Resilience as a Strength

Why Most Women Leaders Get It Wrong (And What Actually Works)

Nobody talks about how resilience as a strength looks suspiciously like having mascara streaks in your car after a meeting that went sideways.

The most courageous leaders I know don't fake a quick bounce—they grieve the setback, grab an extra shot of espresso, and then get curious. Real strength and resilience means understanding that pretending it doesn't hurt just builds scar tissue where there could be wisdom.

But somewhere along the way, we bought into this myth that resilience as a strength means bouncing back faster than a tennis ball. That strong women don't let things get to them. That if you're truly cut out for leadership, you should be able to shake off rejection, criticism, or failure like water off a duck's back.

Here's what I know after three decades in finance and tech, and after coaching hundreds of brilliant women who thought their tears meant they were weak: what we've been sold as strength and resilience is actually emotional bypassing dressed up in a power suit.

The Truth About Real Resilience

Real resilience doesn't look like the polished LinkedIn posts about "turning setbacks into comebacks." It looks like my client Sarah, a VP at a Fortune 500 tech company, sitting in her Tesla in the parking garage after being passed over for a promotion she'd been promised for two years. She didn't immediately start journaling about gratitude or call it a "redirection from the universe."

She cried. Hard. For twenty minutes.

Then she drove home, poured herself a glass of wine, and let herself feel the full weight of disappointment before she started getting curious about what this meant and what she wanted to do about it.

The difference between Sarah and the dozens of women I've worked with who stayed stuck for years? Sarah didn't make her tears mean she was broken. She didn't rush to fix her feelings or immediately start strategizing her comeback. She honored the part of her that was genuinely hurt, and then—only then—did she start asking better questions.

Most of us skip straight to the questions. We've been conditioned to believe that pausing to feel is a luxury we can't afford in competitive environments. But here's what neuroscience tells us: emotions that aren't processed don't disappear. They get stored in our bodies as tension, in our minds as limiting beliefs, and in our careers as invisible barriers we can't quite name.

Why Common Solutions Fail

The resilience industry has sold us a bill of goods that's not just unhelpful—it's harmful. We're told to:

"Focus on the positive" (translation: bypass the real information your emotions are giving you)

"Bounce back quickly" (translation: don't let yourself fully process what happened, which guarantees you'll repeat the same patterns)

"Don't take it personally" (translation: disconnect from your humanity and intuition, the very things that make you a powerful leader)

"Everything happens for a reason" (translation: spiritual bypassing that shuts down your ability to discern what's actually happening and make conscious choices about it)

I spent years following this advice in my own corporate career. I became a master at the quick bounce-back, the immediate reframe, the "it's fine, I'm fine, everything's fine" while my nervous system was screaming and my intuition was trying to tell me something important about the environment I was in or the choices I was making.

The result? I got really good at enduring toxic situations instead of changing them. I built incredible tolerance for dysfunction instead of trust in my own judgment. I mistook numbing for strength and pushing through for resilience. (This is exactly the pattern I explore in depth in How to Overcome Burnout: When Grit Becomes Self-Sabotage—when our greatest strength becomes our biggest blind spot.)

The women I work with have similar stories. They've been so conditioned to prove their resilience by not "letting things get to them" that they've lost access to one of their most powerful leadership tools: their emotional intelligence.

A Better Way Forward: The SoulFire Approach to Authentic Resilience

What if I told you that your tears after that brutal meeting weren't a sign of weakness—they were a sign of wisdom? What if your disappointment about the promotion that didn't come wasn't something to get over quickly, but something to get curious about deeply?

In my SoulFire methodology, we work with what I call Conscious Resilience—the ability to feel fully, process completely, and then choose powerfully. It's not about becoming an emotional robot. It's about developing such trust in your ability to handle difficult emotions that you're no longer afraid of them.

If you're curious about how conscious resilience fits into the bigger picture of leading authentically, join my free Aligned Leadership Masterclass where I share the framework that's helped hundreds of women step into their power without burning out.

This kind of resilience actually makes you more powerful, not less. When you're not spending energy suppressing, managing, or avoiding your feelings, you have more bandwidth for strategic thinking, creative problem-solving, and authentic connection with your team.

My client Jennifer, a director at a major investment firm, used to pride herself on never letting anyone see her sweat. When she was blindsided by a reorganization that eliminated her department, her first instinct was to immediately start networking and job hunting. "I need to show them this doesn't affect me," she told me.

Instead, we spent our first session just letting her feel angry. Furious, actually. At the lack of communication, the way she found out, the timing right before her daughter's graduation. She was afraid that if she let herself feel the full impact, she'd fall apart and never recover.

The opposite happened. Once she stopped using all her energy to hold it together, she started seeing things clearly. She realized she'd been unhappy in that role for months but had been too afraid to admit it. The reorganization, while painful, was actually showing her something she'd been too busy to notice: she was ready for something completely different. (If you're navigating a sudden job loss, here's my step-by-step guide for what to do when laid off.)

Six months later, she'd launched her own consulting practice and was making more money than she ever had as an employee. But none of that transformation was possible when she was stuck in fake resilience mode.

How We Change the Game: Three Pillars of Conscious Resilience

1. Feel It to Heal It (The Grief Phase)

The first step in conscious resilience is giving yourself permission to feel the full impact of what happened. This isn't wallowing—it's data gathering. Your emotions are giving you important information about what matters to you, what your boundaries are, and what you're ready to change.

Try this: After your next difficult professional situation, instead of immediately moving into solution mode, ask yourself: "What am I actually feeling about this?" Sit with whatever comes up for sixty seconds before you do anything else. Notice how your body feels. Notice what thoughts arise. Don't judge it, just notice it.

Most high-achieving women have never given themselves this basic permission. We've been so trained to be solutions-oriented that we skip the most important step: understanding what we're actually dealing with.

2. Get Curious, Not Furious (The Investigation Phase)

Once you've allowed yourself to feel the impact, the next step is investigation. This is where you start asking questions like: What is this situation trying to teach me? What patterns am I noticing? What would I do differently if I trusted myself completely?

This is not the same as immediately looking for the silver lining or trying to find the lesson so you can move on. This is deeper detective work about yourself, your environment, and your choices.

Try this: After you've felt the feelings, grab a journal and write down everything you know to be true about the situation without editing yourself. Then ask: "If my wisest self was looking at this situation, what would she want me to know?" Write whatever comes up, even if it surprises you.

3. Choose Powerfully (The Action Phase)

Only after you've felt and investigated are you ready to choose your next steps. This is where you get to decide what you want to do with the information you've gathered. Sometimes that's a strategic career move. Sometimes it's a difficult conversation. Sometimes it's deciding to leave a situation that's no longer serving you.

But whatever action you take from this place will be conscious and aligned, not reactive and desperate. You'll be choosing from your power, not from your wounds.

Try this: Before you make any major decisions in response to a difficult situation, ask yourself: "Am I choosing this from fear or from power? Am I moving toward something I want, or away from something I don't want?" There's no wrong answer, but conscious choice requires honest assessment.

The Plot Twist: Your Sensitivity Is Your Superpower

Here's what nobody tells you about authentic resilience: the women who feel things deeply are often the most naturally resilient. Not despite their sensitivity, but because of it.

Your ability to feel the full spectrum of human emotion means you have access to information that others miss. You can sense when something is off in your team before it becomes a crisis. You can feel when a strategy isn't working before the data shows it. You can detect authenticity and its absence in ways that give you tremendous strategic advantage.

But only if you stop trying to numb or manage your sensitivity and start leveraging it as the leadership tool it actually is.

The most powerful leaders I know—the ones who create cultures where people actually want to work, who make decisions that stand the test of time, who inspire genuine loyalty—are not the ones who never feel affected by setbacks. They're the ones who feel everything, process it consciously, and then choose their next moves from a place of clarity rather than reactivity.

What This Looks Like in Real Life

Real resilience might look like:

• Sitting in your car after a difficult meeting and letting yourself cry before you drive home
• Taking the weekend to process a career disappointment before jumping into action mode
• Having an honest conversation with your partner about how work stress is affecting you instead of pretending you've got it all handled
• Asking for support when you need it instead of trying to figure everything out alone
• Saying no to opportunities that don't align with your values, even when they look good on paper
• Trusting your gut when something feels off, even if you can't articulate why

None of this makes you weak. It makes you wise.

Your Invitation to Real Resilience

Beautiful soul, if you've been exhausted from trying to bounce back faster than humanly possible, if you've been judging yourself for feeling things deeply in environments that reward emotional suppression, if you've been wondering why you can handle everything except the pressure to act like nothing affects you—you're not broken.

You're awake.

And your sensitivity, your depth, your ability to feel the full impact of your experiences—that's not a bug in your leadership operating system. That's the feature that's going to set you apart.

The question isn't whether you're resilient enough. The question is: are you ready to stop performing resilience and start embodying it?

What's one truth you've been avoiding about how setbacks really affect you? Drop it in the comments below, or if you'd rather have a private conversation about what conscious resilience could look like in your career, book a free Clarity Call. I'd love to hear your story and explore what's possible when you stop trying to bounce back and start choosing to rise up.

Remember: The most resilient people aren't the ones who never fall down. They're the ones who've learned to trust themselves to get back up in their own time, in their own way, with their wisdom intact.