How to build resilience after personal tragedy

Nobody teaches you how to keep going after the worst thing happens. There is no course for it. No certification. Just the raw fact that the world keeps moving and you have to decide whether to move with it or stay where you are.

TL;DR: Resilience after tragedy is not about positivity, toughness, or “getting back to normal.” It is about building a life that carries the weight of what happened without being defined by it. Practical strategies: maintain structure, accept help on your terms, find meaning through action, and stop measuring yourself against who you were before.

I have rebuilt my life twice. The first time started the day I was born into a family shaped by my mother’s death by suicide when I was 20 months old. The second time started when I walked away from a company I helped build to $35 million in revenue because the partnership had become destructive.

Neither rebuilding followed a formula. Both taught me things about resilience that I could not have learned any other way. Here is what I know.

Grief is not a phase you complete

The biggest lie about tragedy is that you “go through” grief and come out the other side. As if it is a tunnel with an exit sign.

Grief is more like weather. Some days are clear. Some days a storm rolls in without warning. The trigger might be a song, a birthday, something your kid says that reminds you of what you lost. You learn to carry an umbrella, not to control the sky.

I never knew my mother. I was 20 months old when she died. So my grief was not about losing someone I remembered. It was about the absence of someone I never got to know. That is a different kind of weight, but it is weight all the same.

If you are in the early stages of tragedy, here is what I wish someone had told me: stop waiting for it to end. Start building a life that has room for it.

Structure saves you when motivation fails

In the first weeks and months after a major loss, motivation disappears. Getting out of bed feels pointless. Work feels meaningless. The things that used to matter feel small.

Structure fills that gap. Not because routine is inspiring, but because it removes the need for willpower from basic functioning. When you do not have to decide whether to get up, eat, show up, and move through the day, you conserve the limited energy you have for the things that actually require thought.

When I left the company I helped build, my structure collapsed overnight. No office to go to. No team depending on me. No schedule. The first thing I did was create one artificially: wake up at the same time, exercise at the same time, eat at the same time. Not because I wanted to, but because without structure, the days blurred into a fog that made everything harder.

If you are struggling right now, pick three non-negotiable daily actions. Small is fine. Wake up by 7. Walk for 20 minutes. Eat a real meal. Do those three things every day regardless of how you feel. You are not fixing yourself. You are building a floor to stand on.

Accept help, but on your terms

People want to help after tragedy. Most of them do not know how. They bring casseroles when you need space. They ask “How are you?” when the honest answer would make them uncomfortable. They tell you about their cousin’s friend who went through something similar, as if proximity to someone else’s pain qualifies as understanding yours.

Accept the help that actually helps. Reject the rest without guilt.

For me, the help that mattered was practical: someone picking up my kids when I could not focus, a friend who sat with me without needing to fill the silence, a business mentor who let me think out loud without trying to fix me. The help that did not work was the motivational kind, the “everything happens for a reason” crowd. I learned to say “Thank you, I appreciate that” and change the subject.

You are allowed to be selective about support. Tragedy does not obligate you to accept every form of help offered. It obligates other people to respect your boundaries.

Find meaning through action, not reflection

At some point after tragedy, you will be tempted to find the “lesson” in what happened. People will encourage this. “What did you learn?” “How did this make you stronger?”

Those questions are premature. Meaning does not come from thinking about tragedy. It comes from doing something with it.

My mother’s death by suicide eventually led me to gun violence prevention work, to becoming an Everytown for Gun Safety fellow, and to building a speaking career where I talk about firearm suicide prevention in corporate settings and at industry conferences. That meaning did not arrive through reflection. It arrived through action, through saying yes to opportunities that connected my experience to something larger than myself.

If you are looking for meaning after loss, stop looking inward and start looking outward. Volunteer. Mentor someone. Start a project. Write. Speak. The meaning will emerge from what you build, not from what you analyze.

Stop measuring yourself against the before

After tragedy, there is a version of yourself that no longer exists: the person you were before the worst thing happened. Measuring your current self against that person is a trap.

You are not supposed to get back to who you were. You are supposed to become someone new, someone who carries the experience and builds with it rather than despite it.

After I left the $35M company, I spent months comparing myself to the version of me who ran 180 employees, closed major contracts, and operated at full speed. That comparison made everything feel like a step backward. It was not until I stopped measuring backward and started measuring forward that things shifted.

Forward measurement looks like: Am I better today than last month? Am I building something? Am I present for my kids? Am I doing work that matters? Those questions have answers you can act on. “Am I back to where I was?” does not.

The physical side of resilience

Grief and stress live in the body, not just the mind. If you are going through a hard time and you are not sleeping, not eating well, not moving, the emotional recovery will stall. This is not inspirational advice. It is biology.

Cortisol, the stress hormone, breaks down muscle, weakens immunity, and impairs cognitive function when it stays elevated for extended periods. Exercise reduces cortisol. Sleep restores it. Nutrition provides the raw materials your brain needs to regulate emotions.

I am not suggesting that a good workout fixes grief. I am saying that neglecting your body while trying to process a major loss is like trying to drive a car with no gas. The engine is willing. The tank is empty.

Resilience as a leadership asset

If you are a leader who has survived personal tragedy, you carry something your peers do not: perspective.

You know what real pressure feels like. You know the difference between a bad quarter and a genuine crisis. You know how to function when the plan is gone and the path forward is unclear. Those capabilities did not come from a leadership seminar. They came from surviving something that most people only read about.

This does not mean you should lead with your trauma. It means you should trust the judgment that comes from having lived through difficulty. When your team is panicking about a missed deadline, you can stay calm because you know what an actual emergency feels like. When someone on your team is struggling personally, you can meet them with empathy instead of impatience because you have been there.

More on this topic at my resilient leadership page, where I cover the organizational practices that come from personal experience.

What I want you to take away

Resilience is not a personality trait you either have or you do not. It is a skill set that develops through practice and experience. If you are in the middle of something hard right now, here is the short version:

1. Build structure. Three non-negotiable daily actions.
2. Accept help selectively. Not all support is supportive.
3. Find meaning through action, not reflection.
4. Stop comparing yourself to the person you were before.
5. Take care of your body. It is carrying your grief.

And if you are not in crisis right now, bookmark this page. Save it for someone who might need it later. Or bring this conversation to your organization so people hear it before they need it.

Last updated: April 8, 2026