How to Develop Resilience: Keep Going — No Matter What

I need to tell you about the neon sign that broke — and how I broke with it.

My life back in March was unrecognizable from my life today. In the span of what felt like exactly one minute, I was leaving Netflix, packing up our home in Los Angeles, and moving back to New York City with my wife so we could be closer to our families. It was so much change — and the change felt absolutely cellular.

My brain has rearranged itself several times over since resettling in New York City. It’s been emotional, and it’s been exhilarating. It’s been crushing, too. 

Nine moving crews and two months later, I was unpacking my last box. It was labeled JENN MCCARRON CALIFORNIA TO NYC, and inside was a neon sign I’d designed in my own handwriting — CALABASAS in Sunset Boulevard pink. (Listen. It was 2018. I was just moving to LA. We were all obsessed with the fact that Kim had married Kanye.) 

That sign was the first thing I made about LA. It was the symbol of my lifelong dream of living in California. It was the reminder of this massive new undertaking of working at Netflix and the transformation of my career. It was a token of everything in front of me I was bound to learn — and at Netflix, it became my calling card. It was even my newsletter masthead. It was everything I wanted to create for my team: The feeling of newness and innovation and of pushing limits to the extreme. It was about paradoxes and tension: East Coast/West Coast. Kim/Kanye. New York/LA. It was me: musician, businessperson, creative — all of it.

And when I opened the box, the sign had shattered. And I finally shattered with it.

I’d held strong through the first three months of change. Boxes, packing, purging, unpacking, giving stuff away, navigating Facebook Marketplace, sifting through older versions of myself, changing coastlines and routines and rhythms. None of it had broken me. I’d pressed on because I had to.

But when the sign broke, I finally felt the gravity of the change. That chapter in my life hadn’t made it back to New York in one piece. 

I walked home from my Tribeca studio gloomy and kicking myself for not packing it better. The whole move had gone off without a hitch save for this one box — but it wasn’t enough. This had gone wrong, and now I had to face an ending. 

When I got home, I told my wife. And she looked right at me and said, “Jenn, we’ll just have it reprinted. Remember when they made this sign the first time? They said they reprint neon all the time. It’s glass. It breaks.”

And as we kept talking, we broke ground on the hard-packed feeling of devastation. It was an ending, and I had to face it. 

I called the neon shop in the morning. The reprint was inexpensive, easy, and mundane. Glass breaks, and you can’t put it back together. So, you make a new one. You make version 2.0.

Why am I telling you about my sign? It’s because that neon CALABASAS now hangs in my new studio as a symbol of resilience. And resilience is just about the most critical skill you can develop in your career. It certainly was for me.

Developing resilience is a lifelong journey that rests on a foundation of mental, emotional, physical, and spiritual well-being. And as my wife and I have uprooted ourselves and set out to make something new in New York, I can’t ignore how critical resilience has been. Here’s how I do it — the Jenn McCarron special of building your resilience muscles.

1. I took naps — seriously. Most panic about midday naps is that you can wake up disoriented. But that’s the good stuff! Being disoriented means you need to look at things differently. You need to get creative. What if you reframed disorienting as refreshing? (Not for nothing: I’m in London this week, and today while browsing the bookshop at the Churchill War Rooms, I happened across Churchill’s own nap protocol: Go all in — undress fully and power down. Let go. And if Churchill can end World War II while still taking afternoon power naps, any one of us can get through our days.)

2. I started reconnecting with friends I’d been too busy to chat with for years. And these relationships ended up being the deepest well of support — they grounded me through so much destabilizing change. These relationships reminded me of who I am outside of my immediate experience, and that was core to pushing through.

3. I leaned on my creativity, including keeping up my songwriting ritual, especially if my brain felt jammed. Usually, I bounce tracks, take them to my iPhone, and obsessively listen to them until I can hear the lyrics. But in these past few months, I wrote something every single day — and I never listened to it again. The only thing that mattered was getting it down to tape. Output was everything.

4. I stayed active — especially given the neuroscience that suggests that the physical drives the emotional. I gave my body what it needed in terms of exercise and recovery, and I was in the gym 24 hours after my last day at Netflix. 

5. I stuck to a schedule and routine. I know that we all do better with a container. And when I looked out at an open calendar during my period between roles, I knew I could fill it with things that mattered. Create, think, move, do — this all became the structure of my days. What’s more: I made sure the routines that keep me going didn’t fall by the wayside. (Acupuncture and therapy are the big ones for me.)

6. I made lists. So. Many. Lists. Punch lists, new life in NYC lists, wrap up life in LA lists, new dreams lists, new never-agains lists. (Should I do a whole post on these lists? Let me know!) 

My new sign is in my new studio — and when I hung it on the wall, I knew my studio was complete. And I knew that it had taken serious resilience to get to where I am now: Ramping up my life and dreams and aggressively pursuing my next transformation.

When the sign broke, my wife suggested the essence of resilience: When things go wrong, commit to the next right action. It’s what I’ve had to do in my entire career — and each time, I had to do it fully. 

I’m not going to go full British on you and say “keep calm and carry on.” In fact, I’ve just about exhausted my British references as I write this post on my final day of my family’s London trip. It’s a trip that marks the end of a brilliant and successful first chapter settling back home in New York. It’s a celebration of hard work and even harder recovery.

But Winston Churchill was clear: We must go on — no matter what. 

Let’s keep going.