Episode 7 - Resilience

In this episode of the Women Doing Big Things podcast, Sarah Dusek and Mona De Vestel discuss the importance of resilience in achieving success. They define resilience as the ability to keep getting back up when you are knocked down and to persevere through challenges. They emphasize the need to find tools and resources to fuel oneself and find balance in moments of imbalance. They also highlight the significance of rest, processing emotions, and listening to one's body in building resilience. The conversation explores the connection between resilience and success, emphasizing the importance of staying in the game and not giving up.

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Hi everyone, welcome back to the Women Doing Big Things podcast. It is great to have you with us. I'm Sarah Dusek. And I'm Mona de Vestel, happy to be here with you And we are excited today to talk about a really big topic. This week we're going to talk about resilience because resilience is a topic that is like your backbone. It's like the thing that is going to hold us together. If we're ever going to do anything big in any way. We've got to understand what resilience is all about, why we need it, what it is, what it isn't, and how it's essential for helping us do big things. Yes, it's an exciting topic. you were to define resilience in the context of your own life, what would that be? I would say resilience is the ability to keep getting back up when you are knocked down. Resilience is the ability to keep going. Resilience is the ability to persevere, to press through, to get breakthrough. Yeah, I would agree with that, to be able to get back up. And also, I think, to find the tools and resources to do so, right? What do we have that we can use in order to get back up? Like, what is the fuel that we use to energize ourselves? and find our way back to ourselves in moments of imbalance, in moments of disharmony, in moments of depletion. How do we find the strength to keep getting back up? Because when you're knocked down, right? The last thing you want to do is think about getting back up. You want to have your five minutes or three hours or 24 years wallowing because you got knocked down and the challenge becomes, how do we find the strength to get back up? How do we, how do we not just pull ourselves together? I mean, I was as a child. often just told, pull yourself together. And I got really good at like just sucking it all up and sucking it all in. And this is not that. This is not like denying the pain and the distress and the difficulty of facing scenarios that are not going away or things not working out or things being really hard. It's not ignoring all of that. and just saying, pull yourself together and get on with it. Resilience for me is not that. And so I think figuring how you navigate the journey of getting back after a big loss or a big miss or something not working out or just something being very hard is the whole essence of what we've got to get into today. Right, I agree with you that it's not being in denial about the challenge and saying, just ignore it and pull yourself back up. It's also not shying away from the challenge. It's saying, I can do this and I will do it, I am doing it, but how do I find breathing spaces in between the chaos, in the battlefield, if you will? I keep seeing this image that comes to about somebody swimming in caves and having little breathing spaces, you know, in between. And I find that really, really, really helpful, literally, to take three seconds, five seconds, in the middle of a meeting, in the middle of a conversation, in the middle of whatever it is that you're doing that you feel like, well, I certainly cannot pull away from this moment. I stop it. I don't want to stop it, but I need, I need something to recalibrate myself and tap into my emotional intelligence that I know I have so that I can reframe my perspective on the situation. And that to me is a breathing space and that breathing space fuels me to the next moment and the next moment. And that to me is resilience in a lot of ways. You know, it's the ability to find those breathing spaces in your day, quite concretely and literally, but also metaphorically. What do you think about that? Yeah, I love where you're going. I love that metaphor. I love the imagery of catching your breath, taking a breath as being the thing that propels you to be able to get to the next moment of taking a breath. And it's almost like this sense of, have to rest, I have to breathe, I have to have some space. to be able to propel me on to go the next leg of the journey. And I never knew when I was younger. I never equated being resilient and requiring rest as being the thing that would feed my resilience. Like my ability to keep going I did not understand was connected just how good I was at taking care of myself, just how good I was at catching my breath, just how good I was at really resting and recognising the importance. If I don't rest, I can't go on. And I discovered that to my peril in my mid to late 20s when I had not done a good job of taking care of myself and I had been really good at persevering and pressing through and doing all the things that we say being resilient is. But I had not left any room for breathing space and because I had not done that I burned myself out and I ran myself into the ground and because I'd been good at like pulling myself together without catching my breath, and actually being kind to myself and being present to myself, I burned out. And for me, burnout is the opposite of resilience, right? I mean, it's what happens to you if you don't have enough resilience. And for me, burnout was entirely caused by lack of awareness to myself, lack of taking enough breaths. lack of realising I needed to take breaths. It was almost like I thought if I took one big breath at the beginning of the journey, I could navigate forever. And not realising. can't. You just can't. You have to stop and refuel in order to be able to go on journeys, go long distances. You have to have space. You have to have rest. You have to have breath. You have to have moment. quiet and restorative time. And that is what fuels your ability to go on. It's what fuels your ability to get up. It's what fuels your ability to come back after a setback. And I think we don't value that enough. We undervalue the importance of just how critical it is to create space for ourselves. Yeah, absolutely. I agree with you. I mean, I think the power of rest is immense. And you said rest and breath and space. have And I think space can be understood in a number of ways, which is, you know, tapping into our internal space, the emotional intelligence that historically women have been accused of being, you know, less than because we're such emotional creatures. But actually, if we reclaim that space and say, actually, it is our emotional intelligence that gives us our greatest power. then we can reclaim that space by taking space, micro spaces, micro internal spaces and refueling ourselves in the course of our day or in the course of a week or a month by taking, you it could be quite literal, like a walk or a swim or whatever it is, but also just like in the middle of something, anything of your day of a meeting, taking that internal space. and tapping into your emotional intelligence as a strategy. I find that extremely helpful for me. It's hugely helpful and it is so easily forgotten. We just forget, we get so busy and then we go, well I'm out of capacity, I'm out of my inner resources, they got depleted and now it's so much harder to cope with difficult situations, it's so much harder to have the capacity to deal with whatever you've got to deal with, it's so much harder push through. It's so much harder to do anything when we're depleted. And that's the magic, I think, of connecting the dots between resilience and creating capacity for resilience. It's like, how do I build my capacity? And to do that, I think we've got to rest. I think we've got to catch our breath. I think we've got to have moments where we allow ourselves to process all the things that are going on in our life I know in my younger years. I was I was especially bad at that I didn't create enough space for processing big hard things happen and I would want to like pick myself up dust myself off and carry on without giving myself a moment to process anything and I think by process I just giving my head space to wrap my head around something, to giving my heart space to feel what I'm feeling about whatever it is that's happening, and giving my body a chance to do what it needs to do to recover from whatever it is that it has experienced. And I think those three elements, mind, heart, and body, it's that sense of what does my mind need to, do I need to talk? Do I need to meditate? Do I need to think? Do I need to journal? What do I need to do to process anything that I'm experiencing? What do I need to do to feel? And I know my therapist says to me all the time, could you just sit with that feeling for five minutes? And I'm like, I don't want to feel it. I don't want to feel that icky feeling that I'm feeling. But she says, mean, just sit with it. Like notice it. Notice that you feel Notice that you feel sad. Notice that you're disappointed. Notice that you're angry. Notice that you're frustrated. notice it. Just be with it for just a hot five minutes and let it pass. Let it dissipate. Have capacity. Have space for it. Don't try and shove it down. Just let it bubble up and let it be. And then my body, I'm probably the worst at listening to my body. Like I want to push my physical limits all the time with what I can physically accomplish at any moment. And sometimes my body says, no, you're done. You're, you're, you're, you're at your limit. You need a rest. You need to stop. You need to listen to me. I'm, I'm just spent. And those three ideas help me with thinking about how do I create space for myself? How do I give myself capacity to process anything that's going on so that, so that I have space to be an energy to rejuvenate myself. pick myself back up and have resilience to keep going I guess what I'm realizing, even as I'm talking about this, is that I have discovered that resilience is not what I thought it was. Resilience is something quite different. it's like the idea of having the inner capacity to be able to get back up and do hard things the ability to get up and carry on and press through, through difficulty or through challenge or through whatever. But what I'm realizing is that it's not perseverance. Resilience and perseverance are different things. Perseverance is you push, you push, you push, you push. You persevere, you persevere, you persevere. You keep going. It's the ability to keep going. Whereas resilience for me is an inner capacity. And so what we've been talking about is this idea of how do you create capacity within yourself to be resilient, to be able to withstand a difficult thing, to be able to have capacity for navigating hard times, difficult times, times that require you to persevere. How do you have the resilience to be able to persevere? Does that make sense to you, Mona? No, I really love that. I love the phrase that what you're using the words inner capacity. I think to me that makes a lot of sense because I think we have in our bodies, like our physical selves, the inner capacity to recharge, refuel, heal and get back up literally. I mean, that's what our bodies do on a daily basis, right? Providing that we give it what it needs on a fundamental level, right? And I think that's a metaphor for our emotional selves as well, our spiritual selves. These are different levels of being, right? But our bodies, if you fuel your body with water and food and sleep, it will inherently have an inner capacity. to get back up, literally, to get up in the morning and go back again for another day, even if you've run a marathon, even if you've, whatever it is. However, we do need to meet our end of the bargain, which is, okay, I gave you fuel, I gave you water, I gave you rest. But it's the same thing too, for our emotional and spiritual life, our creative life. our professional life, like we need to fuel ourselves so that we can keep that inner capacity mechanism working and in place. And I think that's what you were talking about when you were talking about rest. And you did talk about, you know, mind and body and spirit. And we do have that inner capacity, but we do have to have some strategies to keep that in place, I think. resilience is about having capacity. capacity to embrace something hard. The capacity to not, when someone tells you no, like I was just thinking about it for entrepreneurs, for example, I was just thinking, know, entrepreneurs hear no a lot. I hear no a lot, especially when I'm fundraising, like fundraising's oh it's my nemesis, I find it really painful because you have to ask a lot of people to join you on your mission, on your cause and to say yes to coming to the table and say, yes, we're going to do this with you and yes, we're to put money into this venture and yes, we're going to get on board. But in order to get yeses, it's the same with sales, whether it's whatever kind of, when you're asking something of someone else. You get a lot of no's first, Even with trying to get my first book sold, I had a lot of no's before I finally got a yes. And so the ability to bear no requires resilience to get back up and ask the question again and hopefully get a different answer eventually, right? But in order to be resilient, even with that idea, you have to have capacity for bearing the no, right? And what resilience is for me. It's the capacity to take information that you don't like or you don't want, or is not the answer you were looking for or not the situation you want to be in. And have the capacity for it I think a good question to ask ourselves is, you know, is resilience something that we can grow? Is it something that we can learn to do, to have, to build in our lives? And I think for me, I think, yes, I think it's incremental. Resilience is incremental. It's in the victories in between, you know, the many, many, like you said, no's in our lives, right? I keep thinking Jamie Kern Lima's book, Believe It, which I love. She sold her company to L 'Oreal for something like $1 .6 billion. She got so many no's. I have goosebumps right now thinking about this because there's a scene in the book where she goes to a meeting to get investors. And the woman is not only telling her no, but the way that she tells her no is so condescending. She's like looks at her up and down and you know, just makes her feel like Please, you know, you're less than your product is less than how can you think that you are going to be able to sell this? You know, this is not for us and she walks out of that building she turns the corner and just props herself against the building and wails like she wails and I think that You know, her whole book is called Believe It. I think that that kernel of believing, that little flicker of light, of faith, of, you know, believing that, yes, you can do it. You got that no and that other no and that other no. But you know what? There was a yes over here and there was a victory over here. And victories sometimes are tiny. I try to remind myself of that. You know, it's like a gratitude practice saying, I got four big no's today, but I got that tiny little victory of, you know, I made progress over here. I was able to attain this. I was able to make that connection with so and so. Someone had a conversation with me about whatever it is. And that fuels me. That fuels me. That flicker of light fuels me. And that incremental little fuel for me builds resilience over time. And then I sort of recharge and say, This was a big day of a lot of no's, but you know, I know that it can be good. I know that it's gonna, we're gonna turn a corner. I've turned many corners. I don't know if that's how you operate, but that's what I do. Like Jamie Kern Lima, I also have big wails Sometimes they really get to me. Sometimes I feel like I cannot go on any longer. I am done. I am very dramatic. And so I frequently find myself going, that's, that's it. It's over. Can't do this anymore. This is too hard, too difficult. Nope, I'm done. And so sometimes when I'm at that place, I know, my resilience is waning. Like I'm low. My resilience tank is empty. Like, you know, like a scuba diver has a gas tank on their back. And when I'm starting to go, I've had it. I know my resilience tank is like almost empty. And then I know. back from the ledge? then I know, then I have to give myself space and time. Then I have to give myself room to breathe. Then I have to go fill that tank up. And I have to fill that tank up with things that make me feel alive. I know back Christmas time last year, I've received a massive no. for a project that I'd been working on for about two and a half years. And I was pretty sure I was at the end of the journey and I was gonna pull this big thing off and that we were right at the finish line. And all of a sudden it fell apart and we were definitely not at the finish line. And oh that hit me really hard. It was such a massive no. it was like a stab in the chest. I mean, I literally, like it took my breath away. It was so hard. And I knew at the time, I knew this is going to take me a while. This is going to take me a while to pick myself back up from. And I can't just carry on like nothing just happened. I can't just go, okay, well, let's just go back to fundraising or let's go and make this happen. Let's try something else. And I knew my, my tank was empty and I needed time. I needed to give myself space from like, no, I can't do that anymore for a moment. Not that I'm never going to do it again. I'm not, not, not getting back but I have to give myself time and I have to fuel my tank up in a way that gives me capacity to go back out there again and put myself back out there again. Like you were saying in Jamie's example, getting rejected is really hard. I mean, if you're a robot and you don't feel anything, it's fine, no problem. But if you are a full -fledged feeling human being, and those of us who are trying to do hard things are gonna be rejected. probably quite a lot. We're going to have people tell us, no, you can't do that. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, I mean, that's, that's just part of life trying to do hard things, right? But then I know if I'm, if I'm really struggling with hearing that and I'm not taking it on the chin. I mean, obviously it depends how big it is, but if I'm not like going, okay, that's useful information for me. I'll use that to help me do this differently the next time. Then I know, okay, I, I got to take some time out. It's like, it's like a timeout moment. with like, I've got to fuel my tank up. And then I know I've got to fuel my tank up with things that make me feel good, things that make me feel alive, things that make me feel great about myself, things that help me restore my equilibrium, because those things can knock us. And that's then how though I find the energy to get back up and go again. And sometimes the breathing space is small and it doesn't require very much. Sometimes it's a day. You know, sometimes it's a wail outside the building and then you go, okay, I feel so much better now. Let's go make another phone call. Let's go, you know, let's go have another conversation with someone else. and other times it's longer, but understanding I have to keep oxygen in that tank so I can breathe so that I can, so that I literally can keep going is a big piece of this puzzle. But I think you also have an ingredient like many successful entrepreneurs, which is, yes, you get back up because you take the rest and you take the breathing space, but you also have this incredible strength and I think maybe that's the kernel of resilience, is not allowing the no to define you. So you don't integrate that no into, well, I guess I'm not meant for this. I guess I'm not good enough. Whatever the phrases are, you're like, it's devastating. I'm going to wail. I am feeling today right now like I'm done. I'm not going to get back up. This is a feeling. It's not a fact. But then when you do take the rest, it doesn't define you. It doesn't define Sarah. maybe that's the common denominator for successful entrepreneurs to go the distance. We have to have the ability to say, this doesn't define me. This, you know, falling down and scraping my face doesn't define me at my core. It's, you information, I and I admire that about you. I admire that about successful people who are able to take that kernel and say, thank you for the information. I don't like it. And I'm not defined by this moment. Yeah, I had not thought about it like that way before, Mona, but I think you're right. I think it's the ability to feel that pain and that devastation and that loss and that distress, but not believe whoever told you. I mean, maybe that's why we're crazy. That's maybe why entrepreneurs are crazy. Or women who are trying to do big things are crazy because you're right. It's that ability to go. I don't think you're right. Like, I think I will find a way. I will find a way around this. your decision about me is actually just your opinion. And you are very entitled to have your opinion, but it's not my opinion. And therefore I'm going to keep going. I am going to pick myself back up and go again and again. And again, and again, and again, We can't allow other people's opinion, belief, decision to tell us who we are. We have to tell us, we have to tell us who we are. We get to have that last word. We get to say, this is who I am. This is who I want to be. This is what I'm going to do. We get to say that. Nobody else gets to say that about us. No one. Yeah, because if you allow someone else to define you, then you don't get to have under canvas come to life and be sold. You don't get to sell your business for $1 .6 billion to L 'Oreal. That reminds me of another really helpful tool with regards to resilience, in our very first proper under canvas camp that we ever built in Yellowstone and the full story's in the book, but it was this moment of disaster in the business and I was ready to be completely done. I mean, like, I am over it. Like this business has been so difficult and so hard, so brutal. I am ready and I am this, this little icing on the cake right here. This is enough to like totally sink me and I'm totally out. But in that moment, when I didn't have enough strength to pull myself back up, When I didn't have enough strength, someone else did. And that is a really interesting thing about resilience. Sometimes someone else's, we can borrow someone else's resilience as our own, right? Like your tank is empty, you can plug yourself into someone else's tank. Like you're scuba diving and your tank's done. Like breathe from someone else's, like borrow someone else's mask to breathe from theirs for a moment, right? And I think sometimes we forget that. We think it's all about what we can conjure up. It's all about what we can navigate, what we can do. And sometimes we are spent and sometimes we are out of resources and we don't have the time. Like this is interesting, right? Because we've been saying... Take your time, recover, catch your breath, have a wail Yes, yes, yes, yes. That's how you restore your tank. But sometimes there are moments when you don't have the time to have the moment to refuel your tank, but you could borrow someone else's tank temporarily. That doesn't work like 24 seven, right? We have to have full tanks of our own. But in a moment when you, and I needed it in that moment, like I did not have the strength to put that camp back together after it had been wiped out by massive storm. I just was ready to go, we're closed, it's over. Please go home, everyone. Go stay somewhere else. Don't stay with us. This is a disaster. We're closing our doors. But someone elses resilience someone elses full tank. had capacity for me and them, for me to take a breath, him to take a breath and him to say to me, it's not that bad. We can come back from this. we can do this. We can pull ourselves together in a good way. can physically put the camp back together. And I'm like, really? You really think that? And his resilience. gave me the breath I needed to go, okay, well, if he thinks we can, maybe we can. And I'll just, you know, I'll restore myself off his energy for a while. And I think we can do that in, certain circumstances. Jake and I do that all the time. We'll, one of us will be having a moment. of like, nothing's going to work. It's all terrible. And the other one will go, really? Is it really that bad? And it's like, you're just having a moment. Borrow some of my breath for a moment. Borrow some of my perspective. Let me help you take a breath. And you know, that's a good reminder that we need each other, right? You cannot do hard things by yourself. You just can't. We need our tanks filled and we need people to journey with us. You know, they don't have to be partners or spouses or, know, but we need, we need other people that occasionally we can borrow from. know, Mona, you have been that for me this last year with helping me get back up when I'm like, and you've gone, really? Is it really that bad? Let's just take a hot minute here and like. reflect, get some perspective and let me tell you how I can see the situation, what I think is going to happen right now. And then you can go, okay, all right, maybe it's not that bad. think having that team, whether it's a team in your business or in your personal life or having people around you, know, borrowing their energy, I think that is an important ingredient as well. I like that. A question that comes to mind is how much is our success linked to our resilience or to our ability to be resilient? I think it's fundamental. I mean, what do you think, Sarah? think it's like 150%. I tell my entrepreneurs all the time, it's not necessarily who's got the best idea or who's the smartest or who's the sparkliest. It generally is who can stay in the game the longest. And by that, I mean who's still standing when everyone else has given up. I genuinely think if you stay in the game long enough, like if you keep throwing stuff at the wall, if you keep getting back up after you've been knocked down, eventually you're going to get to the top of the mountain because you've just been steady climbing, climbing, climbing, climbing, maybe falling back down, maybe having to borrow someone else's oxygen, but climbing, climbing, that's resilience, right? It's the ability to keep going. And if you keep going, there is the possibility that you will achieve what you were trying to achieve. If you keep trying something, ultimately something's going to stick eventually. And it's just the question of, can we keep climbing enough or do we give up just before we get to the summit? And the hard part, of course, is you don't know where the summit is very often. You often can't see the end of the mountain. And that's the hard part, I think. It's not necessarily the ability to keep going, but it's the ability to keep going long enough for breakthrough to come. And very often, people give just before their moment, just before the breakthrough. And we give up for good reasons, right? We've run out of cash. We don't have enough capacity or that something happens to a spouse or a family member. I mean, there are always good reasons to quit, right? But that, I think, is the magic about the connection between resilience and success. It's like, if you just keep going, eventually, who knows how long. but eventually something will happen, something will give. A breakthrough will happen of some kind. Maybe not the thing that you were thinking was gonna happen, maybe something different, but something will happen ultimately. I think that is a really good reminder for all of us. And it makes me think about this story that I love in Nichiren Buddhism about the 11th day of the 12 day journey. And the idea is that the 11th night of the 12 day journey is when we are at our most vulnerable, that's when most people quit. when most people give up, when the moon is not out, you're in the forest, it's nighttime, you see nothing, you're lost, you're depleted, you're tired, and you think, you know what, I'm done. I'm not gonna get to my destination. I can't get there. And actually, if you have the resilience to, you know, find the strength and the courage and the energy and the fuel to stay one more night, you're right around the bend, the moon comes out and it's a new moon. So I think, I think that that is a really good reminder for, you know, women who do big things, which is stay in the game, stay in the game, don't give up. fuel Borrow someone else's oxygen when you're in a pinch and your tank's empty. Borrow someone else's resilience for a short period of time. But make sure you fuel your tank because that's what's going to give you the capacity to get where you want to go ultimately. Absolutely. Thank you so much for joining us today, talking about resilience. And we'd love, love, love to hear your stories about how do you fuel yourselves? How do you find the breathing spaces? How do you nurture yourself to get back up, to stay in the game? And we really hope you'll join us again for another episode of our podcast. Thanks everyone, we'll see you next time. See you next time, bye.