Magda Wierzycka, one of South Africa’s richest women, had her lowest moment standing in an airport parking lot, unemployed, looking at the long walk to the cheapest rental car. Things had dramatically changed since she was one of the top three most senior employees in the company she worked for. She had quit, angry at an ethical breach and felt like she had to start her career from scratch.
Little did she know, she was months away from a solid position and eventually, the start of her own company, which would rocket her to the multi-millionaire’s club. However, in that drab parking lot, knowing her husband was unemployed as well, knowing she had bills to pay, children to feed, and trying to start her own business, it all felt overwhelming.
“I felt like I was in a constant state of panic attack,” says Wierzycka, “It was such an incredibly stressful time.”
Today, she is the Chief Executive Officer of Sygnia Group, an asset management company. She went from that day in the parking lot to one of South Africa’s richest women in a few years. It’s a tale of countering adversity to rise to the top.
South Africa has had a slew of businessmen tumbling from grace in the past year, some from oversight and others from severe ethical impropriety. For many C-suite executives, a public downfall is difficult to correct, and few can crawl out from the rubble and continue their careers.
However, “You’d be astounded how many billionaires were bankrupt in their past,” points out James van der Westhuizen, a South Africa-based industrial psychologist and the managing member at KnowHouse. “If you can learn from your failure, that’s a good sign of future success.”
Some of the businessmen included in that list are the truly resilient, like Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple (once fired from the company he created).
Resilience is the difference between those who succumb to and those who bounce back.
“Some people would have taken a deep breath and planned the next step after landing themselves in a situation like mine, but I just threw myself into activities,” says Wierzycka.
“My philosophy is that you must never stop fishing. You only need to catch the occasional whale, but you have to keep fishing to do that.”
How to be resilient
How you handle failure says a lot about your internal resources: resilience. The New Yorker defines resilience as the answer to this question: when the worst hits, “Do you succumb or do you surmount?”
James van der Westhuizen, a South Africa-based industrial psychologist and the managing member at KnowHouse, says that he covers three factors in his executive coaching that apply to resilience. They are: