Women’s resilience: what’s it made of?

Authored by Alexandra Zagury, VP Partner Managed Services and aaS Sales

We see inspirational taglines for women like “you can do it” and “you go, girl!” every day. Here’s another one I shared in a recent blog post: “you need to See It to Be It.” This saying has become a pillar of the Cisco Global Partner & Route to Market Sales Organization in an effort to showcase our women leaders and inspire others.

These catch phrases make for great campaigns, posters and bumper stickers, but they also call for us to go deeper. After all, it’s not at all simple for most women to navigate the murky waters of personal, professional, societal and cultural challenges in search of fulfillment and success.

Creating a successful life as a woman–however we each define that–requires countless moments of decision-making, risk-taking, priority-weighing, boundary-breaking, and–what I want to explore with you now–resilience. You’ve heard the term before; The Harvard Business Review even called 2022 “The year of resilience.” I want to talk about what resilience really means, what it really takes, in the glorious and messy realities of our daily lives as women in the tech world.

Before we go further, I want to clarify that resilience cuts across all demographics–I know of plenty of wonderfully resilient men (I’ll talk about one in my blog linked below). And yet women across the globe still face a range of gender-specific obstacles. So let’s take the opportunity, on International Women’s Day and Cisco’s annual Women of Impact day, to explore women’s resilience together.

What is resilience, really? Needless to say, it involves more than the late ‘90s song “Tubthumping” and its earworm “I get knocked down, but I get up again.” I like the way one professional woman defined resilience last year, in the wake of the pandemic, as “more than just the ability to bounce back quickly. It’s the ability to recover healthily…coming back in a healthier way with a better perspective.” As we say at Cisco, resilience means you “grow stronger as life changes.”

At its core, resilience is a mindset, made up of a range of attitudes and behaviors. The specifics are different for each woman.

Check out my full blog here for my take on four attitudes that are central to women’s resilience.

What does resilience mean to you? Comment below with your thoughts!