Here is the full transcript of Denise Mai’s talk titled “How To Build Resilience As Your Superpower” at TEDxKerrisdaleWomen 2021 conference.
Listen to the audio version here:
TRANSCRIPT:
Imagine a nine-year-old little girl, left home all alone. No cable, no cell phone, scared to death. Every time there’s a noise outside, she’s wondering if a stranger is looking to break into her home. With every walk past the window, her heart would stop.
And she would be scared to go to sleep because she didn’t know when her parents would return home. Well, this little girl was me. This was how I started building my resilience. I built it by facing my fears.
Even though I was in a dark, scared place as a child, I built my confidence by not letting my circumstances keep me there. This became my superpower. Today, I want to share with you my story, so I can help you discover how you can build resilience into your life.
Defining Resilience
Building confidence and belief in you in order to build this superpower within you. But what does it mean to be truly resilient? I believe that resilience is the capacity to recover from adversity, to bounce back from challenging life situations, or when things don’t go as planned. When things are stressful and challenging and overwhelming, it means being calm, clear, and stable.
The question is, how do you choose to face these challenges? Let me tell you about how I started my journey on building my resilience. My mom is resilient. She was a refugee from Vietnam. She risked her life with her younger sister to escape her country on a boat.
They were stranded for four days. They were raided by pirates, not once, but twice. Sadly, her sister died on the boat.
But my mom, she survived. After 15 treacherous days, she arrived at an Indonesian refugee camp. She was one of the lucky ones sent to Canada. My mom had me at the age of 40. She was a single mom on welfare.
Childhood Lessons
I grew up in Chinatown, and as a child, I remember lining up at the food bank and having Christmas dinner at the Union Gospel Mission and getting clothes and toys donated from the Salvation Army. Looking back, I don’t regret growing up the way I did. It taught me many valuable lessons in my life, like being grateful every single day for everything that I have. When you come from rock bottom, you truly appreciate everything life has to offer.
You never, ever take anything for granted because you know the value of the simplest things in life. I’ve never met my biological father. My stepdad, my real dad, came into my life when I was eight. What I remember most was that he worked six days a week, 12 hours a day, to provide a better life for me and my mom.
With his minimum wage job, he made sure there was food on the table, a roof over our heads, and provided the basics of life for us. His resilience created a deep-rooted resilience inside me. Thank you, Dad, for instilling a hard work ethic in me and for showing me unconditional love. I started working in grade four at the tender age of ten.
Every Saturday, I would wake up at 5 a.m. when it was pitch dark outside with my mom, and we would take transit for two hours to make sandwiches on a conveyor belt. The first day I got paid, my boss handed me $50. It wasn’t much money, but to me, as a ten-year-old little girl, it was the most money I’ve ever seen in my entire life.
A Pivotal Moment
That day, something shifted for me. Seeing those dollar bills in the palms of my hands created a desire in me. I made a promise to myself, and I vowed, from that day forward, I was going to step into my independence. Some may say, “Why would my mom let me work at such a young age?”
To them, I say, “Thank you, Mom.” Thank you for teaching me independence, the value of money, and responsibility. I put myself through university, working minimum-wage jobs. I was an average student, but despite that, I worked for two Fortune 500 companies.
One day, I had lunch with the CEO, and I shared with him that I didn’t think the corporate world was for me. I knew I was an entrepreneur at heart. He suggested I get into real estate. My first thought that came into my head was, “Who’s going to trust this 24-year-old with their property?”
I didn’t have the confidence in me just yet. My confidence grew when I entered a contest selling ad space to a newsletter. The winning team would win a trip anywhere around the world. My friend and I entered, and we set up appointments to pitch to realtors.
But the night before we began, my friend bailed on me. My heart dropped, and all these doubts and insecurities came rushing through my head. Long story short, I ended up winning the contest on my own. This gave me the confidence to know that I could sell.
After proving to myself that I could do it, I am enough, shortly after I got my real estate license in 2010. By 2015, I’m proud to say I became a top 1% realtor. I placed 32nd out of 14,000 agents. My friend who bailed on me provided me with a great learning opportunity to face my fears and conquer my doubts and insecurities.
I am thankful for her. Because of her, I created a strong and unbreakable belief within myself to know that anything and everything is possible. Resilience. What an amazing superpower. It can be taught, and it’s a skill that can be learned and cultivated over time. It’s like a muscle that can be strengthened through exercise. Resilience is a habit-forming skill. The more goals you accomplish, the more resilient you become.
More Than a Skill
Resilience is also much more than a skill. It’s an adaptation, a journey that begins early on in childhood and continues the rest of your life. So how do you build this magic superpower? Let me share with you three ways.
First, change your perspective. Are you a victim of your circumstance? Or do you use your circumstance to fuel your motivation for success? When you adjust your perspective, you can see things from another angle.
You can see opportunities when there are obstacles. This is a way to reframe the picture. Ask yourself, when faced with these issues, what are your options? What can you learn from this, and what may be your opportunities?
These questions turn you away from the blame game and allow you to focus on the positive. The second way to build resilience is choose your response. In times of difficulties, we can panic and react negatively, or we can remain calm, logical, to find a solution. How we react can change our outcome.
When I was faced with a decision to move forward with those meetings or give up on the contest, this led me to a path of opportunity that I embraced and becoming the realtor I am today. Your reaction and action is always up to you. The third way to building resilience is finding a sense of purpose. Growing up poor and seeing my parents go through hardship gave me the strength of purpose to achieve success.
It allowed me to give back to my parents, to whom I’m grateful for, for bringing me up in this world. We cannot protect ourselves from all the hardships of life. What we can do is protect our own self-protection, the capacity to endure hardships and bounce back more quickly, and most importantly, to know and to have confidence and belief that it is always possible to overcome adversity. No matter where you stand as a society, adversity will come.
I learned to be resilient by looking at how my parents fought through their challenges and came out stronger. I grew up not having the things I wanted. That motivated me to pursue my dreams. If you are resilient and you’ll be sure you can arrive at your destination, don’t give up now.
One moment, one decision, one choice can change your life forever. It can bring you closer to your goals and your dreams. The distance where you are right now and where you want to be is action. Before taking action, you have to make a choice.
Conclusion
So stop procrastinating on that dream. Just make the right decision today. This little girl from Chinatown built in herself the superpower of resilience. I challenge you to build this within yourself.
Don’t waste another second, because you can have everything that you’ve ever dreamed of now. Thank you.