Resilience is what gets tested when your dreams and goals are impacted by circumstances completely out of your control. It can be a real challenge to pick yourself back up. Searching for answers to questions no one can fully answer is exhausting — and it changes you in ways you don’t see coming. You move from thriving into survival mode without even noticing the shift, until one day you look up and realize you’ve been in it for months.
When the Ground Shifts
In 2020, I watched the travel industry — the industry I’d built nearly thirty years of my career in — get rocked to its core. It wasn’t the first crisis I’d encountered in three decades of travel and hospitality leadership, but it was a catastrophe on a scale I had never seen before, and there was no playbook to turn to.
I know I wasn’t alone in what that felt like. A tornado on the inside — thoughts, feelings, and fears spinning into a mass of confusion. Plans that once stretched a year, three years, or more suddenly collapsed into three months, six months if I was lucky. Staying relevant while staying hopeful felt like trying to build on ground that kept moving beneath me.
My voice disappeared for a while. I found myself searching for the words to even advocate for myself — something that had never been a struggle for me before. When the industry you’ve built your identity around stops functioning the way it always has, your sense of how to speak up for yourself gets shaky too.
Retraining My Focus
Long-term plans gave way to one day at a time. I had to retrain my brain to focus on what was right in front of me instead of what I had lost — and slowly, that shift became a new kind of hope. Not the hope of “this will all go back to normal,” but the smaller, sturdier hope of “I can handle today.”
Part of what got me through was intentional: building a strategy that included securing an inner circle beyond my family — leaning on trusted advisors and friends who could hold space for what I was going through without trying to fix it. I remember one phone call early on, where a colleague I trusted didn’t try to talk me out of how uncertain I felt.
She just asked, “What do you need to figure out this week — not this year, this week?” That question became a template I leaned on for months afterward, whenever the bigger picture felt like too much to hold.
The Questions I Had to Learn to Ask
One of the hardest parts of that season wasn’t the industry collapsing — it was facing my own transition from an executive leadership role into the uncertainty of being an individual contributor again, searching for clarity in a kind of role I hadn’t occupied in decades.
I didn’t know who to turn to. I didn’t know what questions to ask, or whether the people around me would even understand what I was navigating. So, I started small: I asked one person, then another, what they wished someone had told them during their own reinvention. I asked what skills actually transferred versus what I’d assumed would transfer. Slowly, through all that unknown, some answers became clear — not because I found a map, but because I kept asking until pieces of one started to appear.
What Resilience Actually Looks Like
Resilience isn’t about bouncing back to exactly where you were. It’s about building something new on ground that’s still settling — and trusting that you’re capable of it, even when you can’t see the whole path yet.
Goals and dreams don’t move in a straight line. It’s a winding road, and there are speed bumps along the way — this is what leaders face when turmoil hits, whether that turmoil is industry-wide or deeply personal. Paving that way forward isn’t cut and dried. It requires being flexible and having the understanding that there will be times when you have to pause and assess what’s right in front of you before you can move forward again.
If there’s one thing I’d want another leader in the middle of their own upheaval to know, it’s this: not having the whole plan figured out doesn’t mean you’re behind. It means you’re paying attention to signs that will actually keep you moving forward — and that’s the more honest place to build from.
I share this not because I have it all figured out, but because I know how isolating that season can feel when you’re the one who’s supposed to have the answers. If any part of this sounds familiar, these are the questions I’d ask you to sit with:
Reflections
- What roadblocks are holding you back right now — and what would it take to name them clearly?
- What do you want to achieve in the next thirty days?
- What’s actually stopping you — is it circumstances, or is it the story you’re telling yourself about them?
- If you’re honest, what results are you expecting, and are they realistic for where you are today?
If you’re standing at a crossroads, unsure which path to take, or feeling like your voice has gotten lost along the way — you don’t have to sort it out alone. A complimentary strategy call is a good place to start unpacking what’s keeping you stuck, finding ways to communicate and advocate for what you want, and moving forward with more clarity and confidence.
Until Next Time
`