Bonnie St. John - Micro-Resilience: Minor Shifts for Major Boosts in Focus, Drive, and Energy

Bonnie Then, and Now

For me, this book on resilience is very personal. As a five-year-old who had just come out of the hospital minus one foot and with a new artificial leg, I was mostly focused on my fancy new shoes. They were blue suede with red stitching. Until that day, the only shoes Id ever owned were ugly white orthopedic ones with heavy steel braces. I had no idea I would become the first African American to win medals in Winter Olympic competition. Growing up in San Diego, I had never even seen snow!

My transformation into an Olympic athlete demanded physical resilience far beyond what I needed to walk again. At a time when few people used gymsespecially not women and people with disabilitiesI ignored the standard expectations for a one-legged, low-income black girl and trained myself to compete as a skier. Eventually I talked my way into a full scholarship to Burke Mountain Academy, a high school in Vermont for elite ski racers. At Burke I sweated side by side with the best of the best and became physically powerful for the first time in my life.

But when I reflect on my overall journey, the mental resilience it took to become an international skiing champion feels even more significant than all the physical work. At many junctures, I had to do things Id never seen anyone like me do, and go places people like me never went. After numerous setbacks, like breaking both my legs in my first semester at Burke (first the real one, then, six weeks later, the artificial one), I rekindled my vision, manufactured a new batch of optimism, and refused to give up.

Beyond the physical and mental challenges, I needed a great deal of spiritual resilience as well. When I look at that picture of a little girl home from the hospital with the Pinocchio-style wooden leg, I see what others cannot. That little girl came back to a home where her stepfather continued to sexually abuse her for years. We struggled financially; our clothes mostly came from thrift stores or garage sales. My mother attempted suicide more than once. The emotional traumas from my childhood have tentacles that still reach deep into my relationships with people in authority, my extended family, and, of course, my husband. For decades I worked with numerous tools and techniques to help pave my own road to recovery. Only recently have I begun to repair my broken concept of home and enjoy the kind of core comforts others take for granted.

In my previous books, I recounted at length many of these very personal stories of disability, big dreams, and positivity. How Strong Women Pray looks unflinchingly at my story of emotional healing set against a backdrop of twenty-seven other womens connections to spiritual strength during lifes toughest moments. Live Your Joy covers nine hard-won lessons I learned about confidence, high aspirations, authenticity, and relationships. How Great Women Lead, written with my then-teenage daughter Darcy, takes you with us on our mother-daughter journey into the lives and life lessons of amazing leaders like Hillary Clinton, Sheryl Sandberg, President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, and many more.

After these three books, Micro-Resilience feels like the message I am truly destined to deliver as the culmination of my unusual life. My personal and professional worlds would be in shambles if I didnt have a substantial capacity to bounce back from extraordinary challenges. I feel that I must pass along this torch of wisdom to others.

This book builds on everything I gleaned from my experiences and expands on them. The writing here is in collaboration with my husband, Allen, who had his own journey of resilience. He navigated his way to a successful career in the cutthroat atmosphere of Hollywood studio politics despite a barrage of setbacks and disappointments along the way. Like so many of us, Allen has also suffered through the anguish of divorce and had to rebuild his life afterward.

Along with our extraordinary team at the Blue Circle Institute, Allen and I spent the last seven years distilling research, galvanizing our point of view, delivering the program to thousands of people, assessing its impact, and honing our ideas and techniques. We curated numerous research-backed micro adjustments into five Frameworks and spent hundreds of hours interviewing people to find the easiest, most effective ways to apply our tools in real-world settings. Fortune 100 executives and their teams, leaders of nonprofits, health-care professionals, entrepreneurs, educators, even stay-at-home parents have enjoyed significant benefits from using this program. In the chapters that follow, we share their stories to illustrate each aspect of our Micro-Resilience program.

Allen and I learned firsthand that these small micro-resilience changes in our lives make us stronger when we are up or down. Not everyone should have to work as hard as we did to figure these things out, but life doesnt come with an instruction manual. You will find in these pages the greatest gift we can give from the deepest place in our souls: a practical, easy-to-use guide to living a more resilient life. If you would like to learn more about our virtual process for delivering this program, and perhaps even learn to teach Micro-Resilience yourself, please visit us at: www.microresilience.com. It is our hope that this material provides the keys you need to unlock the magic and power inherent in you from the moment you were born.