In Episode #113 of The Executive Commute, Jayson Krause is joined by Level 52 coach and facilitator Lara Koretsky for an honest exploration of resilience, adversity, and growth.

Resilience is often described as the ability to bounce back or keep pushing when life becomes difficult. Lara challenges that definition. True resilience is not about returning to who you were before adversity or ignoring the toll it has taken. It is the ability to learn, adapt, recover, and create something stronger from the experience.

Drawing from profound personal loss, family challenges, burnout, career transitions, and years of developing leaders, Lara explains why resilience is not a fixed personality trait. It is a capacity that can be strengthened.

Jayson and Lara explore the five pillars of resilience, the difference between grit and grind, why workplaces often reward the wrong behaviours, and how perseverance can become toxic when it causes people to tolerate the intolerable.

They also examine an important leadership tension: how do you challenge people to grow without rescuing them, overwhelming them, or carrying their backpack for them?

Episode timestamps:

00:00 What resilience really is

00:40 Lara's experience with adversity

01:51 Resilience is a muscle

02:23 Lessons from Lara's father

03:24 Medical assistance in dying

04:21 Creativity through grief

06:21 Lara's career journey

08:58 Feeling least resilient

10:10 Learning from rejected feedback

11:19 The kintsugi metaphor

13:35 Moving beyond "bouncing back"

15:19 Owning your role in adversity

16:35 Defining resilience

16:45 Why grinding through is not resilience

17:31 Choosing where to persist

19:30 Recovery creates growth

20:13 Myths about resilience

21:09 When organizations reward burnout

23:28 Why leaders wait until it is too late

25:22 Building resilience proactively

25:31 The five pillars of resilience

29:09 Humour versus avoidance

30:29 Stealing opportunities for growth

31:38 Do not carry someone else's backpack

34:04 Choosing hope

35:22 Choice within resilience

35:57 The downside of resilience

37:47 Can resilience prevent growth?

40:58 Toxic perseverance

42:18 Grit versus grind

43:11 Knowing when to keep going

44:24 Strategic quitting

45:22 Organizational responsibility for resilience

46:08 Expanding people's capacity

47:50 Workload and real priorities

49:03 Why recovery is essential

49:29 Resilience and stress exposure

50:58 Training adaptability

51:50 How organizations create fragility

53:37 Hiring for resilience

54:48 Where leaders should begin

56:29 The worst resilience advice

56:45 The key lesson

57:09 Writing your resilience story

59:03 Stepping into the real work

60:00 Closing reflections

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