Attitude

Resilience and grit aren't given. They're built.

I hung up the phone a little while ago.

A dear friend. We’ve both been navigating a lot. His mother is in the final chapter of her life. Alzheimer’s. He made the decision to walk away from a job that required in-office time so he could be present for this chapter. No hesitation. He just did it.

We talked about what it takes to keep showing up when everything is hard.

He said it simply: You have to keep doing your best. You have to keep showing up.

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This week has been full of conversations like that one.

I had a call this week with a woman who has spent her career in medicine. Years in neuro and ortho. Helping people overcome one of the most debilitating things a human being can face. Pain. Not the kind you push through in a day. The kind that rewires you. The kind that makes you forget who you were before it.

She works at the intersection of neuroplasticity and pain. How the body memorizes pain channels, and how to retrain them. Moving people from feeling trapped by something that controls their every move, to becoming powerful over it. Her entire focus is forward motion.

We’re working on something together that I’ll share when the time is right. But that conversation stayed with me long after we hung up.

There’s a through line in all of it. The friend showing up for his mother. The woman who has dedicated her life to helping people overcome pain. What I’ve lived through in my own hard chapters.

Here’s what I want you to understand about resilience and grit. You are not born with them. You develop them. You build them in the hard chapters — the ones you didn’t see coming, the ones you weren’t sure you’d survive, the ones that required you to find something in yourself you didn’t know was there.

And the way you build them is not pretty. In spite of what social media might lead you to believe — the botox, the fillers, the hair extensions — no knock against any of it. But none of it will overcome your situation. None of it will overcome the pain. The hard chapters require something that can’t be injected or applied.

You have to get mad. You have to fight. Hit something, preferably a punching bag. Scream if you need to. Cry if you need to. Feel the full, ugly weight of it. But don’t stay there.

You then have to get up.

That is not toxic positivity. That is not a LinkedIn post about pivoting. That is the actual mechanics of survival.

Then — and this is where it turns — you choose.

“The greatest power that a person possesses is the power to choose.”

— Keith Harrell

You look at where you are. You reverse engineer it. What needs to change. Where you need to go. What has to happen next. And then you execute. One step. Then the next. You start making progress. You start moving forward. And eventually — not all at once, not on a timeline you get to pick — you get to the other side.

And from the other side, you can look back. Breathe. And sometimes, if you’re lucky, you can laugh at what you were navigating.

That’s when you know the grit took hold.

There is not one person who ever wrote a book that starts with: today I woke up and my life is amazing, and next week and five years and ten years from now it’s even more amazing. The best books — the best chapters of anyone’s life — are where they found strength when they didn’t know how they were going to survive. How they were going to overcome. How they were just going to be.

That is resilience and grit at its finest.

You fight. And then you find the laugh. Because the laugh is what carries you forward when nothing else will.

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I remember one of my many experiences in the ER. A systemic infection. Moving toward vital organs. The medical team’s plan to help it drain meant creating a surgical track — adjacent to the rectum — so gravity and the body could do what the body does.

Do you know what that means in practice?

Let me enlighten you. After the surgical procedure to create this track, you have weeks of draining and healing. And sitting down in a normal chair is not a comfortable position.

Nursing staff. Daily. Cleaning a surgical track in a place that does not want to be disturbed. Ever.

My mother — an RN, medically trained, a fierce and talented woman — was offered the opportunity to learn the procedure so she could do it herself.

She said no thank you.

We had flown her out to help care for me, as we had done many times. She was in the other room of my one-bedroom apartment. Praying. While I cried and pleaded and made my feelings loudly and clearly known to God, the nurse, and anyone else within earshot.

That is a level of pain that makes you want to cry, scream, and punch someone. In that order.

And we laugh about it now. Hard. The image of her on the other side of that wall, hands folded to her face, while I was decidedly not holding it together. It is one of the funniest, most human memories I have from that particular chapter.

But first you have to get through it.

First you fight.

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Keith Harrell understood this better than almost anyone I’ve ever known.

I met him at a conference where he gave the keynote. He was impossible to miss. 6’7”, with an energy that filled every room before he opened his mouth. We connected months later. Made a point to get together whenever he was in town. Dinners. Conversations that went longer than planned. The kind of friendship where time doesn’t feel like it’s passing.

He was a dear friend. I love and miss him.

If you weren’t on the speakers bureau circuit in the ‘90s and early 2000s, you may not know his name. You should.

Keith was known as “Dr. Attitude” — and he earned it. IBM. Microsoft. Coca-Cola. Fortune 500 stages across the country. The Wall Street Journal called him “A Star with Attitude.” The Nationwide Speakers Bureau put him on their list of 22 Guaranteed Standing Ovations. He was inducted into the Speaker Hall of Fame in 2000.

He overcame a stutter as a kid. He built a career that changed lives. He wrote Attitude Is Everything — and he didn’t just write it. He lived it.

He taught that your attitude shapes your reality. That while you can't always control what happens to you, you can always control your response to it. That attitude isn't just how you feel. It's the foundation everything else is built on.

“Attitude is 100 percent of everything you do. Your attitude today determines your success tomorrow.”

— Keith Harrell

He meant it. Every word.

Keith was diagnosed with spinal cancer in May of 2010. He died that October. He was 54.

And by every account from everyone who knew him — his family, his friends, the people who watched him face that final chapter — he met it the same way he met every other one.

With his attitude intact. Right up until the end.

That’s who he was.

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His words echo with me. Especially now, when I look around and see so many people I care about navigating very challenging situations and circumstances.

So here is what I want to leave you with. From a man who proved it with his life, and a dear friend I still think about often:

Attitude is not pretending it doesn’t hurt. It’s not performing strength for an audience.

It’s the decision you make in the middle of the hard chapter — before you know how it ends — about who you are going to be on the other side of it.

Be encouraged. Be inspired. Go be amazing.

It’s been a rough couple of weeks. For many of us.

But attitude is everything.

Show up. Keep working your way through.

Keith would tell you the same.

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If this resonated, subscribe to The Jenn Files. I write about business, money, resilience, and grit — cutting through the noise so you can build something that can’t be broken.

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Are you navigating a difficult situation? Considering a big change? What is keeping you up at night?

A plateau you’ve hit. A decision you keep circling but can’t make. A pattern that needs to break but you’re not sure where to start.

If you’re ready to stop spinning and start reverse engineering your way through — I’d love to connect.