Meet Tessola Duncan

We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Tessola Duncan a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Tessola, 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?

I would say I first got my resilience from my family and life experiences. I have some remarkable men and women to look up to and who have overcome a lot to place me in the position I am in today. I am always reminded to keep going no matter what and that failure is not an option. That being said, failure to me is when someone gives up. We don’t always win in this life but as long as you never give up, it is not truly a failure. I also come from a sports family, so we often use sports terms to characterize life. One important sports analogy that I keep with me is “pivoting”. While I may not always get the results that I want or hope for, pivoting to continue and find a way is important, it is how I keep going, and I don’t let any shortcomings consume me. I am also the oldest of three and as the oldest daughter you have to learn to be resilient and roll with the punches, it’s a tough birth order to have.

As a track athlete through high school and college, I also had to gain a lot of resilience. The life of a student athlete is hectic and at first, you can fall short in various areas of your life. However, you must figure out a way to keep going. You may miss a class, a 5 am weightlifting session, an assignment, or one of the million things we have to juggle, but you cannot allow that shortcoming to define the rest of your day, experience, or life. I had to learn quickly how to keep it together and allow each day to be a new opportunity without allowing issues from the previous day to hold me down. My sports background has served me well and I take so many lessons from those years into my life to this day. Running track taught me to run my own race and focus on what I have to accomplish and what I can accomplish. Just because you didn’t start the race well doesn’t mean you can’t win. It also taught me that even on the same track everyone’s race is different and everyone’s goal with that race is different. I was a 200m and 400m runner but I occasionally ran 100m and even 60m. for training a specific part of my race strategy. What that means is, that while I was in the same event and other athletes were looking for a win, I was looking for specific times and to work on my starts. Thus, I learned that you cannot compare yourself to others and every loss is still a lesson. Learn from it and do better the next time.

Another lesson in resilience I learned during college and law school is how to navigate the unknown. As a first-generation college and law school student, there was so much that I did not know. There were so many times when it became overwhelming to find out more that I didn’t know I needed to do or had to get to the next point in my education. Not knowing what you don’t know is hard because you can always feel behind or like you are doing enough. So I had to remind myself not to give up and not to sit in the unknown. When I was presented with information on what I was supposed to do or have done I did what I could and sought out more information and help. We aren’t always dealt the best hand but it is what we do with that hand that matters most. Thus, while I knew I didn’t know the steps to get to law school, I put pride aside and didn’t allow being the first generation to be a crutch and an excuse as to why I didn’t succeed, and I asked for help. It was hard to do so at first but thankfully I was met with great mentors who were helpful and never made me feel less than. Once I got to law school I found out so much more that I didn’t know about grad school and how to navigate that but again I had to ask. It is okay to not know but others can’t help you unless you speak up and say you need the help. During those years I saw just how much my resilient spirit helped propel me forward in ways that would not have been possible had I failed to pivot, had I allowed my shortcomings to consume and define me, or had I given up on myself. Overall, resilience to me is in being confident in yourself to make it happen and having the courage to put yourself out there and give your goals and your life everything you have.

On the other hand, I think it is also important to my resilience to have learned to stand still and slow down. Earlier in this message I stated I have learned to keep moving but during my law school years, I found that continuing to move constantly can also be detrimental. I had to learn that there is progress in pausing. Sometimes we have to take a deep breath, take a break, and allow for a recharge or we will never recover. Recovery is key which is another important sports reference I had to keep in mind. Pushing through does not always have to be in action, sometimes our greatest comebacks are after we have taken a minute to recoup and get ourselves together. You have to be your best self to perform at your best.

Overall, I have had to learn resilience to get to where I am today and so I get it from being who I am, coming from the family I was born into, and through my life experiences thus far. Had I not learned to be resilient there is so much that I would not have experienced and accomplished.

Thanks for sharing that. So, before we get any further into our conversation, can you tell our readers a bit about yourself and what you’re working on?

I have recently graduated from Mercer Law School and have just finished taking the Georgia Bar exam. I begin working as an associate at a law firm in Atlanta, Ga. I love this profession and had a pretty great law school experience. It was tough but I honestly would not change it at all. My professional goal is to work as an in-house counsel with a corporation that has a mission and a company culture that I agree with and work well in. I would like to work for a company that encourages community involvement and allows me the time and ability to give back and make an impact outside of the law. I feel as though the legal profession is a great privilege to be a part of and it is important that we give back to our communities. I want to not only grow professionally but also grow my involvement in local and national organizations. I would like to continue working with the ABA and other local bar associations throughout my practice. I enjoyed community involvement in law school and want to ensure that I can continue that path professionally.

I have also coached high school track and field the past 3 years since graduating from undergrad and I hope to return to coaching in the next few years as well. I enjoyed coaching so much and am so thankful for that opportunity and the students that I worked with over the years. It was a unique experience since I had only recently stopped running in college myself. I enjoyed seeing their growth on and off the track. I loved using my experiences as an athlete and working with the other coaches to create workouts and programs to help the students succeed. It was also great to get to know the students as people learn about them and their goals and help them in any way that I could. In addition to my younger siblings, my athletes also pushed me to continue to work hard to be a good example for them to look up to. I wanted to show young athletes where their commitment to sports could get them and how to channel what they learn on the track and or field to their lives and their future as professionals in whichever area. Many of the students I coached came from backgrounds like mine where sports was the way to college and it meant a lot to be a part of their journey and see many of the athletes go on to accept college offers.

I think what excites me the most about where I am today is how much I have to offer and what I can do with this profession. I am excited to start a scholarship fund in honor of my grandfather who passed when I began law school, I am excited to get back into coaching or at least help with donations to track programs in Macon Ga, I am excited to help raise the percentage of black people and especially black women in the legal profession and ensure my community has the resources and support they need to be successful, and overall I am excited to enjoy the fruits of my labor and experiencing my dreams coming true. I know I have made my family proud and most importantly I have made myself proud of who I am.

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 qualities, skills, or areas of knowledge that were most impactful in my journey were resilience, faith, and fun. Resilience is the most necessary skill I think everyone should learn because life is hard and anything worth having is not easy, therefore, you have to learn how to bounce back and move forward. Faith is important to me because I believe that so much that I have accomplished has been through God. Without faith and maintaining my religious/spiritual beliefs, so much would be different today and I know my faith has carried me when my finances, my body, or my abilities couldn’t. Whatever anyone believes I would stay stick to that and don’t forget who you are and what you believe in. The one who stands for nothing, falls for anything. Lastly, I think fun and the ability to find joy and laughter in everything are important. Paths to success are not easy and definitely are not objectively fun, so being able to find joy in what you are working towards and make the journey to success is the only way to get through in my mind. Make life fun, find friends, find hobbies and things that you enjoy, ensure that you are working towards something you enjoy, and that will allow you to maintain a sense of self. Have fun with life because we only get one and it would be a shame to waste it. Work hard and play hard is the motto! If I didn’t have fun in what I do then I wouldn’t have had reasons to continue on when things got tough or when it would have been easier to quit.

My advice to people early in their journey is to remember your why and make sure you know who you are and where you want to go. Once you have that, the troubles of the journey to success can more easily roll off your back and help propel you forward. Even if you have to find yourself in your journey, have fun doing it, be resilient in pursuing your goals, and have faith that it will all work out in the end.

Looking back over the past 12 months or so, what do you think has been your biggest area of improvement or growth?

My biggest area of growth in the past 12 months has been learning patience, grace, and rest. I had been a very impatient person and that was just adding so much stress on me that I had to make it a point this year to learn to slow down and be patient because rushing through life will only hurt me in the end. Grace was a necessary area of growth because I am very self-critical about everything in my life and I found that I was never giving myself grace. While I understood not every loss was detrimental I put way too much pressure on myself to move forward, fix issues immediately, and “keep going”. It became hard for me to stay positive and was detrimental to my mental health. So I had to learn to have grace stop being so self-critical and let go of perfectionism. It also would bleed into my relationship and I realized I was being hard on my boyfriend too and he didn’t deserve that. I also learned that I am hard on my other loved ones and while I know it comes from a good place, it isn’t okay to project my critical, and strict nature onto the ones I love. My fear of failure was beginning to be crippling and a burden in my life. This leads me to rest, I had to prioritize rest this year because I was always doing something, having to be somewhere, run some event, work, take a test, do my assignments, travel, help others, coach, be a good family member, a good friend, a good partner and it all became too much that I was feeling the physical effects of exhaustion. My mood, weight, and health was fluctuating a lot. I began to miss appointments, meetings, and deadlines, and just fell short in areas that I would normally have never done. I had to learn to rest and prioritize my heath both mental and physical so that I could be my best self.

• Linkedin: www.linkedin.com/in/ tessolad1104