Podcast: How to Stay Resilient in the Face of a Major Setback

“The hardest part was the mental anguish of being a very different person. A different physical person,” said Wortmann, a professor of marketing at Kellogg. “Your identity has changed.”

Wortmann experienced what some call a “life quake”: an event that significantly disrupts your life’s narrative. Divorce, the death of a loved one, losing your job, and serious illness all fall under that heading.

On this episode of The Insightful Leader: Wortmann’s guide to bouncing back from the seemingly insurmountable.

Podcast Transcript

Laura PAVIN: Back in 2022, Craig Wortmann noticed a bump on his shin. Wortmann teaches marketing at Kellogg, and he’s used to being on the run—like, literally. He’s the kind of guy who would run a marathon for fun. Anyhow, Wortmann was so busy teaching around this time that the lump on his leg, he didn’t think much about it. At least, not at first.

Craig WORTMANN: Then I got up really early one day and had a super long day teaching virtually, from dawn—literally—until dusk. And I got home, and my right shin was all swelled up. So that was weird. And so I went to the doctor and I said, “what is going on with my shin?”

PAVIN: So he went in to get the lump checked out. His doctor ordered a biopsy, stuck a needle in his leg. He waited for the results.

WORTMANN: And I got an email. I really wish I hadn’t checked email that day, but I got an email and it said, “this is a sarcoma, this is cancer, and it’s scary, it’s dangerous, so we gotta get this off your shin.”

PAVIN: Wortmann was rattled, but he’s an optimistic guy, so he thought to himself, “okay, I can have the lump removed.” That should just take care of it. But when he went in for surgery, his doctors discovered a complication. He remembers waking up groggy from the anesthesia. His surgical team and wife were standing over him.

WORTMANN: I’ll never forget, as long as I live, the look on all of their faces. And they said, we opened your leg, we did a biopsy up into your knee to make sure that it wasn’t there, and it’s there. It’s in your knee, the cancer is in your knee, and it’s going north, and we have to take your leg. And that was a tough moment.

PAVIN: Welcome to The Insightful Leader. I’m Laura Pavin. We’re all likely to experience life-changing news at some point, and it can cast a shadow over other areas of your life: your relationships, your interests, your career. Because when you lose the things that are a part of you, it’s hard to imagine showing up for those other parts of your life in the same way.

That’s how it felt for Wortmann. He thought he knew what resilience was. He spent a lot of his career teaching it through the lens of sales, which is his expertise. But this experience forced Wortmann to relearn what it really meant to be resilient. And what he did learn helped him regain a sense of normalcy that he once thought unfathomable.

And through that experience, he was able to devise a detailed toolkit to help others get through the worst moments of their life, too, and rebuild themselves brick by brick. That toolkit is called Bounce Back Better.

WORTMANN: Why settle for back? Why not use this experience—crappy experience, let’s be clear—but why not use it to be better than I was before?

PAVIN: In this episode: a three-part guide to bouncing back in the face of a major life event. We hear about that next.

…

Wortmann is in his fifties. He describes himself as a lucky guy. Sure, he’d weathered what he calls a few “life quakes” before. Life quakes are traumatic events like the death of a loved one or loss of a company. And Wortmann had experienced both of those losses. But finding out he had cancer and needed to have his leg amputated—that definitely qualified as a major life quake and an unexpected one. He thought he had the tools to deal with it.

WORTMANN: I told myself that I understand resilience and I know how to bounce back, and on some level I did. And that is all true. That’s all valid. Something like this happens and you learn it in a much deeper sense.

PAVIN: After Wortmann had his amputation surgery, he found out he’d need to wait months before he could get a prosthesis. And that’s because his leg shape was changing as he healed. More than the physical trauma, Wortmann says, he struggled with his mental health.

WORTMANN: The hardest part was the mental anguish of being a very different person, a different physical person, you know, not being able to get up and walk across the room. And so what I did—that is both entirely normal and not very constructive—is, I wallowed.

PAVIN: Wortmann had experienced mild depression maybe once or twice in his life, but this was completely different. He felt full-on despair. He says he wasn’t sure he wanted to be around. His identity had been rooted in this idea that he was always on his feet: that he was a fast runner, someone who worked out, a guy who stood at his desk.

He didn’t sit still—ever.

WORTMANN: That identity was, you know, gone for a time and that took a lot of adjustment.

PAVIN: As his brain caught up to his new physical reality, Wortmann churned through a soundtrack of negative thoughts.

WORTMANN: I’m not a good father anymore. I’ll never dance at my kids’ weddings. Like I’ll … I’ll … I’ll never do … I’ll never run again. It’s horrible. And so what you do is you … you spin, you spiral. It’s chaos. You’re scared! Your identity has changed. And that is a very normal phenomenon.

PAVIN: While Wortmann was in the muck of this wallowing phase, he wondered how he could get out of it. Before, this notion that time heals all wounds, it more or less made sense to him. But that wasn’t working in the situation. He wanted to be proactive, but he didn’t know what to do, exactly.

WORTMANN: How can I get back on track? Like what … what are the steps? And that’s the difference between my pre-, my two-legged self, and my one-legged self. Like, my two-legged self? I thought I knew that, and I didn’t. I didn’t know the steps, and so I had to learn that. I had to research it and figure it out.

PAVIN: As Wortmann started studying up on the resilience literature, he realized that the negative thoughts he was having were normal—and there was a way out. A method that would become the “bounce” phase of his three-part guide.

His first move was to simply be aware of what he calls “negative labels.” For Wortmann, those negative labels included thoughts like, I’ll never run again, or I’ll never walk normally. His next step was to write those thoughts down.

WORTMANN: And then the next thing you do, which sounds a little weird to people, is you try to flip that to a positive label.

PAVIN: For instance, Wortmann’s first attempt at a positive label for the thought “I’ll never run again” sounded something like this:

WORTMANN: Look, my leg is still healing. I don’t have a prosthetic leg. I don’t know what that’s gonna be like. It could let me run. Now, notice that it’s not Pollyanna. It’s not like, “oh, Craig, everything’s gonna be fine. Like, I’ll run a marathon again.” That would be an unrealistic positive label. And so a more realistic is like, well, “but I don’t know what I don’t know. I’ve never worn a prosthetic. Like, maybe the thing will let me dance. Maybe it’ll let me run. I don’t know.”

PAVIN: Wortmann says this process of trying to create a positive out of a negative can feel a little cheesy, but research shows this Jedi mind maneuver can really help to shift our mental outlook.

WORTMANN: At some point, you gotta wrangle your mind to a place that is more positive. Not super positive—just a step in the right direction.

PAVIN: Okay, so in this first “bounce” phase of Wortmann’s resilience toolkit, you need to do two things: one, notice your negative mental labels and write them all down; two, flip each of your negative labels into a positive statement. Wortmann says there’s a really useful word that can help.

WORTMANN: Sometimes it’s as simple as adding the word “yet.” You know, I can’t run yet. I can’t walk normally yet. I mean, it’s really as simple as that. And this is the part that lands on people really strangely. Because they’re like, “does that really work?” And the answer is, “yep.”

PAVIN: You can start to imagine what this could look like in other situations, ones that throw us off, but don’t necessarily rise to the level of a life quake—something more like a tremor. For instance, let’s say you have a job interview, and it doesn’t go so well. You might walk away from the interview feeling mad or sad or embarrassed—maybe all the above.

Soon, the negative thoughts come online. Thoughts like, “I’m not as good as those other people.” “I’ll never get another good job in my life.” Wortmann says these thoughts are a cue to flip our mental scripts into something more positive.

WORTMANN: You say, okay, look, I have succeeded in interviews before, so I didn’t do this one well; what can I learn and how might I change what I did in that interview for the next time? That’s just a slightly positive label. It’s not unrealistic. That is totally realistic to do.

PAVIN: So phase one is the “bounce” phase. Wortmann calls the second phase in his resilience toolkit the “back” phase. This next phase is all about taking action.

Remember how Wortmann told himself he couldn’t run—yet? Well, he realized that before he could even aspire to run, he first needed to learn how to walk again using his prosthesis.

WORTMANN: I have no idea how to use this limb. My brain hasn’t rewired to it. I go right back to negative. And so this is the cyclical nature of this thing. You gotta wrangle yourself back. You gotta get on the treadmill, and the action is: I am gonna walk three times a week. This is literally true for me; it’s unbelievable to say this out loud: I’m gonna walk for three minutes on the treadmill. It took all I had to walk for three minutes.

PAVIN: Wortmann gave himself a stretch goal, but not so much of a stretch that he couldn’t achieve it. By the way, he’s quick to point out how resilience isn’t a one-way street toward a rainbow ending. It is normal for those negative thoughts to come creeping back in.

WORTMANN: Resilience is not a linear process. You go back and forth, so it’s like a cyclical thing. You start to just get baby steps into the positive and then something happens, you snap right back to the negative.

PAVIN: What helps is to surround yourself with social support for whatever action step you’re trying to take, even if that step seems small. For Wortmann, it means asking his wife and his adult kids to check in with him to make sure he’s walked on the treadmill that day. Because walking on the treadmill? It’s physically painful for Wortmann. Some days he doesn’t wanna do it. But what’s worse than not doing it? Letting his kids down.

WORTMANN: And when your kids ask you if you’ve done something, I mean, everybody in the world knows you’re probably gonna do it. Because that’s your accountability. They were my accountability coach. I didn’t need anybody to teach me how to walk on a treadmill. I needed the nudge.

PAVIN: He needed the nudge. The social scaffolding and coaching that helped Wortmann with those nudges has now widened from his immediate family into a larger network of support. It includes his doctors, his rehab specialist, and people he’s met in the amputee community.

So, as Wortmann mentioned at the beginning of the episode, he didn’t just wanna bounce back to baseline. He wanted to be better than he was before. So what does better mean and why not call it good? Once you’ve made your way through the bounce and back phases of resilience, like why keep striving toward better?

WORTMANN: It’s totally fine to stop. You know, what I would never advise anybody is stop at the bounce phase. I want everyone to come back from disaster, big or small, but is it okay to stop and be satisfied? Of course it is. That’s fine. I am strange. I like to ask strange questions, like, why wouldn’t I be better?

PAVIN: This brings us to the last phase of Wortmann’s resilience toolkit: the better phase. He says the first step is to establish some initial goals.

WORTMANN: So an initial goal for me was to walk 30 minutes on the treadmill, and that seemed like a long, long bridge from three minutes. Can you imagine? Like, I can barely survive three minutes. I’m gonna walk 10 times that? And the answer is, “yeah, that’s your initial goal, buddy. Let’s get after it.” And it took me some months to get there.

PAVIN: One way to think about setting an initial goal is that, yes, it’s a stretch, but it’s also not pie in the sky. It’s something you could imagine as a real thing if we show up consistently and work at it.

It may take some trial and error to recalibrate your goals to what feels realistic and achievable for you.

WORTMANN: The research on deliberate practice shows us that we can be 10 times better than we are right now at anything. That does not mean we can be the best in the world. I’m not gonna be an Olympian. That’s okay. But I can be 10 times better than I am right now. And I’ve literally, in my own amputation journey, seen this. I’m like 20 times better on the treadmill than I was before. And in the summer. I’m gonna be running.

PAVIN: That’s right. Wortmann’s hatched a plan. He’s going to be heading outside to try some trail running at his cabin in Wisconsin. His wife will be by side filming him. Wortmann plans to document and share this moment on social media. He’s hoping his story will inspire other people experiencing a tough time.

WORTMANN: That’s the final phase, is just not stopping at “back,” but saying, okay, I really took a hit. I’ve learned a lot of stuff, and now I’m gonna turn it into something great.

PAVIN: Trail running would be an amazing achievement. But that’s actually not how Wortmann is defining success for himself now.

WORTMANN: I think this is a weird thing to say, but success for me will look like me going through most of a day and not thinking about the fact that I’m an amputee. Like, “oh yeah, I lost my leg a few years ago. That was weird.” That will be awesome.

PAVIN: The goals Wortmann is cooking up these days are more mental than physical. He is seeing inklings of what the research on post-traumatic growth describes as the last stage of the recovery journey: optimism.

WORTMANN: I can see it up ahead like a … sort of like a train light in the tunnel. I can see it. I’m not there yet. I’ve got a ways to go to get to true optimism where I walk around like I used to. Like, “God, this is great. I’m so lucky. This is awesome.” I’m not there yet. I got work to do, but it’s work I know how to do and I just gotta go to work and do it.

[CREDITS]

PAVIN: This episode of The Insightful Leader was written by Nancy Rosenbaum. It was produced and edited by Laura Pavin, Rob Mitchum, Abraham Kim, Fred Schmalz, Maja Kos, and Blake Goble. It was mixed by Nancy Rosenbaum. Special thanks to Craig Wortmann. Want more The Insightful Leader episodes? You can find us on iTunes, Spotify, or our website, insight.kellogg.northwestern.edu.

We’ll be back in a couple weeks with another episode of The Insightful Leader podcast.