Resilience

Do you beat yourself up when you react to an unexpected situation, a mediocre performance or a colleague who rolls in with another excuse for missing a deadline? Here’s the deal, you are going to react - because you are human. And humans, charming as we are, can be unpredictable assholes. 

While you can’t stop the reaction, you can minimize the fallout. That’s where my four-step resilience process comes in. 

Historically, the people who make the biggest impact aren’t the ones who never fail - they’re the ones who bounce back like it’s their job: 

When Michael Jordan was cut from his high school basketball team, he didn’t crawl into a corner and cry into a Gatorade. He got to work. As he famously said, “I’ve missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. Twenty-six times I’ve been trusted to take the game-winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.” (Translation: greatness has a blooper reel.)

When Walt Disney got fired for "lacking imagination" - a firing that aged really well - he didn’t quit. He got back up, kept drawing, and reminded us decades later in Meet the Robinsons to “Keep moving forward.”

Setbacks are a fact of life. But when they sneak up on us like a bad Zoom angle, they can leave us feeling overwhelmed, anxious and lost. The research on resilience is clear: effective leadership requires more than tossing out a casual, “Do better next time.” What actually moves the needle is how you show up in those messy, uncertain moments - the conversations you initiate, the tone you set, and the actions you model.

Resilience is not about toxic positivity or pretending nothing’s wrong.  It’s about being present in the chaos, stabilizing your team, and finding the way forward. Leaders are uniquely positioned to use the resilience process to amplify strengths, bridge gaps, and make people feel seen, supported, and appreciated - even on days when everything goes sideways.

And let me be blunt: it chaps my ass when leaders set development goals for their team to “BE Resilient,” without offering a single tool, protocol, or clue. Telling someone to “be resilient” without a roadmap is like handing them a hammer and yelling, “Go build a house!” 

That is why this month’s blog series unpacks the four-step resilient process: react, reset, respond, recover - so you can handle whatever challenge comes your way with clarity, intention, and a little less swearing.