How To Bounce Back And Build Resilience When COVID-19 Interrupts Your Life

My cousin walked through a forest with balloons lifting her long white veil. A friend has been using her unemployment to transform the backyard of her apartment building into an edible forest. My sister acquired a puppy who hasn’t left her side since she adopted him three weeks ago. Solo weddings, new domestic habits, and cute animals are just a few of the ways I see my community coping with a pandemic that has isolated us and made us fearful of the future. Knowing that I run a business, many of my friends have been asking how I’m coping. 

For me, COVID-19 is a new challenge in a long list of startup hurdles. I started Kuli Kuli in the aftermath of a terrorist attack. Our sole source for the key ingredient that we sell, moringa, burned down in a wildfire a few months before our nationwide launch. After years of building the business together, I was forced to fire my childhood best friend. A quarter of my staff quit and my grandmother passed away  within almost the same week last spring. The coronavirus has become one more roadblock in the obstacle course of my journey building Kuli Kuli.

I’ve become convinced that the heart of entrepreneurship is resilience. For a physical object, resilience is defined as the ability to regain its original shape after being bent or compressed. For an entrepreneur, resilience is the courage to stick it out, to retain the optimism and passion that led you to start the business in the first place, even when it feels like the whole world is against you. It’s the feeling of being squeezed on all sides by the obstacles ahead of you and still maintaining an unearthly level of optimism for the future. 

Research has shown that resilience is much more than the capacity of individuals to cope well under adversity. It’s the capacity to cope with the current circumstances by creatively finding new resources that sustain their well-being. In other words, resilience is a process, and it’s one that can be learned. 

As Sheryl Sandberg wrote in the New York Times, “The good news is that resilience isn’t a fixed personality trait; we’re not born with a set amount of it.”

Over the past six years of running Kuli Kuli, I’ve spent a lot of time cultivating resilience in myself and developing it in those around me. I’ve also spent a lot of time studying it, keen to cultivate what I think of as “enough grit” to run a company through any crisis. Recently, I’ve revisited some of that research with a new eye towards how I, my startup, and our society can build enough resilience to survive this pandemic and whatever comes after.  

Cultivate a Community of Trust

The biggest factor in building resilience is having supportive relationships. This may feel ironic in a world where we can’t give our best friend a hug or rub our sister’s back as she cries. Video calls don’t come close to providing the same level of comfort as in-person interactions. But a call can still go a long way in offering encouragement; showing your friend who just lost his job that he’s not alone. I’ve also found that it’s been particularly helpful to have calls with friends who are going through similar situations. Recently I took a large pay cut to give my startup more breathing room as we understand how the pandemic will affect our sales prospects. A friend of mine was furloughed to 50% of her normal salary. We spent hours on the phone commiserating, and ultimately came up with creative, low-cost ways to spend our quarantine time. She’s diving headfirst into baking bread while I’m finally getting started on a book writing project that I’ve been dreaming about for years. Reaching out to friends and family with encouraging texts and calls is one of the best ways to build a supportive community that will provide support long after the pandemic has faded.   

Conduct a Regular Life Review

The Roman philosopher Seneca would famously review each day, asking himself what he could have improved because. He believed that although most people focus on the future,“our plans for the future descend from the past.” This advice seems particularly relevant at a time when there is so much anxiety and uncertainty about the future. Studies of successful entrepreneurs have shown that the ability to learn from mistakes and rebuild after failures is the reason that serial entrepreneurs perform better than first-time entrepreneurs. Similar to Seneca, I see the value in reviewing my past with an eye towards self-improvement. For me, this review is most helpful to do on a quarterly basis where I go through how I spent my time over the previous three months and identify my wins, challenges, and key learnings. As I spoke about in my TEDx talk on optimism, I also have a daily review ritual where I write down the best part of my day every evening on a calendar next to my bed. I’ve found that this practice helps me find the joy in life, even on the darkest of days. My daily and quarterly review rituals have given me a solution-focused mindset to identify challenges, learn from them, and then quickly move past them. 

Determine What You’re Willing to Drink Pain For

I used to go running every morning in a small Nigerien village where I served in the Peace Corps. Even at 6am, the air was already hot. My Nigerien friends would call out “kina sha wooyia,” as I dripped sweat in the heat, running for seemingly no good reason. This Hausa phrase directly translates to “you’re drinking pain.” The phrase has stuck with me. Entrepreneurs sign up for struggle when they start companies. In the COVID-19 era, most people on the planet are facing their own variety of struggles. The key is to figure out what you’re willing to struggle or “drink pain” for. One of my friends is a professional author and speaker who just saw his entire speaking business disappear overnight. Instead of turning to a fast-cash job of delivering Amazon packages, he decided that continuing to be a writer was a career worth struggling for and created a virtual class to help emerging authors write a book during quarantine. This ability to “drink pain” is also apparent in the creativity of a Chinese restaurant owner near me who, when faced with months of racism and fear that threatened to shutter her doors, decided to build customer loyalty by publicizing a roll of toilet paper delivered with every takeout order. 

Surviving this crisis is going to take a lot of creativity and grit. We may be socially distant, but we don’t need to be socially isolated. By reaching out to friends and family, offering to pick up groceries for older neighbors, and having honest heart-to-heart conversations with colleagues, we can build a loving and supporting community that will endure long after the crisis fades. Taking the time for reflection and applying a critical eye to the way we spend our time will help us learn from our mistakes and rebuild even better. Figure out the things that are most important to you, even if they seem like the most difficult path, will ensure that the struggle is worth the effort. It’s impossible to predict what the world will look like six or 12 months from now. My hope is that as we adapt and overcome this crisis we’ll build a more resilient future.