How to Be Resilient

Yesterday, my friend Christine gave me the most meaningful compliment I’ve ever received. She told me “Jaye, you are the most resilient person I know.”  

Christine went on to say “So many people experience challenges and set-backs and it takes them down - but you tackle each one with such bravery and courage. How do you do it?” 

I took a big deep moment and let myself take in that compliment. I am really proud of my grit and tenacity. I often feel uncomfortable talking like this, fearful that it sounds cocky and self-centered. But talking this way about resilience feels different. Resilience - to me - is about curiosity and vulnerability and the deep belief that you may not have the answers but that you are certain you can navigate it. Resilience - to me - is about acknowledging that you feel terrified but you’re still going to do it anyway. 

I’ve done some pretty gritty things over the last five years. I moved to a remote cabin in the woods alone with my son during the pandemic. I started my own company. I asked my husband for a divorce. I walked away from every penny I owned in order to keep my house. I went no-contact with my family of origin after 40 years of struggling with their toxicity in my life - just to name a few.

I’ve been thinking about resilience a lot lately. At The Engine, we just hosted a retreat for fifty CEOs and the theme of the day was “resilience.” It felt like a timely theme for the day considering all that is happening at a macro-level with the uncertainty facing science, innovation, and funding in America right now.  A colleague of mine in the startup finance sector and I were chatting about it and he said “this is a moment for the cockroaches - the founders who can find a way to scavenge what they need to stay alive.”  

I agree. This is a hard moment for Tough Tech entrepreneurs. Investors are more risk-adverse than they’ve been in years and non-dilutive funding feels unpredictable. Even if you do get that grant, who knows if suddenly you’ll be blocked from access to millions of dollars or if the entire funding agency’s priorities shift overnight. It’s a wild world out there right now.

So how do you build up your resilience and, as Ted Lasso says, be more like a goldfish? How do you shake it off and just trudging through the messy middle of the mucky hard stuff? 

I was reflecting at that lunch with Christine on how I think that I became a resilient person. The way I see it: resilience is a flywheel. At some point, you challenge yourself to go past your comfort zone. You take a risk and you learn that it didn’t crush you. You push yourself to take one step towards solving an audacious problem and, when you get into the eye of the storm, you realize that you are okay. You aren’t drowning. Or, maybe, you “fail” and realize that that getting “crushed” wasn’t as bad as you imagined. 

I think my whole life has been about building my resilience muscle - personally and professionally. One of my earliest moments of learning how to be resilient occurred during my sophomore year of college. Due to a bunch of complicated reasons (that I’ve unpacked with my own coach), I made the decision to transfer to the University of Pennsylvania (UPENN) at the absolute last moment that they allow transfer students: second semester sophomore year. 

UPENN takes in a handful of new students at this juncture and distributes them across the very large urban campus. The only place that they had available at that time to house me was in a freshman dorm, sharing a room with a truly bonkers lady who never left her room and microwaved Hot Pockets for meals. Her computer made this “uh oh” sound every time she made a mistake that drove me nuts and she forced me to use the payphone across the street instead of granting access to our landline. Needless to say: it was not an ideal welcome to Philadelphia. I spent a lot of time in the gym and library.

That was actually not the hard part. The hard part was that - and I didn’t learn this until after I was enrolled - my sophomore standing was not guaranteed. I had to spend the first several months on campus hunting down department heads and convincing them that every single class I took at Bowdoin was comparable to a course at UPENN so that they would sign-off and give me course credit.

Transferring to a large urban university was also social suicide. I missed all of the usual student orientations, I didn’t play any team sport, and I wasn’t into sororities. It felt impossible to find my way in the complex social network. It was one of the loneliest experiences of my life to be around so many young people - and not know how to connect with them. I am an introvert at heart and it was unbearably uncomfortable trying to linger after class to try to make small talk. I ate a lot of meals alone.

If I look back in time, this experience was probably one of my first resilient tests - the beginning of my resilience flywheel. I graduated on time and with the highest of honors. I learned I can do hard, hard things. 

Since that big move from Maine to Philadelphia, I have done endless hard things and some have panned out well - like taking a risk to make $19K per year at MIT with a 3-month old baby at home. Others have not. I’ve cried a lot. I’ve had panic attacks. I’ve lost endless nights of sleep when I couldn’t see a way out of whatever I was facing. 

But here’s one of the secrets I’ve learned along the way: resilient people don’t do it alone. It takes a village. You need thought partners and cheerleaders and connectors. You need a community around you to do hard things. You know how you create that community? It’s counter-intuitive, but here’s the trick: it’s about sharing with some trusted folks that you don’t know the answers. It’s about leaning on others and showing your vulnerability. It’s about admitting that you’re scared and asking for advice and guidance. As a CEO, I want to be clear - these trusted people have to be OUTSIDE of your organization so that you can show up as a leader for your team. It’s this community of people who give you the strength to stretch and grow and build. 

Right now, you may be scared that you only have six months of runway left for your company. Right now you may have an uncomfortable chicken-and-egg situation on your team — you need to de-risk something to unlock resources but you also don’t have the resources you need to get there.

I want you to know that you are not alone. Look around you. Find your people. Lean on them. Take one baby step forward and use that momentum. Resilience isn’t about always being cheery or pretending everything is just fine when it’s not. Resilience is about choosing to stay in it and make hard decisions. You can practice resilience in your personal life and I assure you it will translate into your professional life. I want you to know: You’ve got this. Lean in.