I met a young woman, who I'll call Barbara, on a business trip to California. She was working at a successful new company, at the start of her career and proud of her position as her company's first ever sales manager. It's exciting to hold the ‘first’ job within an organisation. You help set the tone and scope of the position. Also, the company was beginning to take off and, suddenly, even her own family and friends were talking about it. For a young person early in her career, she was ideally placed.

But Barbara had just been hit with what felt like very bad news. She was going to be ‘layered over’. The company was hiring a new person above her to run North American sales. He'd be inserted between her and her current boss, so that now, instead of heading sales herself, she'd be an employee in the department she had created.

This change felt like a huge blow. She worried that it would decrease her status and authority. Her salary wasn't changing, but her enthusiasm about her job and her abilities definitely waned. She also told me that she was afraid she was ‘getting old’ and running out of chances to rise. (At twenty‐something? Old? By her standard, I should have been retired, perfecting my golf swing and dining at 5 pm.) She reached out for advice. Should she quit?

I didn't think she should quit. Having a person inserted above you can feel like a demotion, for sure, but within a high‐growth company, it often isn't. It certainly wasn't in her case. She was doing very well at her job, but the company was growing exponentially. The company needed someone with deeper experience. Barbara was still pretty inexperienced and young (despite her worries about her age). She didn't have the background that the company thought was needed for this senior role.

Also, I happened to know the new hire, and I thought he was a great leader and someone who cared about developing his people. I believed Barbara would learn a lot from working for him. I encouraged her to stick it out, and to work on developing more stamina for the vagaries of work (rather than working on her résumé and seeking a new job).

She decided to stay put and give it a try. She very quickly adjusted to the new boss and began to thrive again. The experience of succeeding at her job created more energy for work, which translated into more success. She wound up landing one promotion then another from her new boss. She even got promoted while out on maternity leave, which shouldn't be a shocking detail, but sadly still is in some corporations. She was there for another four‐plus years, and has since moved on and continued to rise.

The ‘Ah‐ha!’ of Barbara's story: stamina is a success superpower

When people leave perfectly good jobs or stay far too long in bad ones, it's easy to blame poor decision‐making or bad luck or a lack of self‐discipline. But often, as I've seen, the real problem is inadequate stamina. You need stamina to stick with a job after being layered over, for example, as in Barbara's case. Your feelings are hurt. You don't know how it will pan out. You have to hang in there when disappointed, rather than quitting prematurely or stewing with resentment, and letting that decrease your productivity and enthusiasm.

You also need stamina to look for a better job when it's time to move on or you've been let go. Stamina helps you pursue better opportunities at your current place of work, and stick in there without losing hope. It takes stamina to move to a new city or country and create new contacts and friends. Or if you're leading a team and must continually advocate for them to get the resources they need to do their jobs. Or to fight back when you have been wronged. These are all typical examples of the role of stamina at work. We tend to think about stamina in terms of athletics, but it is also a key characteristic of those who have rewarding, long careers.

Some people face extremely challenging political, economic and/or personal factors and have to call on reserves of stamina that most of us will never need to tap. I mentor a young Afghan woman who had gone to university in Bangladesh, but was back home in Kabul when the country fell to the Taliban in 2021. Talking to her on WhatsApp as the Taliban surrounded the city, and then losing all contact when the city fell, definitely made my own ‘challenges’ with stamina seem miniscule and insignificant.

She did eventually get out to safety, I'm happy to report. But the ongoing challenges she has surmounted in her effort to build a stable life certainly put in perspective the kinds of struggles most of us face. Thinking about her situation also points to another aspect of stamina: when we hear stories of people who miraculously rose above incredibly difficult circumstances, you can bet that stamina played a part.

We often talk about stamina as ‘just doing it’ or ‘gritting it out’. But this is not what I mean. Forcing yourself to stick with tasks you hate can lead to burnout and to giving up. Repeatedly saying to yourself, ‘Just do it!’ and ‘Stop complaining!’ saps energy, rather than generating it.

I think of career stamina as something far more positive. It's that initial discipline or perseverance plus the positive force of enthusiasm. Enthusiasm grows from liking what you're doing and succeeding at it. Stamina is a virtuous cycle. Working hard with enthusiasm generally leads to accomplishment and success. That experience of success in turn helps generate more enthusiasm and energy, which leads to more wins. I see stamina as an empowerment equation: Perseverance + Enthusiasm = Stamina.

Stamina helps create a sense of agency in your life. And unlike an immutable, personal characteristic you're born with, such as having blue eyes, say, stamina can be built. You develop career stamina much as a runner builds stamina for a big race — by practising specific skills and mental habits, and avoiding others. Part of loving your day job is incorporating regular stamina ‘mental workouts’ into your normal routine. Here's how.

Power Perspective #1:
Self‐care supports stamina

If you work in healthcare, self‐care is part of the job description. In all professions, it's an important part of building and maintaining career stamina. As Ralph Waldo Emerson put it, ‘The first wealth is health’.

The importance of self‐care became obvious during the pandemic, when the lockdown put an end to most social outings and shuttered recreational outlets such as gyms, theatres and restaurants. Many people saw firsthand how the lack of these kinds of activities can lead to lethargy, burnout and emotional distress (such that not even weekly bread baking could alleviate). Even minor‐seeming acts of self‐care help us be at our personal best; when we're not, many normal activities can seem overwhelming.¹ This can include things like getting up to go to work, meeting clients and making decisions.

One of the most important forms of self‐care can be done lying down (and should be): sleep. Inadequate sleep is associated with a slew of poor outcomes, including cognitive decline and psychological distress.

Arianna Huffington, who has written extensively on the importance of sleep and has referred to herself as an ‘insomniac turned sleep evangelist’, experienced first‐hand the price of inadequate sleep when she collapsed from exhaustion. As she puts it, ‘It’s only relatively recently that we’ve come to fully grasp the medical consequences of sleep deprivation’.²

Sleep studies point to another important form of self‐care, one that generally requires getting out of bed and getting dressed: social support. I always think about the spectators at marathons who stand on the sidelines and eagerly hand out bottles of water to the runners. Marathoners need hydration and a lot of stamina. Those cheering fans offering water also provide a stamina‐boosting dose of social support. Social support is so important that, during the pandemic, some sports teams competed in empty stadiums filled with cardboard cut‐outs of fans. Even paper people, it turns out, can help increase stamina.

I belong to three book clubs, not only because I like reading, but also because the members are part of my support team. I also count on my husband and friends for social support. Companies increasingly pay for career coaches for senior and mid‐level managers, not only to help them improve their leadership skills, but also because this regular human support helps spark better performance.

Good self‐care can also mean spending time alone: taking a walk in the woods, drawing, cooking, gardening or working out. I try to take a break every day to do something physical. An hour at the gym, doing laps in the pool or being out on the court playing badminton helps me to refocus and relieve tension. Many forms of self‐care go together, like hiking and chatting with a friend, or my reading groups that let me escape into a novel and get out of my own thoughts, as well as socialise.

Self‐care can be particularly important during moments of career upheaval. The support of friends and time spent doing personally nourishing activities can help you maintain the stamina you need to keep going, as a woman I'll call Colette recently realised.

Power Perspective #2:
Don't over‐focus on the negative

Disappointments and moments of discouragement will happen in your career; you can't prevent it. Organisations grow, shrink and pivot. They make structural changes frequently. These transformations have nothing to do with you. Though they are no reflection on your work or your worth, they can make you feel terrible. Other times, a setback is due to your performance. It's important to listen to feedback and adjust your behaviour accordingly. But even then, a rejection or failure generally won't determine how you do in the long run.

Your manner of dealing with it, however, does.

Obsessing about setbacks doesn't make them go away (even though rehashing all the gory details can feel very compelling, I know!). Negative rumination can, however, damage your career because it saps stamina. I've seen the tendency to fixate on the negative during performance reviews. If I tell people nine good things they've done, and offer one piece of constructive feedback, they'll focus all of their energy on that single critique. It's important to listen to constructive feedback in order to progress and thrive, sure, but you also have to really hear and think about the positive input during an assessment of your performance, something we will discuss later.

We all focus on the negative to some degree. Rejection and criticism hurt, and we can't help thinking about these painful experiences. We examine decisions that led to undesirable outcomes as a way to avoid making the same mistake in the future. Dwelling on the negative is a natural tendency. Psychologists call this tendency a ‘negativity bias’, and the human species developed it for a purpose. ‘People have evolved to pay more attention to negative information and experiences than to positive ones’, says Glenn Geher, an evolutionary psychologist at the State University of New York at New Paltz. ‘Negative information is threatening. Circumventing those threats in the future has a big payoff.’³

Unfortunately, when it comes to the kinds of disappointments and setbacks we face in the modern world, our negativity bias ‘can bite us in the butt in a lot of ways’, says Geher, ‘such as by making us overly anxious’. Or by making us feel that we should obsess about every change or disappointment at work.

The better, more stamina‐supporting approach to setbacks? Notice when our emotions have gotten the upper hand and then talk them back down, using facts and clear thinking. Psychologists call this ‘reappraisal’, and research shows that it can really help. ‘You look at how you're appraising the situation, then see if you can reappraise it better’, says Geher. Your immediate thought might be, Someone else got the job I wanted. I must be terrible. Geher says:

A reappraisal could be, ‘I didn't actually fit the job description perfectly.’ Or, ‘It's an over‐flooded job market right now and there are a lot of other applicants.’ That kind of reappraisal can really work. Not always, but it's usually one of the best tools we have.

It's important to make a conscious effort to focus on your successes throughout your career because positive emotions help shore up stamina. Research bears out the power of positive emotions. Experiments inducing positive emotions have shown that they ‘broaden the scope of visual attention’, while fMRI studies (measuring brain activity) show that positive emotions literally expand people's field of vision. Barbara Fredrickson, a psychologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, has devoted years to researching the value of positive emotions and experiences. Even small positive moments, such as witnessing a beautiful sunset or getting a bag of candy, can improve people's focus and performance at their jobs. (No wonder tech firms offer so many kinds of treats and snacks to workers for free.)

Positive moments build ‘durable personal resources’, such as creativity, energy, enthusiasm and drive. Psychologists see positive emotions as another part of our evolutionary toolkit. The purpose of positive emotions, as shaped over millions of years of evolution and natural selection, is to help build resources people need to survive.⁴

In other words, focusing on the positive helps you stay in the game.

As Fredrickson and others have shown, negative emotions, in contrast, can result in a narrowing of perception and more limited ideas. Finding yourself in a mental ‘crouch’ can shrink your range of vision and ability to generate solutions.

I often coach people on this skill when helping them prepare for job interviews. Young women, in particular, will talk about the qualifications they might be missing and the experiences they haven't had. They sometimes don't realise their strengths or know that companies don't expect as much from people early in their careers. I remind them to talk about what they have done. If asked about leadership experience, talk about when they worked as a camp counsellor or were part of student government. If asked about teamwork, mention their years on a sports team, the debate team, or the robotics club. If questioned about taking initiative, mention a club they started or events they organised. If asked about analytics, talk about their participation in the university's student investment management group. These experiences count and display real strengths.

Sharing your strengths helps hiring managers do their job. Most companies are looking for people with a couple of really strong areas, or ‘spikes’, as opposed to perfect all‐arounders. Increasingly, companies focus on leveraging strengths, and you should, too. Yes, you need to improve areas of weaknesses, but (barring any major, career‐destroying problems) it's far more important to identify your strengths and build on them. In an interview, emphasise your strong points and sketch for interviewers the connection between your experiences and what's needed for the position. You can always add the fact that you are curious to learn about other areas.

Another reason not to let a setback discourage you is that the opportunity you lost may well come back around. The first runner‐up sometimes gets the crown. The reasons for this vary. The top candidate might withdraw. A new person might be put on the reviewing team. A background check might yield such high praise of you that the firm elevates you in the ranking. You don't know what's going to happen until the very end because recruiting isn't usually a transparent process, and many factors are at play.

A woman I know was the compromise candidate between two factions at a professional services firm. The partnership group was polarised. Each faction had a clear favourite, and neither would agree on the other's first choice. Since my friend was everyone's second choice, they decided to offer her the position.

She could have worried that everyone would know she wasn't the first pick or that this reflected on her ability or fit. But no one ever remembers the process. (Like all the kids who enter universities off the wait‐list and go on to be excellent students and leaders, what counts is what you do when you get there.) She took the job, and threw herself into it. She's still there, getting good reviews and loving her work.

People often look at my career today, after I've been at it for 40 years, and assume my success has been constant and steady, with no disappointments along the way. As with most people who've had long and vibrant work lives, this is not true. I've lost out on desired jobs, then had them come back around.

After my brief, disappointing stint in marketing at American Express, when I was looking for a job as a consultant in Australia, I got pretty far along in the process with a small Sydney‐based firm (from chapter 1). The lead partner there told me that, as a later applicant, I was number five out of four. If one of their first four dropped out, I could have the job. (He is a charming salesperson, but even he couldn't make that situation sound appealing.)

Being ‘wait‐listed’ for a job I wanted didn't make me feel great. In the end, though, one of their offerees declined the position. I took the job and moved to Sydney. I did well and stayed there longer than any of the other three people hired in that round. No one remembered that I was fifth out of four.

Later, when I was eligible to be considered for partner at what had then become BCG, four of us were up at the same time, three men and me, the most senior woman in the office.

Two of the men made partner. The third did not. Nor did I. It's fairly common to not make partner at the first opportunity, but it was disappointing.

When I asked for feedback, one person told me I was too informal with my clients, as evidenced by the fact that they were kissing me hello. Clients often would kiss me on the cheek when we met, which was a normal manner of greeting between professional men and women in Australia. If they weren't kissing the male consultants, maybe it was because they were put off by their beards. This suggestion of excessive informality was rattling, and I was disheartened not to be elected to the partnership.

But the story didn't end there. Six months later, I was up for partner again. This time, I made it. As it turned out, my previously criticised familiarity with clients was a strength. Out of the 250 partners, I was one of the top 15 revenue generators my first year, partly due to the fact that clients felt so comfortable with me.

An opportunity may also come back around because you've gained new competencies that make you more desirable. This could be due to experiences at work or skills and knowledge you've acquired while pursuing an outside interest or passion, as Marla Stone saw 40 years into her career.

Power Perspective #3:
Remember that you have options

Another stealth stamina‐sapper is feeling stuck in a job you don't like, or that no longer challenges you or holds your interest. It's normal to feel under‐challenged or stagnant at times, but a prolonged feeling of being trapped in the wrong role can lead to decreased creativity, resignation and depression — and insufficient energy to improve your position and enjoy the other things you love.

First, find out if your dissatisfaction is common at this stage of your career by talking to friends who are at similar levels and perhaps reaching out to your board of directors (which I explain in chapter 3). If so, that may point toward you needing stamina to move through this phase and rise into a role with more autonomy or authority. Recognising that you're experiencing common, early‐career discomfort can help you make a conscious choice to stay put for a certain amount of time, which is very different than being ‘stuck’.

If the problem is the job, the best way to feel more free is to consider other options. No alternatives in sight? It's time to do some job dating. Seriously.

While people in unhappy marriages generally don't date around in search of a better spouse, if you're frustrated in your job, you definitely should go on some ‘job dates’ — as in, meetings with people in other firms. Job dating can remind you of your value, which might raise your morale enough to make your current position seem fine. Or, you might realise you want to leave and can. Discovering possibilities gives you an immediate shot of energy and a confidence boost. Suddenly, you find yourself thinking, Wow! Look how many people want me! Whereas before you saw an airless cubicle, now you see an open vista.

A man I know in Singapore, who I'll call Tim Liu, oversees sales in China for his firm. During his seven years in that role, he's built up a team of nearly 50 people. He'd like to try something new, but there are few positions locally with equal pay and authority, and he doesn't want to make a geographic move, so for the time being, he's staying put. He goes on periodic job dates as a way to stay current on new companies, to network and to learn about possibilities for people he knows. He also encourages those on his team to job date as well, partly to test and reaffirm their commitment to their roles. ‘I always say to people, “If you're the least bit unhappy or dubious about whether you want to be here, go ahead and talk to other people”. It may be surprising to hear that I say this to my own employees. But I'd rather have them happy with me than wondering all the time.’

While you've probably heard the truism that looking for a job is a full‐time job, job dating is lighter and more fun. You're just casually scoping out the scene, not seeking commitment. You might discover that your skills are in high demand, as human resources professional Mariabrisa Olivares did when she went on some job dates.

If you want to try job dating, you can respond to recruiters, as Mariabrisa did, search on LinkedIn and career sites, check your university's alumni association, attend networking events, review job listings at companies that interest you and reach out to professional connections. If you find yourself in a room with someone from a field or firm that looks intriguing, do what I did when I met Vint Cerf — send an email asking if that firm might consider you. Or ask for a 30‐minute informational interview about the company or industry.

Talk to satisfied friends about their jobs. Who feels valued at work and well‐paid? Could you move into that field or find a job with that company? The process also forces you to update your social media profile and CV, always good actions to take.

Power Perspective #4:
Acknowledge that you are not totally in control

We don't have total control over our careers (even if we follow all the steps in this book). Thinking that we can determine every single thing that happens to us also saps stamina.

Sometimes, real disappointments occur that are out of our control. In my own case, after more than a decade of working successfully as a consultant, I started looking for a new role. I'd been advised by executive recruiters to get out of consulting or be prepared to remain in it forever. Firms want to see that you can run a business, too.

In 1999, I was offered a great new job building and running the international division of the multinational financial services firm Charles Schwab. It was based in San Francisco, so it would entail a huge move for my family back to California. This was no small consideration. I'd just had my second son the year before, so we were looking at moving across the Pacific with two children under the age of four. My husband would also need a job in the States.

Linton also secured a position at Schwab, and we all made the move. It was a big upheaval, and it took us some time to get settled back in California. The boss who hired me left before I arrived, so I no longer had a supporter at the firm. Then, after we'd been there just two years and were finally feeling at home, the firm shuttered its overseas businesses to focus on the US domestic market. I'd given up my partner role at BCG to build Schwab's international division. Now there was no international division.

I was devastated. I knew I was not being rejected and this was just part of the company's strategic decision‐making process. But this decision from the top that was out of my control impacted me and my entire family, and meant I had to let go of everyone on my team. It was horrible to have to fire people, to dismantle a team I'd worked so hard to build. (The fact that my job was also disappearing made me feel a bit less guilty, but only a bit.) I enjoy developing opportunities for people, and this was the exact opposite.

The experience turned into a time of real questioning for me. Had I done the right thing by leaving BCG and moving my family to the US? Had I damaged my career with this choice?

Another big question came to me a little late, in retrospect, one that was more positive: Was there an opportunity here I wasn't seeing, such as the chance to take a little time off to stay home with my kids? Or the chance to switch industries or roles?

I wound up taking the severance package offered and staying home for an entire year. I used the first six months to relax, recuperate and be with my sons. Then I started looking for another role. I got a terrific role at Visa after that year out, but it took real stamina for me to move past this disappointment and be ready to start looking again.

My experience is not all that unusual. Firms change course. A great boss leaves. You get layered over. Your company is acquired or folds. When it comes to careers, all kinds of things affect you that are outside your control. As much as developing a sense of agency matters when it comes to supporting stamina, so does realising that you are not totally in control. This is a truth that COVID made very clear — none of us is totally in control of our lives. Hopefully, this is a lesson we can draw on from this incredibly difficult pandemic period.

If you fail to recognise the very real role of luck or chance in challenges that arise, you can feel as if any glitch in your plan is a personal failure, and one that you should have been able to avoid. This refusal to acknowledge fate can lead to overly negative thinking and over‐focusing on rejection and failure — mindsets that sap stamina.

You're also not in total control of how things might change in your favour, such as when an opportunity comes back around. Recently, a search firm reached out to me about a great job that didn't interest me. I recommended a friend who was looking around and who I thought would be a perfect fit. The firm reached out to him. He went through a series of interviews, and really enjoyed his conversations with people at the firm. They seemed to like him, too.

Eventually, it came down to just two people, my friend and another guy. The search firm assured my friend that he was the better choice. My friend was really excited. But then he got the bad news: the company chose the other person because he had a more traditional background for the position.

My friend was disappointed. He'd become very interested in this company and the role. But he's an upbeat person in general, and he knew how important it was not to let discouragement sap his stamina or second‐guess every conversation he'd had. He also knew that none of us has control over hiring decisions.

Lo and behold! The firm rejected the other candidate in the end, due to something that arose in the final negotiations. The company offered the job to my friend, and he accepted it. He is off to a great start there.

Recognising the role of luck in your life also helps keep you humble as you rise. Taking all the credit for your own good fortune can offend people who have contributed. It also can decrease your own drive. Dan Springer, the CEO of DocuSign, puts it this way:

I do think you have to be in a position where you accept that both good fortune and bad fortune will come your way. You can't get overly down or overly up and get complacent. You have to have that energy to keep charging ahead.⁷

Springer says that only about a third of the things he's done in his life have turned out exactly how he wanted them to. This is important to remember for all of us. Just as giving in to discouragement when things go wrong can sap stamina, so can assuming you are solely responsible for your bad or good fortune.

For some people, part of stamina is knowing that your work has an impact beyond yourself. Many of us are working in part to support our family, and this responsibility helps push us on. Others may see their leadership role as helping establish a new norm for the next generation. For me, being in a position to help others — by offering advice, making connections, writing recommendations, sharing information about opportunities they might be able to pursue — is a huge part of the pleasure I get from work. Doing this ‘extra‐curricular’ mentoring absolutely contributes to my own career stamina.