It Was Perfection or Me. I Chose Me

For several months, I knew I was working harder, not smarter. But working hard was all I knew how to do. Not just as a habit. It was a deeply held belief I struggled to let go of. The story I told myself was familiar: if I could just be excellent enough, consistent enough, present enough, eventually the results would follow.

So when life threw something unexpected my way and I no longer had the bandwidth to pour into work, I made a choice: I paused.

A few months after that first setback, I experienced another loss. I said goodbye to my last living grandparent. My matriarch. A woman whose teachings are core to my identity. Her presence in my life was a kind of anchor, and without it, I felt the full weight of what I had been carrying.

What I told myself would be a temporary pause became a seven-month sabbatical. I was deep in mourning. And as a relatively new entrepreneur, I hadn't built the resilience structures to keep my business running without me.

I gave myself grace during that time. I held onto the belief that when I was ready, I would return and keep growing. I'm working my way back now. Slowly, intentionally.

Resilience is exactly what I help my clients build. It's the foundation of my coaching work with ambitious professionals who feel stuck and exhausted in their careers. And yet when I faced my own season of loss, I discovered the gap between knowing something and having actually built the structures to support it.

That's what I want to explore here. Not a framework I teach, but what I personally learned when my own resilience was tested. Because I think it's directly relevant to anyone navigating challenge in their professional life, whether you're in corporate America or building something of your own.

What carried me through wasn't a system. It was a mindset I've spent years developing: the ability to do what I can control, and accept what I can't. At one point in my life, that tendency toward preparedness tipped into hypervigilance. Over-preparation that created its own kind of stress and its own set of consequences. Learning to hold that balance differently is ongoing work for me.

But mindset alone wasn't enough. What this experience made clear is that resilience also requires structural support. External systems that can hold things while you're emotionally unavailable to drive them yourself.

In my corporate career, I've built those structures instinctively over decades. Staying connected to communities and projects outside my core role. Building relationships through business resource groups and professional associations. Volunteering for initiatives that widened my perspective and reminded me that my options were larger than my current circumstances. What I now call a portfolio approach to career resilience. Multiple points of connection that keep you grounded and visible even when one area of your life gets hard.

As an entrepreneur, I hadn't yet built the equivalent. And I felt that absence acutely when I needed it most.

Here's what I've come to believe: resilience is not about being strong enough to push through everything. That's a story a lot of us in corporate environments have been told, and it's one I lived for a long time. The cost of that story was real. I've ended up in the hospital. I've stewed in frustration while performing at a high level and wondering why nothing was changing. I've spent years telling myself that if I just worked harder, someone would eventually see my value.

What I didn't know then was how much energy I was losing to the stories I was telling myself. Not just the physical exhaustion of overwork, but the emotional drain of being stuck in a narrative that kept me small. That's a different kind of tired. And it's the kind that doesn't go away with a long weekend.

Resilience, at its core, is about knowing what you can control and having the practices in place to protect your energy for what matters. It's intentional. It's habitual. And in today's workplace, with all of its uncertainty, restructuring, and relentless pace, I'd go so far as to say it has to be radical and relentless.

As I return to my business and reflect on this season, I keep coming back to one question: what structures do I need to put in place so that my work can withstand the times when I am not at full capacity?

Because those times will come. For all of us. Grief, burnout, caregiving, health challenges, life. None of it pauses for your career or your business. The professionals who navigate those seasons without losing everything they've built aren't necessarily stronger. They've usually just built better systems in advance, and they've done the inner work to know what they actually need.

That's the work I want to do more of. In my own life, and alongside the clients I work with.

If you're reading this and something is resonating, I want to ask you directly: what does your resilience portfolio look like right now? Not the version you aspire to. The one you actually have. What's holding you when things get hard? What structures exist to keep you connected, grounded, and moving forward when you don't have full capacity to drive it yourself?

If you don't have a clear answer, that's worth paying attention to. Not from a place of judgment. But from a place of genuine curiosity about what becomes possible when you build those structures before you need them.