Speaker Sheet

Grit Is Overrated: The Real Science Behind Leading Without Burning Out

Grit isn't the answer. Choosing your hard things on purpose is.

Grit culture tells you to push through everything. The science says that's backwards.  

We've been sold one story about strength: push through it, ignore the signal, want it more. I flip that on its head. Drawing on decades of research into stress and control, and a story that starts on a six-inch mountain trail with a ravine on one side, I make the case that resilience isn't one thing. There's the kind that gets handed to you, and there's the kind you choose on purpose, and they are not the same kind of strong. 

Audiences leave with a different way to meet the next hard thing in their own life, before it shows up uninvited.

Audiences leave "Grit Is Overrated" with a new definition of resilience. For anyone who wants to keep building on it after the talk ends, that's exactly what RESET, my five-part coaching framework, was built to do:

Reconnect with what your body is actually telling you. Energize by stopping the drain grit culture calls strength. Shift from surviving hard things to choosing them. Expand your life the way that actually works, in small moves, not demolitions. Thrive, because courage compounds the same way any skill does.