Hi fellow founders,

This week marks our first official rebranded edition, and we’re highlighting a quote from Elizabeth Edwards:

“Resilience is accepting your new reality, even if it’s less good than the one you had before. You can fight it, you can do nothing but scream about what you’ve lost, or you can accept that and try to put together something that’s good.”

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When the pandemic hit in 2021, our first business - a creative freelancer marketplace - had just launched. You can probably imagine how that turned out. The 10,000 creatives on our platform lost their businesses overnight, and so did we, since our main revenue stream came from platform commissions.

The rest is history. We turned to the only asset we had—our community—and began experimenting with monetizing newsletter partnerships. It worked, and we survived.

But survival didn’t come overnight; it took 12 months. And during those 12 months, I crumbled into a version of myself I barely recognized. My co-founders fought through the uncertainty and held us together.

I had always prided myself on being innately resilient—someone who never gives up, one of the last survivors, someone who only ever needs a week to bounce back. But that experience forced me to rethink everything I thought I knew about resilience and redefine it for myself.

Over the years, I’ve come to understand the power of self-compassion and vulnerability—and how they might play a bigger role in resilience than we think. In this issue, let’s dive into resilience from a different lens.

Defining Resilience- Helpful or Harmful?

Overcoming adversity is a hallmark of resilience. Think of people who remain persistent, despite profound challenges like loss or catastrophe. While resilience traditionally focuses on "bouncing back", people rarely emerge from immense challenges unscathed.

Acting like it’s business as usual when you’re struggling often does more harm than good. Psychology identifies this as toxic or maladaptive resilience. That is because refusing to adapt to new realities can actually weaken the resilience you’re trying to build.

When Resilience Becomes a Liability

Resilience is often celebrated as a cornerstone of personal strength. Its close cousin, grit—a combination of perseverance and dedication, drives high-achievers toward their goals. Yet, like resilience, grit can become a liability when applied to unachievable objectives.

Gritty people can fall into the trap of pushing forward even when pursuing a lost cause. In one study, the grittiest participants kept trying to complete unsolvable word problems, even to the point of losing money.

The findings reveal an important truth: the qualities that drive success can also hold you back if you don’t know when to step away.

Toxic Resilience: The Paved Road to Burnout

Similarly, resilient traits like adaptability and flexibility can be misapplied in unsupportive or actively harmful environments, like a toxic startup environment. Maladaptive resilience doesn’t promote growth or success; instead, it paves the road to profound psychological and physical consequences.

Team members who invest more energy into achieving goals without clear parameters or recognition are at greater risk of exhaustion, anxiety, reduced productivity, and disengagement. Studies show that these employees also suffer higher rates of burnout. Burnout is not just a temporary setback—it can take employees months or even years to recover.

Re-defining resilience as an act of self-compassion

Resilience is often framed as a force of will that pushes through hardship no matter the cost. But true resilience is not about gritting one’s teeth through suffering—it is about adaptation, self-compassion, and knowing when to seek support.

Dr. Kristin Neff, a psychology professor and renowned researcher, is a leading expert in self-compassion.  Her work breaks through common myths surrounding resilience, such as the belief that self-compassion fosters weakness rather than strength or that self-compassion and motivation are incompatible.

Her research shows that adopting a self-compassionate approach to resilience—through actions such as setting boundaries, acknowledging and alleviating one’s suffering, or stepping away from harmful situations—is associated with a greater ability to navigate life’s challenges successfully.

Avoid the Pitfalls of Maladaptive Resilience

Resilience should empower us, not trap us in cycles of unrealistic expectations and self-inflicted pressure. Instead of treating resilience like an endurance test, we might ask: How would I comfort a friend in this situation? Offering ourselves that same kindness transforms resilience from a set of rigid expectations into a flexible, sustainable source of strength. Here are more ways to reframe resilience with more compassion and balance:

• Resilience is a group effort: A toxic view of resilience places the burden solely on the individual, neglecting the environments that contribute to hardship in the first place. Dr. Neff’s concept of common humanity reminds us that suffering is not a personal failure but a shared experience. Connecting to others during a challenging time is essential for true resilience.

• Emotional awareness matters: Acknowledging your emotions rather than suppressing them helps prevent burnout and builds a deeper, more lasting resilience. When we recognize and surrender to our feelings instead of pushing them aside, we can respond to challenges with greater clarity and self-compassion. This strengthens our ability to cope while fostering personal growth and emotional well-being over time.

• Flexibility over stubbornness: The kind of resilience that might save you from being lost at sea is not the same resilience that will protect you in a toxic workplace. To avoid maladaptive resilience, we must recognize that it is not a singular trait but a spectrum of responses. Sometimes it means pressing on, other times it means letting go. Every so often, resilience means setting sail in a different direction.

Not to be missed

• TEDx talk: The difference between self-esteem and self-compassion.

• 6 ways to market yourself without marketing yourself.

• Time Anxiety: Is it too late?