Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Kelly Lynch. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.
Hi Kelly, appreciate you sitting with us today to share your wisdom with our readers. So, let’s start with resilience – where do you get your resilience from?
Let’s start first with what resilience actually is.
Sure, there are people you can encounter in the world who seem much more resilient than others. It can absolutely be true, that some people innately are just more resilient. However, resilience isn’t just a personality trait – it’s so much more than that.
Resilience is a skill that requires persistent attention to not only maintain, but also continue to develop it. And as with any skill – it is perishable if you don’t give it the attention and maintenance it needs. The saying ‘if you don’t use it, you lose it,’ really holds true here.
When I think of my own experience of resilience, it calls to mind the people I’ve looked up to over the course of my life, the people who have both positively and negatively influenced me (negative influence is just as important as positive, because it reminds us what we DON’T want to do or be like), and the immense ways my experiences have shaped me. I’ve had to lean into trusting myself, my instincts, education, and experience more than I think I could list or remember. Whether my experiences have been a result of traumatic things happening, or making choices to shift my life from one direction towards a totally different one – resilience has been a factor in all of that.
My resilience comes from learning how to trust my instincts, my education, and my experiences, so that I could take progressively larger and larger risks for the sake of growth. Big falls can come from big risks – but big wins can come from those risks too.
The choice in taking the chance has always come back to whether or not I trust myself to handle the outcome, no matter what. Whether I’ve ‘won’ or ‘lost’ in a choice I made, I’ve always learned. The lessons have been priceless, and have helped me continue to build that foundation of resilience that has gotten me to this point.
Looking back, what do you think were the three qualities, skills, or areas of knowledge that were most impactful in your journey? What advice do you have for folks who are early in their journey in terms of how they can best develop or improve on these?
The three most important qualities and skills in my personal and professional journeys have always been integrity, alignment, and determination.
1 – I’ve said for longer than I can remember that if I couldn’t do something with integrity, I wouldn’t do it at all. Being able to function from a foundation of integrity makes everything else not only easier, but also far more stable. If you’re making choices from a strong foundation of stable values – I truly believe you can’t go wrong.
2 – Alignment has been a theme throughout my life. The moments I’ve made choices that have not been in alignment with my values or who I say I am, have been the moments of some of my biggest failures and hurts. Just the same, my biggest successes, my growth as a person and professional, and my best relationships have all come from the moments of being the most aligned with my values and identity. Alignment is a reminder to us all of what really matters, and the impact that can be had on us when we step out of alignment.
3 – It was a running joke since my childhood that I was always going to be the person who’d do what I wanted, the way I wanted. As an adult, my peers, friends, and clients will often comment on how stubborn I am, and I truly take it as a compliment. Being determined (or stubborn) has been a quality I’ve had to work hard at learning how to manage, because it can be just as much of a weakness as it can be a strength. The more I’ve learned in my adulthood how to manage stubbornness, the more it’s shifted into determination, which is where the strength of the quality is revealed. My determination has helped me overcome multiple surgeries throughout my life, an incredibly painful divorce, severe postpartum depression and anxiety, learning how to become a single parent while also running multiple businesses, and more.
When you’re working on integrity, alignment, and determination, the most important thing you could ever do is to focus on keeping in perspective exactly who you are, and who you are working on becoming. This means taking the time to study what you say you value, to make sure you really mean what you say. It means understanding not just what you do – but also really, deeply understanding all the parts of you that come together to create who you are. And last, but certainly not least, it means learning how to maintain the stamina that’s required to go out and do the work of chasing down your dreams and creating a life you’re truly proud of.
Before we go, maybe you can tell us a bit about your parents and what you feel was the most impactful thing they did for you?
My parents taught me to look at a person’s character and dismiss the irrelevant noise society tells us we’re supposed to prioritize.
Growing up, my parents owned a garden statuary and park bench manufacturing company my paternal grandfather started. As the third of four girls, it was an expectation that my siblings and I would all work in the company at some point or another, and we all did. Each of us was given different roles that were suited to our personalities and strengths, and one of my older sisters eventually took over the company when my parents retired.
As a teen and then young adult working for my parents, I witnessed them hire and give opportunities to people who were just looking for a chance and an opportunity. I was surrounded by privilege, not only due to my skin color, but also because of where I come from. My parents understood that in their own ways, and how easy it would have been for me to grow up completely insulated from the realities of the world if they had made different choices in how they raised me.
In the process of evolving through adolescence and adulthood, I learned – as a result of the choices my parents at first made on my behalf and then taught me to make for myself – what it means to look beyond what someone looks like on paper, and truly look at who they are. Working shoulder to shoulder with my parents’ other employees, all of whom had a variety of backgrounds, life experiences, education, and more, taught me about the value of examining a person’s current character instead of maligning them because of a past they were trying to leave behind. They were people who showed me what a ‘hard days’ work’ actually meant, how to have fun while still getting the job done, what it meant to be a team, and that it’s ok to ask for help. The people who stuck with my parents – because my parents stuck with them – were loyal, respectful, kind, humble, and hard-working.
Being taught by my parents, through action and example, what it means to choose people based on their character has led to me being surrounded in my adulthood with a literal and figurative rainbow of human beings I adore, admire, and respect. These are people who are models of integrity, they are brilliant in both their knowledge and their intelligence, they know what it means to work for what they want, and they are constantly aspiring for more. They are diverse in so many ways, and have incredible stories of what it means to overcome and thrive in spite of what life has thrown at them. My circles have been filled with colleagues and co-workers who became my friends, and in some cases my closest confidants. They live out their values, they know exactly who they are, and they aren’t ashamed of where they’ve walked in their lives because they understand the difference between experience and identity. Whether they realize and intend it or not, they are constantly teaching me, just simply by being themselves. My job is to make sure I’m always staying in a position of being teachable.
Learning how to choose who I surround myself with based on character instead of the qualifications society demands that we prioritize, has led to being surrounded by people who give me the grace and space to be my most authentic, flawed, nerdy, and goofy self, while also pushing me to continue to level up in life. I can’t think of a better impact, or lesson, that any of us could have on each other, and I’ll always be grateful to my parents for that.
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Image Credits
Jamie Bannon
