Resilience gets romanticized. We celebrate people who overcome impossible odds, who rebuild after devastating losses, who somehow emerge stronger from circumstances that would break most of us. What we rarely discuss is how they do it.
The mythology around resilience suggests some people are naturally tougher, more optimistic, or better equipped to handle adversity. This is partially true but mostly misleading. Resilience is less about inherent toughness and more about specific practices that prevent adversity from defining your trajectory. When you’re running a business, resilience determines whether setbacks become learning experiences or terminal events.
Kelly Markey knows this intimately. As an international bestselling author and motivational speaker, she built a successful corporate career while navigating undiagnosed endometriosis, infertility treatments, miscarriage, and divorce. She grew up under apartheid in South Africa, immigrated to New Zealand and then Australia seeking better opportunities, and discovered that discrimination exists everywhere. Through it all, she maintained professional excellence and eventually channeled her experiences into Don’t Just Fly, Soar, a book that has sold in over 70 countries and earned her nominations for two Nobel Prizes.
In a conversation on the Deliberate Leaders podcast, Markey shared how she developed the capacity to remain effective during periods when most people would have collapsed.
Coming up, we’ll explore what resilience actually means in practical terms, why the conventional advice about positive thinking and grit misses the point, and how to build the specific capabilities that allow you to navigate adversity without sacrificing your goals or your wellbeing.
What Resilience Actually Means
The popular conception of resilience involves bouncing back from setbacks with renewed determination. This framing creates an unhelpful standard. It suggests that resilient people experience adversity, briefly struggle, then return to their previous state as if nothing happened.
Resilience is the capacity to move forward when circumstances work against you, even when you cannot return to how things were before. You don’t bounce back. You integrate what happened and build something new.
This matters for business leaders because the challenges you face rarely have clean resolutions. A key employee leaves and takes institutional knowledge with them. A market shift makes your core offering less relevant. A personal crisis demands attention during a critical growth phase. You cannot undo these events. You can only decide how they shape what comes next.
Markey describes resilience through the lens of continued forward motion despite pain:
I had to find the silver lining in every situation. I lived with undiagnosed endometriosis, which was excruciating. And then had to go through bouts of laparoscopy to discover that it was almost impossible to conceive, went through rounds of IVF, miscarriage, divorce, the whole gamut. And through it all, I had to be professional and show up at work.
The resilience here is not about overcoming adversity and moving past it. The resilience is in showing up consistently while the adversity continues. Most business challenges work the same way. You don’t get to pause operations while you figure things out. You navigate the crisis while maintaining execution.
Why Resilience Matters More Than Ever
Business has always involved uncertainty, but the pace and unpredictability of disruption in 2026 creates conditions where resilience has become a competitive advantage.
Companies that survived the pandemic demonstrated this clearly. Some organizations collapsed when revenue disappeared. Others adapted quickly, found new revenue streams, and emerged stronger. The difference was not financial reserves or market position. The difference was leadership resilience that enabled rapid strategic shifts without organizational panic.
Markey experienced this firsthand during lockdown:
I was getting calls from all over the world from people that were feeling lost. I guess the apple cart had toppled and we all around the globe didn’t know what was going to unfold. And somehow, I think people around me perceived this resilience or panache in my life that they thought, okay, I’m going to reach out to Kelly and see if I can get some level of inspiration or stability because we were all in this boat together and we didn’t know how far we were sinking.
When uncertainty becomes universal, people gravitate toward sources of stability. In business, that stability comes from leaders who can maintain clarity and direction when circumstances change faster than planning cycles allow.
The question is how you build that capacity before you need it.
The Foundation: Finding Meaning in Adversity
Resilience begins with the decision to extract value from difficulty rather than just endure it. This is not about forced optimism or pretending challenges are opportunities in disguise. It’s about recognizing that adversity contains information you cannot get any other way.
When a strategy fails, you learn which assumptions were wrong. When a relationship ends, you learn what you actually need versus what you thought you wanted. When a crisis forces you to operate with fewer resources, you learn which activities truly drive results and which were just comfortable habits.
The practice of finding meaning in adversity involves asking what becomes possible now that was not possible before. This reframe shifts your focus from what you lost to what you can build.
Markey developed this mindset through repeated exposure to situations where the only path forward required creating new possibilities:
Sometimes you have that lifeline that you can reach out to, but you need to get your mindset to a place where you’re not feeling overwhelmed and you see the light at the end of the tunnel and you are reaching towards it no matter how difficult the situation is.
For business leaders, this means treating setbacks as data rather than failures. A product launch that underperforms tells you something about your positioning, your audience, or your execution. A client who leaves tells you something about where your service delivery fell short. A market shift that hurts revenue tells you something about dependencies you need to reduce.
The resilience comes from extracting those lessons and applying them immediately rather than dwelling on the disappointment.
Authenticity as a Resilience Strategy
One of the most counterintuitive insights about resilience involves vulnerability. The instinct during difficult times is to project strength, maintain appearances, and avoid showing weakness. This instinct backfires because it isolates you from support and forces you to solve problems alone.
Resilience requires authentic acknowledgment of where you are and what you need. This does not mean broadcasting your struggles to everyone. It means being honest with yourself and selective others about the challenges you face so you can access resources and support.
Markey emphasizes this point:
Being authentic is being able to have those difficult conversations, being able to address the elephant in the room and still be friends, still sit at the table and be authentic and say, you know what, I beg to differ, but I still love you.
In business terms, authenticity means admitting when you’re in over your head, when a strategy is not working, or when you need help. Leaders who can do this build stronger teams because people trust them. Employees and partners know you’ll address problems directly rather than pretending they don’t exist.
The alternative is what Markey experienced early in her career:
I discovered that people are busy and they’re not really interested to unpack or uncover what’s breaking a human being or hurting them, or even to be part of the equation towards healing.
When you hide struggle, people cannot help you. When you’re authentic about challenges, you create space for collaboration and support that makes resilience easier.
Building Resilience Through Daily Practice
Resilience is not a trait you either have or lack. It’s a set of practices that become stronger through repetition. Here’s how to build those practices systematically.
1. Separate What You Control From What You Don’t
Resilience collapses when you waste energy trying to control outcomes that depend on forces beyond your influence. The practice here involves ruthless focus on controllable factors.
When facing adversity, make two lists. The first list contains everything you can directly influence through your decisions and actions. The second list contains everything outside your control. Your attention belongs exclusively on the first list.
This sounds simple but requires discipline. When a client cancels a major contract, you cannot control their decision. You can control how quickly you pursue replacement revenue, whether you maintain the relationship for future opportunities, and what you learn about client retention from the experience.
Focus creates resilience because it prevents the paralysis that comes from obsessing over unchangeable circumstances.
2. Define Progress in Terms of Process
During adversity, traditional outcome metrics often become discouraging. Revenue drops. Growth stalls. Plans fall apart. If you measure progress only by results, you’ll feel like you’re failing even when you’re doing everything right.
Resilient people measure progress by whether they’re executing the process they believe will eventually produce results. During a downturn, progress might mean maintaining your prospecting activity, refining your offer based on feedback, and preserving team morale. These inputs create the foundation for recovery even before outcomes improve.
Markey describes this as finding your mojo regardless of circumstances:
Don’t just be complacent. Try to find your mojo, no matter what situation you’re in.
Your mojo is not about feeling great all the time. It’s about maintaining engagement with your work and your goals even when external conditions make success harder.
3. Create Stability Through Routine
When circumstances become chaotic, routine provides an anchor. The practice here involves maintaining non-negotiable habits that signal normalcy and control.
This could mean starting each day with the same planning ritual, maintaining regular check-ins with your team, or protecting specific hours for strategic work. The specific routine matters less than the consistency.
Routine builds resilience by creating pockets of predictability in unpredictable environments. When everything else feels uncertain, these small consistent actions remind you that you still control your response to circumstances.
4. Reframe Setbacks as Information
Every setback contains a signal about what needs to change. Resilient people extract that signal quickly and adjust. Less resilient people dwell on the setback itself and miss the opportunity to improve.
The practice involves asking three questions after any setback:
- What did I learn that I could not have learned any other way?
- What assumption did this experience invalidate?
- What becomes possible now that was not possible before?
These questions shift your focus from what went wrong to what you do next. That shift is the essence of resilience.
5. Maintain Relationships That Matter
Isolation kills resilience. When you’re struggling, the instinct is often to withdraw and handle things alone. This instinct makes everything harder.
Resilient people invest in relationships before they need them and maintain those relationships during adversity. This means staying connected to peers, mentors, and friends who understand your challenges and can provide perspective when you’re too close to problems to see clearly.
Markey’s experience during lockdown illustrates this principle. She maintained connections across her global network, which created a support system that functioned even during universal crisis. When people reached out to her, she was able to help because the relationships already existed.
For business leaders, this means cultivating relationships with other founders, joining peer groups, and working with advisors who can offer guidance during difficult decisions. These relationships compound in value during adversity.
The Role of Purpose in Sustained Resilience
Short-term resilience can run on discipline and willpower. Long-term resilience requires something deeper. You need a reason to keep going that transcends immediate circumstances.
Purpose provides that reason. When you’re clear about what you’re building and why it matters, temporary setbacks become less significant. You’re not just trying to survive a difficult quarter. You’re working toward something that justifies the struggle.
Markey found this purpose through writing during lockdown:
I just grabbed my laptop and I just started writing and it just morphed into something that was amazing. So I wrote this in 10 days. When I launched, I became a bestselling author in less than an hour. I’ve sold in more than 70 countries.
The book emerged from a sense that her experiences could help others. That purpose carried her through the emotional difficulty of revisiting trauma and the uncertainty of putting her story into the world. The same principle applies in business.
When you’re building something that solves problems for people you care about, the setbacks along the way become part of the journey rather than reasons to quit.
When Resilience Means Walking Away
One final insight about resilience that rarely gets discussed involves knowing when to stop.
Resilience is not about persisting through everything regardless of cost. Sometimes resilience means recognizing that a goal, relationship, or strategy is no longer serving you and having the courage to walk away.
Markey addresses this in her discussion of relationships:
Progress is being able to get up and feel content in the morning. No matter what comes my way, I am happy that I’ve given it my best shot. And this is where I want to be. And this is my choice. I’m happy. I’m living in a situation where it’s out of my control. It’s bringing back the control into your hands and your life.
In business, this might mean shutting down a product line that’s draining resources, ending a partnership that’s no longer aligned, or pivoting away from a market that’s become too difficult to serve profitably.
The key is distinguishing between quitting because something is hard and stopping because continuing would be self-destructive. Resilience involves the wisdom to know the difference.
Building Resilience Before You Need It
The best time to develop resilience is before adversity strikes. Waiting until you’re in crisis to start building these capabilities means you’re learning under the worst possible conditions.
The practices outlined here work best when they become habits during normal times. Focus on what you control. Define progress in terms of process. Maintain routines. Extract lessons from small setbacks. Invest in relationships. Clarify your purpose.
When you do these things consistently, resilience becomes part of how you operate. Then when adversity arrives, you have the foundation to navigate it effectively.
Markey’s story illustrates this principle. The resilience she demonstrated during the pandemic was not new. It was the same capability she had been building through decades of navigating personal and professional challenges. When universal crisis emerged, she was prepared.
Your goal is to be similarly prepared for whatever challenges emerge in your business. The work you do now to build resilience determines whether future setbacks become growth opportunities or breaking points.
Book a complimentary strategy session to assess your current resilience practices and identify specific areas where strengthening your approach would create meaningful advantage during the inevitable challenges ahead.
Not sure if you're the bottleneck? Find out in 2 minutes →
