Building resilience is one of the cornerstones of success in business—especially entrepreneurial pursuits. The ability to pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and get right back to the task at hand is paramount to success in business, at every level.

Whether you’re a seasoned sales professional or just starting out on your entrepreneurial journey, these tips for building and maintaining personal resilience will put you on the path toward having the strength and flexibility required for success.

Pick Your Battles

Knowing your strengths is a key component to success in any endeavor; leveraging your strengths in your work will get you farther, faster, than spinning your wheels in areas where you lack knowhow and confidence. No one is good at everything, though, and learning when to power through a difficult course of action versus when to delegate is important. Building resilience includes challenging oneself, but it also means knowing when a task is best given to someone else—and being OK with that.

Build & Maintain Your Self Confidence

Building personal resilience relies heavily on recognizing your strengths and maintaining your confidence in them. You know what you know—make sure others know it too! Personal resilience takes practice and self-reflection. Take some time to honestly consider which facets of your profession you’re best at and make a list you can reference to boost your self-confidence and bolster your self-awareness.

Hone Your Skills

When you know your strengths, you can get to work on improving them. When your areas of expertise and your specialized skills are all second nature, the business of bouncing back from times of difficulty—or even failure—becomes easier. Call on your talents, experience, and knowledge to help you get through tough times, and build on those unique advantages to move on from setbacks. Honing your skills also reinforces your self-confidence, creating a powerful feedback loop for yourself as you maintain your personal resilience.

Be a Team Player

Business is built on relationships. You want—need—to be someone people want to work with. Reliable. Helpful. Trustworthy. Talented. The list of superlatives people want from their teammates and networks can go on and on, but the bottom line is this: being an indispensable member of your professional community is key to building professional and personal resilience. When your network is strong, bouncing back and moving forward—and extending successes—is much easier, because you can call on those relationships as you seek new opportunities, constructive feedback, and emotional support.

Manage Emotions During Losses—and Wins

The most resilient people have a keen understanding of their emotions and are skilled at managing them. This doesn’t mean building resilience requires stoicism—the opposite, in fact. Those who take the time to see the good in things and spread their positive outlook find it easier to work through rough patches. They see each experience, positive or negative, as a way to learn. These are also the people who are self-aware enough to see when things are going well and celebrate them.

What strategies do you use for building your personal resilience? Share your thoughts on Twitter and be sure to follow @Cydcor on Instagram to learn more about our company and our culture.

By Vera Quinn, President and Chief Revenue Officer at Cydcor

When you’re ten years old, your mom is just about the last person in the world you want to hang out with. So, when my then ten-year-old son asked me if I wanted to join him for a day hike, I knew I couldn’t refuse, even though it would mean sweating profusely as I drag myself, panting and terrified, uphill for two hours, getting whacked in the face by branches, tripping over rocks, and the risk of falling over the edge of a steep cliff. Refusing to let him down, I took one agonizing step at a time, knowing eventually, if I just kept moving forward, I would climb my way to the top.

That day on the mountain left me with some valuable lessons about what is possible when you take risks, face your fears, and dig in to overcome the things that you believe are holding you back.

Here are 7 ways taking risks can change your life for the better:

1. Do Things You’re Not Good At – Nobody likes to look stupid or fail, but only by risking embarrassment, disappointment, and failure do we create room for real change, growth, and astounding personal achievement. Put yourself out there, get uncomfortable, and create your own opportunity.
2. Exceed Expectations ­­- Other’s and Your Own – My son never thought I’d accept his invitation to go for a long hard hike, and I never thought I’d be able to finish it. But by pushing to exceed both my son’s expectations and my own, I opened the door to an entirely new experience and a new accomplishment I once believed was impossible.
3. Face Obstacles Head On – As I stumbled over rocks, vines, and narrow, slippery pathways, I realized obstacles are unavoidable and the ONLY way to continue forward is to face them as they come and conquer them one by one.
4. Stand up to Your Fears – Change is scary and so is growth. For me, climbing my personal mountain meant dealing with my intense fear of heights. But I refused to fail, not this time, and I refused to let my son down. Deciding that failure was no longer an option became my secret weapon to overcome my greatest fear.
5. Fake it Till You Make it – Find your motivation as you go. Sometimes, you just don’t feel strong enough to take risks and face the challenges ahead. But what if you trust that your motivation will grow along the way? Sometimes just getting started is enough to unlock the motivation you needed to keep going.
6. Take it one step at a time – Don’t focus on the mountain top you’ve got to conquer. Instead, focus on just getting through that next step, and before you know it, the mountaintop will come to you.
7. Trust in the payoff – Even if you can’t see the benefits of risk taking, trust that eventually the payoff will reveal itself. While I struggled up that steep mountain path, I wondered what magical fairies might greet me at the peak to make it all worth it. I decided to believe there would be a payoff, even if I couldn’t imagine what it would be. When I saw the look on my sons face as I finally reached the top, I knew what all the hard work had been for.

On the mountain and in life, you can only discover what you can do when you say yes to challenges, as daunting as they may seem. No matter what obstacles have presented themselves over the years, I’ve learned that if I just keep putting one foot in front of the other, I can accomplish almost anything.