Cultivating Resilience in Uncertain Times

By Amy Bradford, Bradford Consultant Group & WIA Advisory Board Member (May 6, 2025)

It’s a tough time to be a leader, a manager, an employee, a retiree … it’s a tough time to just be. We don’t need headlines or the ticker tape to tell us that we’re living in uncertain times. We’re living it.

Volatile markets, return-to-office mandates, geopolitical tensions, rapid adoption of AI and higher food prices, all of this and more are front of mind and in faces all the time. We’re concerned about our friends’ divorces and financial hardships, those who have received a life-changing diagnosis leaving them questioning their future. The ping or buzz of another text message or notification adds onto the weight of everything we deal with.

Life isn’t fair. Sometimes it hurts like hell. Yet, here we are.

Everything we encounter each day on our journey feeds into how we cultivate a resilient life. A life in which we recover and bounce back from life’s hardships. Because life isn’t fair, and life is hard.

Remember Damar Hamlin, the Buffalo Bills player who suffered cardiac arrest on the football field, only to be revived and eventually returned to play? Or Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani activist and Nobel Peace Prize laureate who survived a gunshot to the head for advocating for girls’ education. Two examples of heroic resilience.

We all know others who haven’t suffered and endured like Hamlin and Malala yet are some of the most resilient people we know. We marvel at their ability to keep enduring hardships we can only imagine.

Award winning author and child development researcher, L.R. Knost described life like this - “Life is amazing. And then it’s awful. And then it’s amazing again. And in between the amazing and awful it’s ordinary and mundane and routine. Breathe in the amazing, hold on through the awful, and relax and exhale during the ordinary. That’s just living heartbreaking, soul-healing, amazing, awful, ordinary life. And it’s breathtakingly beautiful.”

Yes, life is hard, but I believe we all have the capacity to cultivate resilience even in times like these. Just how do we do that?

Hello hardship my old friend, you’ve come to mess me up again. While those aren’t the real lyrics to the Simon & Garfunkel song, they’re an appropriate description of what hardship has felt like every time it has visited me. Life is going along well, even if it’s just the routine and mundane of the everyday. And then, seemingly out of nowhere, my husband wants a divorce, or I lose my job, or every member of my immediate family dies within an eight-year timeframe.

Rabbi Simon Jacobson, author of Toward a Meaningful Life, said in an interview with the Olivia Chan Foundation several things that struck me -- that tragedy is too strong and powerful for the mind to fathom. And from what I have lived and observed, he is right. We can’t wrap our heads around a tragic event, a loss, or a setback of some kind. But we can emerge on the other side, more resilient than before.

I invite you to attend my networking session “Cultivating Resilience in Uncertain Times” at the 14th annual Women in Agribusiness Summit in Orlando this fall. At this session, I will share a simple framework to equip you with the solutions and tools to thrive in the face of adversity. You will learn about the first step in cultivating resilience – awareness of what drives your choices, your actions, your decisions and triggers. You will leave the session with clarity about your vulnerabilities and opportunities in relationships with ourselves and others. You’ll be able to begin taking control of your inner programming, and you’ll be ready to start your journey toward a more resilient you, whatever life throws your way.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Amy Bradford is CEO of Bradford Consultant Group. Bradford’s 30-year professional career includes work in the public and private sectors, holding marketing and communications positions at Southern Cotton Ginners Association, GROWMARK, Illinois Farm Bureau, Illinois Soybean Association, Illinois Department of Agriculture, and Farm Credit Services of Illinois.

She has been actively involved in the National Agri-Marketing Association, and served as president (2017-18), VP (2016-17) and secretary-treasurer (2015-16). She also served as programming chair and president of Heartland NAMA, is a member of Public Relations Society of America, American Agricultural Editor’s Association, Agriculture Relations Council, and Cooperative Communicators Association. She is a mentor in the Agriculture Future of America Fellows program.

Bradford is an adjunct professor at Greenville University, teaching courses in organizational behavior, cultural influences in the workplace, organizational communication, research methods and data analysis. She holds a bachelor’s degree in organizational leadership from Greenville University and earned a master’s degree in organizational leadership from Gonzaga University.