Reflection: Career & Workplace Resilience
Thinking back on my long journey towards resilience. And still going.

To start off, a bit of context…
In this post, I’m going to riff off of Sheryl Sandberg’s latest theme — resilience. Of course, my perspective on resilience only runs as deep as the environment and background in which I grew up. To be clear… I was born and raised in a middle income household. I’ve been given every necessity in life (and many would argue, more). I’ve never battled any notable health issues. And I’ve always lived in safe neighbourhoods in some of Canada’s most thriving cities. I really haven’t had it that bad — my problems have been of the first world variety. So you might be asking, “Who the hell are you, Erin, to write a post on resilience??” That’s a great question that I don’t have a good answer for, but I have thoughts on what it means to be resilient. Bear with me.
I’m well aware that many people have much greater tales of resilience than I do. Those people inspire me and help me to put my resilience in perspective. That said, I’ve been thinking a lot about my resilience muscle in the past month. I’ve recently encountered a downfall (more on that in another post) and was a little surprised that it didn’t bother me as much as it should have. A couple days after it happened, I sat there thinking, “Should I be more worried about what just happened? Or, should I be worried that I’m not that worried? What’s going on inside my head?… or not going on? Am I losing my marbles? God, I need to keep those marbles!”
Obviously, a great time to unpack.
Defining ‘resilience’…
Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s famed COO, had a bout with resilience in losing her husband not too long ago. Without having read her new book, I opened up my laptop and Google’d ‘Sheryl Sandberg resilience’ and found this quote…
“The seeds of resilience are planted in the way we process the negative events in our lives.” — Sheryl Sandberg
The important word in Sandberg’s quote is ‘seeds’. It implies that resilience is derived from human development and growth. In other words, a person doesn’t become resilient easily and/or over a night of sleep.
To go along with that, I Google’d the dry definition of ‘resilience’ to hopefully uncover any nuances of the word that I wasn’t aware of before. Here’s what I found…
re·sil·ience
rəˈzilyəns/
noun
- the capacity to recover quickly from difficulties; toughness.
- the ability of a substance or object to spring back into shape; elasticity.
As the word ‘resilience’ is increasingly becoming a term used to characterize a person as it relates to their work, the definition above doesn’t entirely address the multi-dimensionality of people and what it means to be career-resilient. To give an example… would you ever characterize someone who experiences a career downfall, gets back up, and goes through the same motions again and again (same mistakes and same downfalls) a ‘resilient’ human being?
Interesting. According to the dry definition of resilience, that person would, in fact, be resilient. But I would argue that this person isn’t resilient at all. Sure, they are one-dimensionally resilient, but as human beings gifted with the abilities to deeply process events into complex thoughts and understandings, we are not one-dimensional and therefore the dry definition of resilience isn’t accurate in my mind.
People can ‘recover’ and ‘spring back into shape’ as, say, a rubber band that has been extended to max capacity would. But hopefully, we are vastly more sophisticated than rubber and we should emerge stronger, more intelligent, and MORE resilient than before. And that is my definition of human resilience — the capacity to recover quickly from difficulties and emerge to a higher level of resilience. Rubber bands can’t do this.
In my experience, there are a handful of steps that make up the process to build career resilience.
- ACKNOWLEDGE that a negative event has occurred and assess how it made you feel.
- CHOOSE to believe that things will get better despite the negative event that just occurred.
- IDENTIFY the breaking points associated with the past negative event + STRATEGIZE how to mitigate them in the future.
- TAKE ACTION to ensure, to the best of your abilities, that the negative event never happens again.
- EXPERIENCE numerous or many negative events of differing natures/scenarios. Repeat — go back to Step #1.
Going through the above process isn’t easy! It involves a lot of awareness, a bit of work in figuring out a complex problem, and a mountain of courage. But as humans who want to grow emotionally stronger and psychologically smarter, we must.
My path towards resilience…
When I was a little kid, I was obsessed with swimming. At the age of 10, I often woke up in the morning having dreamt of swimming and winning medals the night before. At the age of 12, I decided that I wanted to make the Junior National team. I always stared at the older National Team members in awe as they wore their red National Team parkas on the pool deck. I listened to their stories about travelling to far away countries to compete and represent Canada. I wanted it all (and more!), so I began working hard… really hard. I set goals for myself and I practiced and trained as much as I could. While other kids were sleeping before school, I was in the pool training over and above regular practices. While other kids were playing or watching tv during the weekends, I was running around the neighbourhood to build up my cardiovascular fitness. While other kids were getting their first jobs over the summer months, I attended yoga classes, joined the canoe club, and enrolled in ballet programs. Oh, and of course… I kept running.
When I was 14 years old, long story-short, I didn’t make the team. My dream for two solid years came crashing down. I was devastated. I can remember that summer was characterized with a lot of crying and me sometimes feeling so bad about my life that it was a struggle to get up in the morning and breath. It was such an awful scene that it was embarrassing. I had zero resilience.
Thankfully, I had the best role model — my mom. She scraped me off of the floor and pushed me back into the pool. Well, she didn’t actually push me because… that would be child abuse, but we identified where I needed to be better and we moved onwards and upwards from there. And even though it was my mother who forced me to pick myself back up, I can confidently say that I wouldn’t be the same person I am today without her help during that difficult time. That was my very first big fail. I ended up making the National team the following year when I was 15. And I made the team every single year after that until the year I retired. Sure, there were many ups and downs during my National Team years, but my first experience with failure was the hardest. It was my very first step towards resiliency.
Fast forward to today. Having gone through, what feels like, a million downfalls (and some outright fails), the way that I absorb and react to these difficult events in my career has changed dramatically. I’ve learned to place them in a larger and more colourful context. This bigger picture is painted by having a more complex life (ah, the life of an adult!), but mostly painted by past experiences and having had the opportunity to have lived through (and survived!) a million career downfalls. And yes… I did use the word ‘opportunity’ in there — that was intentional. I also used the word ‘million’, which was not intentional and obviously a dramatic exaggeration.
I’ve learned how to grow from negative events. Today, I have career resilience and I don’t perceive downfalls as the outright ‘failures’ that I once did when I was a teenager. They are now a stepping stone for me to become a more intelligent and resilient (being the key word here) professional. And I’m definitely not saying that I’m 100% bonafide resilient today— I’m far from it, but at least I’m a whole lot farther than I was at 14 years old.
If you have any thoughts on resilience or on this post, please leave a comment!
And thanks for reading.
