What if resilience isn't about bouncing back?

^{Hi! Welcome. You being here means more than you know. Knowing it lands with someone like you keeps me going. I'm Lavena Xu-Johnson. I write about psychology for founders. Why? Because scaling a business means scaling ourselves first.}

Happy Sunday, founders,

Last Friday night, I came across an extreme sports documentary that moved me deeply: Mountain Queen: The Summits of Lhakpa Sherpa.

Lhakpa Sherpa grew up a daughter of yak farmers in rural Nepal. Because she was a girl, she did not have access to education. She carried her brother to school for two hours every day, without ever going in.

At 27, she became the first Nepali woman to summit Everest and survive. With no formal education and no money, she wrote a letter directly to the Prime Minister of Nepal's office, appealing for government support to fund an all-women Sherpa expedition. With government support, she led the expedition to the summit on May 18, 2000. A few years later, she met the man whom she thought was her climbing and life partner, and moved to the States. Little did she know he would soon become the abuse she could not escape for years.

For a decade, her soul was pulling her back to Everest, while she protected herself and her two daughters from her husband Gheorghe’s extreme violence, and worked at a Whole Foods in Connecticut.

Director Lucy Walker once said, " Everybody's got a mountain. Sherpa just happens to have Everest in her backyard.

This story is far more than a mountain woman and her extreme sport. It's something we all recognize: the hardship we keep coming back from, again and again, the one that pushes us to our limits, yet builds us, and makes us who we are.

For founders, the mountain is the business. The trails to the summit are the full range of our personal growth.

Most of what we know about resilience describes it as something you either have or don't. A trait. A personality type. But Lhakpa's story, and what the research actually says, tells a more sophisticated story than that.

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We tend to use the word "resilient" as a synonym for "recovered." Someone has experienced hardship and is coming through the other end.

But psychologists Richard Tedeschi and Lawrence Calhoun had a different view. In their foundational research, they defined what they called post-traumatic growth: the positive psychological changes that emerge specifically as a result of the struggle with highly challenging or traumatic experiences (Tedeschi & Calhoun, 1996).

Recovery means returning to baseline, but PTG (post-traumatic growth) means surpassing it.

Across their research, Tedeschi and Calhoun identified five domains where post-traumatic growth tends to appear (Tedeschi & Calhoun, 1996):

When something significant destabilizes us, our minds tend to do one of two things:

A meta-analysis of 46 peer-reviewed studies found that deliberate rumination, specifically the intentional, reflective processing of a traumatic event, was meaningfully and consistently associated with post-traumatic growth, with a significant positive effect across samples. Intrusive rumination, by contrast, showed no reliable relationship with growth in either direction (Taku et al., 2022).

This means the involuntary looping isn't the problem. It's typically the starting point. Growth tends to come when we eventually shift from replaying to reflecting, from "what happened to me" to "what does this mean for me."

There's a temptation to read Lhakpa’s story and conclude she is simply made differently, that some people have a high level of tolerance for pain that the rest of us don't.

The research proved us wrong.

Tedeschi and Calhoun describe resilience not as a fixed capacity but as an ongoing process. One that involves the active reconstruction of meaning after our assumptions about the world are challenged (Tedeschi & Calhoun, 2004). The question isn't whether the event can break us; it is whether we can reconstruct something more useful and meaningful.

This is why PTG and resilience often coexist but aren't identical. People who experience post-traumatic growth tend to report not just recovery but transformation: a different set of priorities, a capacity for discomfort that simply didn't exist before. Ultimately, a new sense of self. Often, that capacity compounds. Research on frontline workers exposed to repeated high-stress events has found that post-traumatic growth at one point in time predicts higher resilience at a later one across three separate measurement periods (Li et al., 2025).

Resilience is like a muscle; it gets stronger each time it's used. The growth from one traumatic event will become the shield for the next adversity. Lhakpa didn't stop once and summit, she went back. Each return made the next one more possible than it would otherwise have been.

One of the ideas in PTG research is the concept of the "assumptive world": the set of beliefs we carry, often unconsciously, about who we are, how the world works, and what we expect.

Trauma uproots the world we know, and the work of recovery means reconstructing it, letting go of old assumptions, sitting with the discomfort of not-knowing, and rebuilding a newer, validated version.

For founders, we build companies on a stack of assumptions: that the market wants what we're building, that the team will stay close, that our judgment is good, and that we can ride out the uncertainty. When one of those assumptions breaks, and in any founding journeys, at least one will, and it challenges something in us at the identity level.

One consistent finding in the PTG literature is that growth doesn't emerge from the adversity itself. It emerges from the meaning we make of it (Tedeschi & Calhoun, 2004). The event does not determine the outcome, but the cognitive and psychological work we do does.

Lhakpa was told by her culture, her marriage, and her circumstances what she was capable of and not capable of. She overcame those adversities, over decades, one summit at a time. Each climb was a renegotiation of her own assumptive world.

Hurdles that destabilize our sense of identity are constant variables in a founder’s life: a product that failed, a partner who betrayed, a fundraise that didn't close, or a year that went the opposite direction entirely.

Post-traumatic growth research offers something more useful than "stay resilient." It offers a map of the process:

In the documentary, when Lhakpa returned from her 10th summit, she held her daughter’s face and said:” This one was for you, Shiny.”

The tenth summit wasn't abstract. It was tied to a concrete identity she was building out of the wreckage of her marriage. That directness, struggle in the service of something real, is what the research identifies as a driver of growth beyond recovery.

As always, hit reply if something in here hits home.

Until next week,
Lavena

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