I Thought I Was Resilient, Until a Devastating Loss Showed Me Resilience Is Not Something You Just 'Have' It's something you build.
By Mita Mallick
This story appears in the May 2024 issue of Entrepreneur. Subscribe »
When I began my career in marketing, a mentor told me this: Resilience is key. I nodded at the time, thinking I understood what he meant — that nothing is easy, that the strong-willed survive, and so on. I struggled with confidence during my early career, but over time I grew bolder, well-respected, and accomplished. Wasn't this resiliency? I thought I'd learned my mentor's lesson.
But I did not understand resilience at all. That became clear in 2017, when my father unexpectedly died. He was a stable, inspiring force in my life — and with him gone, I felt in free fall. I started isolating myself. I lost focus at work. My decades of experience and confidence slipped away.
Months after his death, I discovered one of his handkerchiefs in his study. For as long as I could remember, he kept one of these tucked in his pocket. It was his version of a small luxury — like a consistent gift to himself, despite what the world gave or took from him. He was an Indian immigrant engineer who left his family behind in Kolkata to start a life in the U.S. He didn't have a community of support to fall back on. He struggled to fit into corporate America. But despite all that, he became an executive of a Fortune 500 company.
As I grieved, I carried his handkerchief wherever I went. It reminded me to do as I'd watched him do — to establish routines at work, to focus my attention, to practice self-care. I started taking long walks and made sure to eat lunch every day. I built new connections with colleagues, took on new projects, began co-leading our women's employee resource group, and helped my employer rethink its bereavement policies. In short, I established my own purpose, no matter what challenges surrounded me. Just like my father.
In time, I came to reflect upon my mentor's old words: Resilience is key. Now I understood. Resilience is not something you can borrow, emulate, or study in a management book. It is not something you can just have, as I once thought. It is something you build — an iterative process that's unique to each of us, as we adapt to life's challenges and choose to move forward again. On the other side of that process, you truly find yourself.
