inner compass
Edition #3,
May 30, 2025

Rising with Resilience

"My barn having burned down, I can now see the moon."
- Mizuta Masahide

FROM THE DESK OF LEILANY LIMA

For most of my life, I couldn't share an important story that profoundly shaped who I am. The experiences that began when I was eight years old - international kidnapping, domestic violence, years in hiding - had to remain private for safety reasons. By my early twenties as I was establishing my career, the immediate threat had subsided, though was ever-present in the background, and by my late twenties, that chapter of fear had closed completely due to a death in the family.

Today, I live freely and fully - no longer confined by that trauma, but undeniably strengthened by it. And here's what I've learned about resilience through both lived experience and sixteen years of professional practice: our greatest challenges often become the source of our most powerful contributions.

The situational awareness I developed through that trauma became my ability to navigate complex challenges with both heart and strategy. The internal strength I built during constant uncertainty became one of my greatest professional assets.

What if I told you that your greatest setbacks might actually be the source of your most profound strengths?

Resilience isn't just about bouncing back - it's about bouncing forward with new capacities we didn't know we possessed.

This edition explores the science of resilience, how to identify and strengthen your protective factors, and how to create environments where both you and your team can thrive through inevitable challenges. Because the question isn't whether difficulties will come; it's whether we'll be equipped to transform them into sources of wisdom and strength when they do.

Let's discover the resilient core that's already within you.

COORDINATES

Self-Direction

This month, I invite you to become your own resilience researcher. Set aside 20 minutes to explore this exercise.

Your Resilience Research: Create a simple two-column chart. 

  • In the left column, write about one challenge/adversity you've faced
  • In the right column, consider and write about
    • What internal qualities helped you get through that adversity? (Think: adaptability, humor, persistence, faith - for a full list of resilience resources check the Inner Compass section)
    • What external supports helped you? (People, resources, activities, places)
  • Self-Reflection:
    What did you learn about yourself through that experience? How did going through that challenge/adversity foster (or perhaps force) your development? In what ways did you become stronger, wiser, kinder?

Benefits: When people bounce back from adversity it’s most often because of the strengths and supports written down on the right side of the chart. Understanding your unique resilience profile allows you to consciously activate these strengths during future challenges and recognize the remarkable capacity you already possess.

Team Navigation

Help your team discover and strengthen their collective resilience:

  1. Share stories of resilience: In your next team meeting, invite everyone to briefly share a professional challenge they've overcome and what helped them through it. This builds awareness of the team's collective strength.
  2. Create a team resilience resources map: Ask team members to identify their strongest resilience resources, then discuss how these different strengths can support each other during difficult projects or periods.
  3. Normalize struggle and growth: When challenges arise, frame them as opportunities to strengthen the team's resilience muscles rather than problems to be avoided.

Team Benefit: I've witnessed that teams that understand their collective resilience navigate uncertainty with greater confidence, support each other more effectively, and often discover innovative solutions that wouldn't emerge in purely comfortable conditions.

INNER COMPASS

"You were born resilient. Resilience, defined as the capacity to spring back, rebound, and overcome adversity, is 'hard-wired' into the human makeup." - Nan Henderson

There's a myth in our culture that some people are naturally resilient while others are not - that resilience is a rare quality possessed by a fortunate few who seem to effortlessly weather life's storms. This myth not only diminishes our understanding of human capacity but also prevents us from recognizing and developing the resilience that already exists within us.

The truth, supported by decades of research in psychology and neuroscience, is far more empowering: resilience is not a trait you either have or don't have - it's a capacity that can be recognized, strengthened, and consciously activated.

The Science of Strength from Stress

Research reveals that adversity, rather than simply being something to endure, can actually be one of the most powerful catalysts for developing what researchers call "protective factors", the internal and external resilience resources that help us not just survive challenges, but grow stronger through them.

These protective factors function in three crucial ways:

First, they buffer us from some of the impact of negative experiences, acting like a safety net that prevents us from sliding into complete disruption when difficulties arise.

Second, they propel us through and over challenges. When faced with crisis, strong internal protective factors assist us in grasping the lifelines that can carry us forward when we might otherwise feel stuck.

Third, they offer evidence of our innate resilient core. Some protective factors may be learned, but research shows that even our earliest memories of overcoming adversity reveal characteristics we were born with - qualities that emerged naturally when they were needed most.

Discovering Your Protective Factor Profile

Take a moment to reflect on how you naturally navigate challenges. As you read through these areas, notice which resonate most deeply with your instincts and strengths:

  • Relationships - Your ability to form positive relationships and to seek support
  • Service - Finding meaning through being of service to others or to a cause
  • Life-skills - Good decision making, impulse control, appropriate assertiveness
  • Problem-Solving - Breaking down complex situations and making decisions under pressure
  • Humor - Having a good sense of humor, finding lightness and perspective during difficulty
  • Inner Direction - Trusting your values and making choices based on internal evaluation
  • Perceptiveness - Insightful understanding of reading people and situations
  • Independence - Adaptive ability to distance yourself from unhealthy people or situations, to maintain your autonomy and do what's right for you
  • Positive View of Personal Future - Optimism, envisioning positive possibilities even during setbacks
  • Flexibility - Ability to adjust to change when necessary to positively cope through challenges
  • Curiosity and Learning - Love of learning and approaching challenges with curiosity
  • Self-Motivation - Internal initiative and drive
  • Spirituality - Feeling of being connected to something greater than yourself
  • Self-Worth - Feelings of self-worth and self-confidence
  • Perseverance - Continuing forward despite difficulties
  • Creativity - Expressing through any artistic endeavor, using creative thinking, imagination

Circle the 4-5 that feel most natural to you. These are your core resilience resources.

Reflecting back on your Resilience Research Chart, notice how your protective factors didn't just help you survive - they helped you develop capacities you might not have discovered any other way.

Resilience in Real Life

Let me share how these protective factors showed up in my own journey, because understanding resilience in practice can illuminate how it might be working in your life too.

Inner Direction became my survival foundation. When everything external was unstable - new names, new homes, constant uncertainty - I learned to develop an unshakeable internal compass. As a child I was unknowingly building the skill that would later allow me to sit with myself easily, to trust my instincts in complex situations, and to remain grounded when others around me were in crisis.

Perceptiveness emerged from necessity. Growing up needing to be hypervigilant taught me to read rooms, anticipate needs, and notice subtleties others might miss. What began as a survival mechanism became my professional superpower - the ability to see the bigger picture, to sense when teams need support, and to navigate organizational dynamics with both strategic thinking and human sensitivity.

Service transformed my pain into purpose. The trauma that could have defined me, instead became the foundation for my life's work. In mental health settings, families in crisis found someone who truly understood their experience. In my counseling practice, clients discovered they could share their deepest struggles without overwhelming me, because I'd walked through my own darkness and emerged with both scars and wisdom.

Love of Learning kept me growing. Each new challenge, from childhood onward, became an opportunity to develop new capacities. Moving between countries, adapting to new languages and cultures, navigating complex family dynamics, all of this built my confidence that I could "sort things out" no matter what life presented.

The remarkable truth is that what felt like my greatest disadvantages early on, became my most distinctive professional advantages later in life. The careful planning that trauma demanded became my ability to manage complex projects seamlessly. The emotional regulation I learned in crisis became my capacity to remain solutions-focused under pressure. The deep empathy born from suffering became my ability to connect authentically with others and create psychological safety wherever work.

This is what resilience looks like in practice; not the absence of struggle, but the conscious transformation of struggle into strength.

Creating Resilience-Supporting Environments

Whether you're leading a team, leading a family, or nurturing your own growth, these practices foster resilience:

Normalize struggle as growth: Acknowledge that meaningful progress involves discomfort and setbacks—this isn't failure, it's how development works.

Celebrate resilience in action: When someone handles a challenge well, highlight the specific strengths you noticed them using.

Focus on learning: Ask "What did we learn?" and "How did we grow?" rather than only evaluating outcomes.

The Ripple Effect of Recognized Resilience

When you begin to recognize your own resilience, you start seeing it everywhere - in the parent managing work and family challenges, the colleague navigating difficulties, the friend rebuilding after loss. This shift transforms how you approach your own challenges, and support others through theirs.

Your resilience isn't something you need to develop from scratch - it's something to recognize, honor, and consciously strengthen.

The capacity is already there, woven into your very nature.

Will you give yourself credit for the remarkable strength you already possess?

Resiliently,

Leilany Lima