The new rules of resilience
Career03.10.2025
My career has been a journey through the foundational layers of our digital world. It spans from the rise of the cloud at Microsoft to the transformation of human connection at Meta to reshaping how inspiration is found and acted on at Pinterest, and now, as President of Mastercard in Canada as the digital payment economy rapidly evolves. The digital world is defined by constant innovation, but the pace of change today, supercharged by generative AI – and even more recently Agentic AI – is unlike anything we’ve seen. Like the internet, mobile and the cloud before it, it’s reshaping everything.
In this landscape, we must look at how we define ourselves. Workplaces are changing and career paths are going in exciting but, quite frankly, uncharted directions. This indeed requires resilience, but the idea of “resilience” needs an upgrade. Its true power lies not just in withstanding and recovering, but in the willingness to evolve. For leaders in 2025, resilience is a proactive and forward-looking mindset for pioneering the unknown. It’s a cycle that, for me, is built on three pillars.
First, it requires courage. This begins with intentionally taking on the hard job. It’s the willingness to raise your hand for the challenge that doesn’t have a clear roadmap and then learn as you go once you’re in it. This is a super uncomfortable position to find yourself in, but the most profound growth happens when you lean directly into complexity.
Second, it demands a willingness to redefine failure. In a world where the path forward is often unwritten, you have to be comfortable forging it yourself. This means accepting that some steps will be missteps. Those difficult tasks you’ve taken on sometimes won’t deliver the outcomes you intended, but you will learn from them. True innovation isn’t always a full-scale revolution, more often, it’s a series of small, brave evolutions. We need to normalize this process, viewing failure not as an endpoint, but as an essential way to learn in a moment where perfect solutions are not clear (to anyone).
This is all held together by the third pillar: compassion, beginning with how you treat yourself. As women, many of us are often our own harshest critics, holding ourselves to impossible standards of perfection. But what if we were more accepting of the incremental progress we make each day? This would make it easier to stay in the game. Moving forward doesn’t equal a flawless victory. True resilience means having the grace to accept yourself as you are, both professionally and personally, and to keep showing up.
Let’s be honest though, this personal pressure doesn’t exist in a vacuum. As the world rapidly changes around us and on top of the increasingly complex professional demands, the pressures of childcare and caregiving for aging parents haven’t gone away simply because we talk about them more. We are still navigating these demands in the background, making the need for self-compassion not just a ‘nice-to-have,’ but a necessity.
As you advance in your career, the challenges will get harder. You’ll also find the external rewards or validations become rarer. You have to become comfortable celebrating your own wins, big and small, and then find the strength to begin the cycle all over again. That journey, having the courage to start, the willingness to fail, and the willingness to accept ourselves for who we are, has the power to reshape your trajectory. When you approach resilience with this mindset, you’ll see the resilience itself is the reward. It’s a gift to yourself and everyone around you.
