How to Overcome Challenges and Build Resilience

The word gets used as though it were a character trait — some people have it, some do not, and the ones who do get through things without being marked by them. That is not what I see.

What I see is that the people who come through difficult stretches in reasonable shape almost always had something in place beforehand. Not grit. Infrastructure.

What that infrastructure is

A shortened list. Knowing in advance which three commitments come off first when a week collapses. Deciding that in advance is much easier than deciding it at the moment everything is going wrong.

One person who gets told the truth. Not a support network — one person, named, who will be told what is actually happening rather than the version you give at work.

A floor, not a routine. The minimum version of your week: what still happens when almost nothing else does. Usually sleep, one meal you did not make a decision about, and one walk.

Early warning signs, written down. Yours are specific and you already know them. Mine are that I stop replying to messages and start reorganizing my desk. Written down in January, they are recognizable in September.

What it is not

Resilience is not the ability to feel less. It is the ability to keep the essential parts of your life running while feeling exactly as much as the situation warrants.

I say this because a lot of people arrive believing they have failed at resilience because a hard year was hard. It was supposed to be hard. The question is whether the structure held, not whether it was comfortable.

Building it before you need it

The awkward thing about all of this is that it has to be done in a calm month, for a bad month that has not arrived. It feels like a waste of a good Tuesday.

Do it anyway, and keep it short: three commitments to drop, one person to tell, a four-line description of your floor, and three warning signs. One page. Then put it somewhere you will find it, which for most people means a note on their phone rather than a document they will never open again.

Every client who has done this and then had a bad stretch has told me the same thing afterward: they did not follow the plan exactly, but having written one meant they recognized what was happening two months earlier than they otherwise would have.