💌 Building Resilience: A Four Part Framework and More Tactical Layoff Advice

Hi, I'm Miribel, your hype buddy in life. This is your weekly source of inspiration & information on all things around life, personal growth, mental health, wellness, and career, read by like-minded individuals - just like you. If you find value in this content please like & share above, or forward it to someone in your network. I love it when you do that! If someone forwarded you this email you can subscribe here:

Length: 6 min | Readability: College-level

• How to Cultivate Resilience: A Four Part Framework… and a compilation of tactical advice and guidance around layoffs.

• Tweet of the week: Huberman says to figure out your “number”

• Weekly wrap-up! Selena Gomez's new documentary, what overfunctioning is, journal prompts, and more!

⭐️ Resilience 101: A Four-Part Framework

Let’s be real. This week (maybe this year?!) has been a bloodbath.

Whether you have been impacted directly, are entering the job market, or are simply… just trying to exist and ensure your financial and job security, we've all been navigating conditions that have left many of us feeling deflated and depleted (especially after this year’s multiple waves of mass layoffs). And that makes the idea of resilience more relevant than ever.

Upon the events that occurred this week, I remembered this article about cultivating resilience, by Jason Shen, an executive coach, former Facebook PM, ex-NCAA champion gymnast, and 3xs startup founder.

Resilience, as defined in this article, is the ability to adapt effectively in the face of adversity and change. Most of us can adapt at least a little to a small amount of change. But the bigger the change or challenge, the harder it is to adapt. Cultivating resilience means building the tools and habits of mind to scale your ability to adapt. This article dives into this topic in much more depth, so please take a read! But if you’d like the essence of his post, see below:

The 3 Myths of Resilience:

- Resilience is not a trait or a resource—it’s a skill. More specifically, a set of skills that you can learn, practice, and improve. This is essentially what Carol Dweck’s research around growth mindset is about. You may never be as good at shooting three-pointers as Steph Curry, but with training, you sure as hell can get a lot better than you are right now. The same is with resilience.

- Resilience does not mean being self-reliant—it means relying on and being reliable to others. Any organization, any person, and any community that is resilient is one where people are coming together, where there is outside support, and where there is a shared contribution toward a shared future. We have to let go of this idea that if someone was really tough, they could do it on their own—it’s just not true, and never has been. Don't do it alone. Focus on building relationships, giving and taking, contributing to the greater good, and asking for help.

- Resilience is not just thinking and planning ahead of time—it requires flexibility and feelings of uncertainty. Some people try to control every variable to prevent bad things from happening. The more everyone tries to plan everything, the more unexpected results trigger a shift in outcomes. This mentality of overplanning and overanalyzing is also flawed because it treats everything like a mental puzzle to be solved. Resilience is a process.

The Four Skills of Resilience

You know I love frameworks. As a product manager in my 9-5, structured thinking is how I thrive in a world filled with ambiguous problems and people pulling me into different situations.

Jason shares his framework to help anyone experiencing uncertainty, adversity, and change. One thing I’ll note is that with all frameworks, resources, and articles I share, not all of these may resonate with you – how we individually build our resilience is unique to us! This is one of many perspectives that I want to share to help us all develop our own “toolkit” and resilience muscle.

It’s summarized beautifully in this diagram. Jason goes into much more depth in his article. He provides his real life examples alongside each of these skills.

Note: Although it’s labeled as steps 1-4, you may find more value starting at Reflect before going to Respond, or something else. But if you’re wondering how to begin, you can go ahead and follow this order until you’re able to adapt these skills to your specific circumstance and needs.

The Tradeoffs to Resilience

We’ve covered the key benefits of cultivating resilience, but it comes with its trade-offs. Just like any quality—speed, power, reliability, accuracy—investing effort in improving it means spending less elsewhere. There can be real downsides to consider.

• Fewer massive upsides: Resilience requires, in part, spreading yourself out. Resilience means creating contingency options, setting aside additional resources in reserve, and not putting all your eggs in one basket. A balanced stock portfolio is less likely to lose money than throwing your cash in a meme stock, but it’s also less likely to go to the moon and bring you massive gains overnight. Resilience prioritizes downside protection over upside maximization,

• Reduced speed: To act with resilience can mean taking a bit longer to evaluate a situation and prepare ahead of taking action. Resilient entities rarely are the first movers. A team focused on resilience may operate slower and miss out on some opportunities compared to those who prioritize “moving fast” or going “all in.”

• Release of control: A resilient mindset is one that understands not everything can be controlled and that calculated risks can go wrong. To operate with resilience is to be okay with failing or ending up in an unexpected or unplanned outcome. This lack of control and feeling of uncertainty can be uncomfortable for some who would rather have a tighter grip on the situation.

The past few years have felt like an avalanche of unrelenting change. The pandemic, the wildfires, the national reckoning on race, continued gun violence, and increased polarization. There is no going back to the way things were before. Time only moves in one direction.

But even as we mourn the world we’ve lost, we can use the skills of resilience to write our comeback story. Never forget that our species is endlessly adaptive. We’ve learned to live in nearly any climate and geography on Earth, feed off a diverse array of flora and fauna, cohabitate in a variety of lifestyles and cultures, and have scaled societies through devices and services that would appear as complete magic for those living just a few generations before us.

Resilience runs in our veins, and together we can cultivate that power to face whatever comes next.

♟Tactical Layoff Advice

I read all the posts about layoffs on LinkedIn so you don't have to. If you’re looking for more tactical insights and advice to navigate these challenging times, specifically around layoffs, I compiled several posts here:

• If you’re seeking a job at a startup and want to understand how to approach the process, here’s a post on how Lydia Tang, an engineer at Retool, navigated her decision-making around choosing which startup to join.

• A few key takeaways from this post: this is a time to extend yourself more self-compassion than ever. Don’t look for feedback about what you didn't do well that caused the layoff, do accept the somewhat arbitrary nature of life in general, don't question your worth or blame yourself, and do talk to more experienced folks who have seen or been through layoffs who can give you perspective.

• For those on H1B, Isha provides some tactical tips on what levers you might be able to pull to provide some extra leeway time to help you find a job.

• Lastly, a reminder is that there is no “dream” company. It’s a company that: aligns with your values, pays you what you’re worth, allows you to enjoy your work, challenges you to grow, and rewards that growth with pay and promotions. There are SO many companies out there that will meet those criteria for you.

📲 Tweet of the week:

If you’re a hard worker and want to figure out how you can sustainably maintain your health over time, try doing this exercise!

📸 Visual of the Week

During the toughest weeks and moments, this is a reminder for you to celebrate all the wonderful, small wins in your life.

💡 Weekly Finds:

• Biggest bombshells from Selena Gomez’s new documentary ‘My Mind And Me’ - Selena Gomez: My Mind & Me is now streaming exclusively on Apple TV+! We’ll let you watch for yourself but after watching it (as a major Selena fan), it’s honest, intense, heartbreaking, uplifting, and all of the emotions that you think you’ll be feeling during this 1.5 hour documentary.

• What is Overfunctioning? When your partner takes too long to make dinner, do you step in to speed things up? When the team can’t make a decision at work, do you take the lead? There’s so many more examples, but if this sounds like you, you might be overfunctioning. This is called “overfunctioning,” and iIf you’re constantly on the go trying to micromanage everyone and everything around you, you might be doing more harm than good for yourself and others. Read more to learn more about this term, who does it and why, as well as what can we do to pull back and have more balance in our lives.

• Why Burnout is Leading More Women to Redefine Success Many women are burnt out and now quitting burnout by quitting their actual work, reimagining what "success" means for them and the type of work that they'd like to pursue. If you're curious to learn more about what that looks like and one woman’s journey, you can read more in this article by Chief.

• Can You Get Ahead and Still Have a Life? Younger Women Are Trying to Find Out. The pandemic’s shake-up of work and life has had lasting effects on ambition for a lot of women. For some, the last years have prompted a reassessment of how much they’re willing to give to their careers at the expense of family time or outside interests. WSJ discusses how women assessing their careers say they’re determined to advance while keeping work-life boundaries intact.

• You’re Not Responsible for Your Parents’ Happiness. Just a quick reminder if you grew up in a household with pressures and felt obligated to do X or Y so that your family could be happy, this is a reminder that you’re not responsible for your parents’ happiness. You’re allowed to have your own thoughts and desires. There's a difference between taking responsibility for someone vs supporting someone.

• 25 Journal Prompts for When You're Anxious AF. Are you basically a ball of anxiety? These prompts may help you get untangled and write out your thoughts as you process those emotions. Give it a try!

• It’s fall time! What should I do? Think outside the pumpkin patch this Autumn and try some of these fun fall-themed activities! Also highly recommend using the Nudge app for recommendations to do nearby your local city!

💌 Happy November! Hope you learned something insightful today. Please reply to this email or submit here if you have any feedback.

That’s it for today — see you next week!