3 Ways Managers Can Build Resilience to Handle Tough Challenges at Work

• Get the Foundation of Self Framework
• Take your personality assessment

Resilience isn’t just something you build after a crisis. In this episode, you’ll learn how to strengthen your mindset, build emotional stamina, and proactively prepare for life’s hard moments, so you can handle them with more calm, clarity, and confidence.

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Do you only feel strong after everything falls apart?

Resilience isn’t something we should only discover when we’re forced to. Whether you’re leading a team or simply trying to lead yourself through tough seasons, this episode will help you understand what it means to build resilience on purpose.

From personal challenges to professional growth, we talk about what it means to face discomfort with intention, how to shift your mindset, and how to strengthen your habits now—before the pressure hits.

You’ll also hear the study that blew my mind about dopamine, discipline, and why your brain actually feels better when you do hard things first.

By the time you finish listening, you’ll learn:

• The difference between reactive and proactive resilience and why it matters in every area of life
• Three ways to build resilience daily by leaning into discomfort
• How doing hard things first actually boosts your brain’s dopamine response
• How personality assessments helped me face hard truths and can help you too

Want to figure out where you're getting in your own way?
 Take a personality assessment at intentionalaction.net/self-awareness and get a free 30-minute debrief with me. Let’s turn your self-awareness into personal growth and leadership clarity.

Connect With Desiree on Linkedin
Buy the book - Taking Intentional Action: How to Choose the Life You Lead

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Coachin...

Transcript

Desiree Petrich (00:01.654)
Most people only build resilience after something bad has happened. They hold strong to the what doesn't kill you makes you stronger. But what if I told you that you can build resilience every day on purpose? Well, in today's episode, we're going to talk about how to walk into the wind literally and figuratively. And I'm going to share three ways that you can build resilience on purpose. There was a study that I recently read that blew my mind. So make sure you stick around for number three, because you're not going to want to miss this.

Desiree Petrich (00:36.898)
Welcome back to the You're the Boss, Now What podcast.

Desiree Petrich (00:47.244)
Welcome back to You're the Boss, Now What? I'm your host Desiree Petriq and our goal here is to help you lead yourself and your team better. So lean in and let's get started.

Desiree Petrich (01:04.853)
Last week I talked with wardrobe stylist Elisa Ellis about using our clothes to help build our confidence both internally and externally. But this week we're going to talk about confidence and strength that you build internally, mentally and at a gut and visceral level of how can we build resilience before we need it, before life starts lifing at us. Before we get into the different ways that we can actively work on building our resilience, I want to explain to you the difference. There's two types.

of resilience. There is reactive resilience. This is the thing where when fires are coming at you, whether they're in the form of your kid is sick and you have to call off work for the day, you get injured so you can't stick to that workout.

Desiree Petrich (01:57.398)
you get injured so the workout system, the schedule that you had that you were really finally

Desiree Petrich (02:14.114)
there is the reactive resilience. This is where all the fires are coming at you at once. Whether it's your kid gets sick and you have to call off work, you get injured. And so the workouts that finally started to feel like they were being a little bit more fun.

Desiree Petrich (02:39.234)
Reactive resilience is the white knuckling through the hard things. This is fires are happening at work, the walls are crashing down around you and you have to just grit your teeth and bear it and it feels hard and you don't know that you're ever gonna get to the light at the end of the tunnel. It's you are in the middle of a really big project at work and your kid gets sick and you have to go home and you want to be there mentally but you just don't know how to do both.

You finally have a workout program that feels good, it's going good, you're getting your steps in, your nutrition is on point, and then you get injured or you get the flu and you know that you're gonna have to start again, but you just can't mentally wrap your head around it. These are all examples of white knuckling through something. Maybe you get fired, maybe you lose someone, maybe you have a long-term chronic illness and it feels impossible to get to the end of that tunnel.

That is reactive resilience. That is thinking, I'm going to just wait till something happens and pray and cross my fingers that I'm going to get through it. Then there's the proactive kind of resilience. This is the kind of resilience that I want to encourage you to engage with because this proactive resilience means that you are choosing a little bit of discomfort now so that when the hard things happen, you can feel a little bit more prepared. There are things that will happen to you that you could never prepare for.

you could never in a million years imagine what will happen. And I don't want that to feel overly scary, but I could have never in a million years imagined that I would have my son, he'd be in the NICU for a month. My mom would have a stroke and pass away two months later. Like that is not a scenario that I could have ever expected. I could not have expected to get a job right out of college in the management field and then really, really struggle and then have to deal with a global pandemic on top of it.

These scenarios could never be expected. So how do we proactively get resilience?

Desiree Petrich (04:43.98)
without knowing what it is that we're trying to be resilient for.

Desiree Petrich (05:04.342)
In my book, Taking Intentional Action, I have this framework and it's called the foundation of self. It's building a series of habits and mindset shifts that are going to really help you to overcome any of the challenges to build a strong foundation of self that allows you to choose happiness on every given day. The bottom tier of this is the one we're going to talk about today. The bottom tier of the foundation of self framework is self engagement. It's all of these different areas that we can

choose discomfort in now so that things will be a little bit easier later. I didn't recognize that this was what I was doing until after the fact, but during the pandemic, I started building out habits. I realized that I had absolutely no control over the things that were happening and I wanted some. I wanted some control. So I looked at my life and I said, there's so many areas that I can't control right now. What can I? And I started exercising.

I started reading books about relationships. I hadn't called certain friends in years and all of a sudden, just because I couldn't see them, it felt easier to call them the stupid things that we make excuses for. And I am raising my hand. I do it all the time. But if we can say, what am I avoiding right now? What am I resisting right now? And we can choose discomfort in that thing. That is what it means to self engage. That is what it means to build some proactive resilience.

I want to give you a scenario here. Think about the day you walk out your front door and you're going to walk a mile down the gravel road. Just pretend you live in the country here for a minute. You're going to walk a mile down the gravel road and you get down to the end of that turn. You turn around and you realize that walk was kind of easy, but I know why.

Desiree Petrich (07:04.846)
So I'm gonna give you some of the examples of different habits that you can build. This is the first way to build resilience. It's to say yes to those small discomforts. So if we're talking about physical health, it could be get a certain number of steps every day. It could be eat a certain amount of protein. It could be avoiding a certain food group. You pick something that is specific to you that would help you to feel discomfort.

discomfort, not so much that it's going to wreck you, not so much that you can't even wrap your head around the concept of doing it. Don't say I'm going to do a 60 minute workout when you can't even wrap your head around doing 30. We have to be realistic about this, but choosing discomfort in these areas is truly about where in my life am I resisting certain things, even though I know they would make my life better and easier and more enjoyable. And how can I do them?

How can I muster up the strength and the courage and the resilience to do these things? Doing it in moments when nothing is on the line is what is going to build that resilience for you. So that was physical health. We have mental health. Can you read a book? Can you journal? I hate meditating, but maybe you would enjoy it. Can you meditate? Can you visualize? Can you track your food? These are all mental type things that are going to help you to build that resilience. Is it sleep?

Can you turn the TV off 20 minutes earlier? Can you have a bedtime routine of washing your face and brushing your teeth and flossing your teeth before you go to bed? Decreases the amount of blue light. It's gonna help you to feel like your hygiene is more in order. It's gonna be a little less scary the next time you have to go to the dentist. There's a lot of resilience in that too. If it's sleep, can you keep your phone in a different room?

If the resilience that you need to build is not hitting the snooze button, can you trick yourself and put plans into place to make sure that you're not able to hit that snooze button without at least putting your feet on the ground and having to walk to your alarm clock? If it's reading, can you say, I'm gonna start with five pages a day? All of these things, although very small, are just the way that we can self engage ourselves, saying yes to small discomforts.

Desiree Petrich (09:22.88)
If we're looking at this from a leadership perspective, if we're looking at this from a work perspective, what are some really small things that you could do that would provide some discomfort now? But ultimately, at the end of the day, they're going to make things easier for you. Can you ask for feedback from your boss or from a coworker? Even though you might know what they're going to say, or even if you're scared about what they're going to say, can you take that small bit of discomfort now? If you know you don't like making eye contact with people, but you know that it's something that would help you to go further,

and faster in your career, can you make eye contact even though it's a little bit uncomfortable? Can you raise your hand in a meeting even though you are an introvert and you don't like speaking up? Can you hold your tongue? That is very uncomfortable for me. I like to be the one talking. I like to pick holes in things and play devil's advocate. Sometimes it's not necessary. Can I hold my tongue? That would be discomfort for me. Can you raise your hand and volunteer to chair a board of directors? Can you volunteer to lead

a meeting, can you volunteer to do these things before you're ready? Putting in the reps before someone says, hey, you need to lead this meeting or hey, you need to go and ask for feedback from this person because what you're doing clearly isn't working. Life is going to force certain situations on us when we're not ready. So what if you can prepare for them by looking at the life that you lead right now, by looking at what's currently standing in between where you are right now and what it is that you want, whether it's career focused, family focused, relationships focused,

health-focused, pick one, pick an area, pick something very granular within that area, and then go and do the thing. Go to intentionalaction.net slash foundation of self, and it's gonna give you a ton of different ideas of things that you can look into. Is it your money mindset? Is it your sleep? Is it your spirituality? What areas are you needing to dive more into? What areas are you needing to increase a little bit of that discomfort?

Now, number three is going to tell you a little bit about why discomfort and why challenging yourself is ultimately the best thing that you can do, even to overcome some of the bad habits that we have. So stick around here. But let's do number two first. looking for resistance. We already talked about this a little bit, but I want to go a little bit deeper into it because resistance is one of my favorite words because it's really easy to volunteer for a million things.

Desiree Petrich (11:51.054)
and then two months later feel incredibly overwhelmed and not understand where it's coming from. It's really easy to have all of these.

Desiree Petrich (12:12.032)
It's really easy to just choose to dislike a boss or a coworker and never have a conversation with them, never try to make it better. And then six months down the road, it's like, I either have to quit or they have to, we're not gonna make it through this. Where is your resistance coming from? I was talking with my coach yesterday, and yes, I believe everyone should have a coach, entrepreneur or not. I was talking with my coach yesterday and I just said,

I was feeling so much resistance to some things that I had raised my hand for and I said I would do and then I was feeling bad because I was letting people down and I was dropping the ball and I wasn't giving enough attention to these things that I knew I needed to do. So I emailed the person that I had said I would help with something and I just said, I'm so sorry. I have a lot on my plate right now and I'm choosing to take the attention I was going to put on this and put it on something else. Please know that I'm to be there to support you.

no matter what and I will help in any way that I can but at this time it's not something that I have the time or the capacity for. The amount of resistance, the amount of weight that lifted off of my shoulders even though I had known for two months that I needed to do that was insane. If we're not looking for the things that are causing us resistance we're not going to do them. I didn't podcast for two months.

because of something really stupid. I didn't like my cover photo. Now this is a very vulnerable moment for me, but when you aren't looking for it, if you don't know what the resistance is, you're gonna sit at your...

Desiree Petrich (13:51.758)
You're going to sit in your home and you're going to feel guilty and you're going to feel like you are dropping the ball. You're going to feel like you're not doing good enough when it's something really easy. At the end of the day, it's something really easy that can very easily be changed. And yes, you might have to have a hard conversation. And yes, you might have to put extra work in. And yes, you might have to say no to things that you wish you could say yes to or that you feel bad for saying no to. But if you can look for that resistance, if you can just sit down and say.

Why is this thing so hard for me? Why am I so against having this conversation with this co-worker that I don't like when ultimately it could lead to me feeling more empathetic towards her and seeing her as a human and being able to say, I know why you do that thing that really bothers me now. What if we could get past that discomfort? What if we could look for that resistance and do something about it? That's going to build that resilience up in us. So I want you to just sit back.

Right now, hit pause and say, where is the resistance in my life? What are things that I want to be doing or that I should be doing and I'm not doing them and why? And then I want you to go do something about it. One itty bitty tiny thing. I'm to give one more example of this. I find a lot of resistance to doing things like exercising and prepping food and getting work done when I have games on my phone. I have a somewhat obsessive

personality when I have a game on my phone and I want to sit there and I want to play it and my relationship suffer and my health suffers and my work suffers and yet I keep downloading games on my phone but every single time I sit back and say where is the resistance to doing these things I can pinpoint it and I go and I take the action and I delete the game from my phone and you think well wouldn't you just keep it off your phone it doesn't even make sense but we do we have to relearn these lessons over and over again

But the more you sit back and the more you actively look for that resistance and the more you actually take the discomfort and engage yourself in the action, the better and easier and stronger you are going to be and the shorter timeframe it's gonna be between the doing of the thing and the noticing of the thing the next time.

Desiree Petrich (16:04.888)
So number three, this one blew my mind. I was listening to a podcast and this study by Dr. Anna Lemke came up and it was talking about that when we do something pleasurable, like scrolling, snacking, binge watching, playing games, eating chocolate, you name it, our brain releases dopamine. It's a feel good chemical and then it makes us wanna do that thing more and more and it's really, really hard to get out of that cycle. But here's the kicker.

If we do things too often, the brain starts to lower that feel good response, that dopamine response over time, which means that we need more of it in order to feel the same reward. We need more games, more TV, more chocolate, more you name it. What is your vice? So we need more of that thing in order to feel the same amount of reward or even worse, we feel terrible.

When we don't get it, we feel like we're missing out on something. We get a visceral gut response to not being able to do that thing. And it feels like we get stuck in a pattern. So here's the really interesting part. And something I think I knew, but I had never heard it in a study like this. It's when we intentionally do hard things first, like a workout, like fasting, if you happen to be an intermittent fasting. If you delay gratification, right? If you do things that are uncomfortable on purpose, the brain will actually rebound

with more dopamine afterwards. Your brain is going to create a feel-good response, even more of a feel-good response afterwards, and you're gonna feel better overall. So I'm gonna put this in layman's terms, just a little bit here. So doing uncomfortable things on purpose will train our brain to enjoy life more after the challenge. So not necessarily during it, the during of the challenge is still gonna be uncomfortable, but our brain is going to...

understand that we can enjoy life more. It's why replacing screen time or sugar with a discipline like a walk or if you like cold showers or not listening to music when you go on a run or just turning your phone off for an hour. It's not just going to build willpower, but it's also going to build emotional strength. And then when we do watch TV or we do scroll or play a game on our phone or we do eat some chocolate, our dopamine response is going to get higher.

Desiree Petrich (18:23.116)
our brain is going to stop requiring so much of it to get the same response. I geek out over this stuff, so I'm sorry if that wasn't as interesting to you as it was to me, but I think it's just so incredible. So number three is we have to delay that dopamine. And in my book, I talk about this concept called...

Desiree Petrich (18:48.344)
conditional permission. This is just a really simple way to essentially put this study into practice. So for me, when my alarm goes off in the morning and I desperately don't want to get up and I want to go back to bed and I don't want to go read and journal and work out, I say, that's fine. I'm an adult. I can make that decision. But I am going to do the hard thing first. I'm going to wash my face with cold water, turn on the light and brush my teeth. And if after that I still want to go back to bed,

I'm an adult, I'm gonna give myself permission to do that, but I'm gonna put a condition in front of it first. And then you know what? When I get to go to sleep later that night, I actually sleep better because I woke up early in the morning. When I get to noon that day and I'm thinking to myself,

Desiree Petrich (19:42.168)
When I do get up and I do read and I do journal and I do workout and I sit down and I finally get to watch five minutes of TV at the end of the night, I get a lot more pleasure from it than if I had been watching TV all day and at some point it's just, it doesn't even work anymore because your body needs so much more of that dopamine hit in order to feel anything. So if I can encourage you with anything on this.

Desiree Petrich (20:15.96)
So you might be thinking to yourself, well, this is a leadership podcast. What does this have to do with my position in the workplace? I you to think about something. Life and work are not separate as much as some people would want you to believe that they are not separate. Resilience in your personal life, the things that you do on a day-to-day basis, they are going to directly impact how you lead. When you can model this self-engagement, your team is gonna see it. It's gonna help you to lead by example, not only for your team, but for your kids and for your friends.

It's going to help you to build the kind of relationships that you want to have because you're going to engage in the things that are then going to help you build the relationships in the right areas. The executive presence that you build from doing something like this in the quiet moments, even when no one can see it, is where you're going to be able to choose growth. You're going to be able to choose to get rid of that resistance and to build resilience on purpose. Now, I told you that during the pandemic, I was stretching.

and reading and getting my 10,000 steps and calling my friends. And I think it was two years later when my son was born and in the NICU, I was still sitting on the floor stretching and reading instead of watching TV. And when my mom passed away, I was still calling friends. And if I didn't have those relationships, if I wouldn't have been doing that hard thing, it feels hard to make a 30 minute phone call when you feel like there's no extra time in your day. But if I hadn't been doing that and

making an effort, I went to have those relationships that essentially held me together during the hardest point in my life, the hardest thing that I could have never imagined possible. We have to do the hard thing first. So I was doing a body combat workout this morning and it's my favorite one. It's when I trained to become a body combat instructor. This was the release that I trained on and so it's in my heart, it's in my soul. And one of the instructors

Makes me cry every time at the end of the workout. The very last song, the hardest song, in my opinion, he talks about how tired you probably are. You're overwhelmed. You feel burdened. You feel like sometimes it's just not enough and your legs are heavy and your arms are heavy. And he said, it's not about that, though. It's not about doing the hard things. It's not about trying to get rid of the hard. It's not about

Desiree Petrich (22:41.204)
not being tired. It's not about not being overwhelmed. It's about doing the hard things so that when you are overwhelmed and when you are tired, when you are frustrated or burnt out, you know how to better self-regulate and self-engage and manage yourself. You know better how to show up to be the person that you want to be simply because you chose to do it when it wasn't necessary. When nothing was on the line, you chose to do the hard things so that when something

came and you didn't have a choice and life inevitably lifed at you, you got to do something that most people don't do. They don't build that resilience first to then be able to use it to strengthen the resolve even further when something does happen that is outside of your control. So you don't have to wait. You don't have to wait until you're overwhelmed to get stronger. You can do the hard thing today.

you can retrain your brain's dopamine response to not need it. So just to go over these three things one last time, you can say yes to the small discomforts through self-engagement. Remember, go to intentionalaction.net slash.

Desiree Petrich (23:58.828)
intentionalaction.net slash self.

Desiree Petrich (24:07.286)
IntentionalAction.net slash foundation of self and it'll give you a bunch of different areas that you can maybe dig into a little bit further. If you want to tell me about what it is that you're doing to build discomfort now or you're just not sure where to start.

Desiree Petrich (24:33.004)
or you're just not sure where to start, send me a message on LinkedIn. I want to help you. I want to be that person that is cheering you on because I know you can do it. Number two, look for resistance. One more anecdote here. When I was told at the age of, I think I was probably 25 at this point by my boss that I needed to take a personality assessment because I kept asking him, said, I know I'm not doing things right. I know my team doesn't like me. I don't know why. I can't figure it out. I'm trying really hard.

And he said, here, take this disc assessment. And I got it back and it said I had a very aggressive personality type style. Only 3 % of the population have a very high D, which is the dominant, assertive, aggressive, quick to change, very abrupt in the way that they speak. I didn't like what it said. And it was one of the most uncomfortable things ever. And I could have just taken it in stride and said, you know what? It is what it is and used it as an excuse and just kept

leading the way I was leading. Or I could do what I did and say, this is not who I want to be. It's not who I want to embody in the line of work that I'm in. It's not going to get me to where I want to go. I need to figure out how to get to a different place in this. I need to figure out how to embody some of the characteristics of the other styles. And it was impossible and there was so much resistance to it. But when we can do the uncomfortable thing, when we can look for that resistance and choose to do something different.

to choose to take action, that is where a lot of our power and our strength and our resilience is gonna come through. And then if you feel like you are addicted to DV or scrolling social media or playing games on your phone or video games or whatever your vice is, eating chocolate, I am a huge, have a huge sweet tooth, it's terrible. How can you retrain your brain's dopamine response by doing something hard first? Say I can eat.

that cookie, but I need to go on a walk first. I can sit and play video games, but I need to stretch for 10 minutes first. I can watch TV, but I need to read for at least 10 minutes first. Use that conditional permission and do something hard first. Retrain your brain's dopamine response. If nothing else, you're going to have a more feel good moment when you actually do that thing you want to do. Find a little bit of discomfort first.

Desiree Petrich (27:02.52)
So here's what I want you to do now. I want you to go to intentionalaction.net slash self-awareness. You can take either a work ingenious or a disc assessment, figure out where you might be resisting certain things and why, so we can do something about it. I'm gonna give you a free 30 minute debrief. If you take one of those assessments and you wanna go over it, I can help you to create a plan around what would it look like for me to show up at work differently? What would it look like for me to show up at home and in life and even when I'm just sitting there by myself?

How can I think and show up differently? Intentionalaction.net slash self-awareness. You can also send me a message on LinkedIn. I want to be there to help you. I want to support you. You do not have to wait until you're overwhelmed and burnt out to get stronger. You can do it now.

Desiree Petrich (27:52.544)
And speaking of choosing things, next week we're going to be joined by executive coach, Melissa Skolton to talk about taking your career into your own hands. Choosing what it would look like to not wait for your company to hand you something, but for you to be able to choose it and start taking steps in the right direction. The confidence and the mindset shift that this conversation is going to give you is going to be incredibly impactful, at least it was for me. So make sure you hit subscribe so you don't miss a thing.

and I can't wait to see you back here next week.

And just remember.

Desiree Petrich (28:32.918)
And just remember, leadership is an incredible privilege, but it's also a really huge responsibility. And you're the boss now. What are you going to do with it?