé of challenges helps you understand your own strengths and ability to rise. 

Being able to speak to your honest (nonfabricated or misrepresented) résumé of challenges before and/or during a job interview can be an authentic way to highlight what you bring to the table, which may not be visible in your submitted résumé.

Benefits of Having a Résumé of Challenges

1. Provides proof of critical intangible traits and abilities 
Challenges not only show what you’ve been through. They show your resilience, adaptability, grit, and problem-solving ability. A résumé of challenges highlights strength of character. It can demonstrate your integrity, as well as your ability to stay honest and truthful and to maintain ethical principles, even when it is difficult or personally detrimental. It allows you to demonstrate your growth by talking about the lessons, skills, and wisdom left behind from each challenge. Also, your résumé of challenges can be proof that you can thrive in uncertain environments.

2. Demonstrates credibility
Sharing and discussing your résumé of challenges and what you have learned from them provides transparency. It makes you more relatable and garners more respect. It demonstrates authenticity. Also, being authentic—and having faced adversity and learned from it—makes you a better leader, and one that people trust.

3. Boosts self-confidence, fosters good mental health
Reviewing your résumé of challenges can help remind you of what you are capable of accomplishing when facing new obstacles. This will feed and encourage your own personal confidence and empowerment. It also prepares you to face new obstacles without unwarranted fear. And maybe most of all, it helps you recognize your personal worth—beyond job titles or job descriptions.

4. Reframes setbacks as assets
Your résumé of challenges provides you with the opportunity to explain how your failures were used as stepping stones to higher growth and development. It can help you transform pain into purpose, showing value in lived experiences.

5. Inspires others, leaves a legacy
Sharing your résumé of challenges normalizes struggle as a part of success. It creates a ripple effect that motivates others to keep going. And lastly, your résumé of challenges is part of your legacy. It’s a record of strength that you can pass on to the next generation. Your story will tell them: Here’s what I endured. Here’s what I learned. Here’s how you can rise, too. In many ways, that résumé becomes the most valuable document of your life, because it tells the truth about who you are to your core.

Here’s My Résumé of Challenges

As an example, here are some things on my résumé of challenges. I was the first female, first Black person, and/or first Black female to achieve my roles in white male-dominated industries in corporate America. Because of this, I had to navigate the daily realities of sexism, racism, sexual harassment, and classism. 

During my engineering days, I often had to spend time in environments that did not have basic bathroom or sleeping accommodations for women. I also had to face many personal challenges while still showing up to perform and grow in my career, such as the loss of many dear loved ones, caring for my husband during his battle with colon cancer, and multiple health issues.

Persevering through all these adversities, while maintaining my integrity, was proof of my resilience and character, earned me respect and trust, and shaped me into a person and leader who values diversity and inclusion, knows how to build high-performing teams, and strives to make everyone feel valued and appreciated.

The next time you update your professional résumé, take a moment to update your résumé of challenges, too. Write down the hurdles you’ve cleared, the moments you thought you wouldn’t survive but did, and the lessons that reshaped you. Because in the end, it’s not the titles we hold that define us, but the challenges we’ve overcome to get there. 

And when you know and understand your résumé of challenges, you’ll never again doubt your ability to rise.

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