By Becky Hancock
The Ordinary Tuesday Test
If you want to see resilience, don’t look at the good months. Look at the ordinary Tuesday in month seven, when nothing is working yet and you do the work anyway.
The Power Tasks, One Year In
That’s where mine lives. When I started building this business, I was handed a short list of daily actions, what I started calling my power tasks. Post something of real value on LinkedIn twice a week. Send twenty-five connection requests every single day. Send a welcome message to anyone who accepted, then follow up again five days later if I hadn’t heard back. On paper it takes five minutes to read that list. Living it meant doing those exact same actions, day after day, for a full year, long before there was any evidence they were working.
There were mornings I didn’t want to open LinkedIn. There were weeks where I’d send my twenty-five requests, write my value post, send my follow-ups, and watch absolutely nothing come of it. No replies worth mentioning, no calls booked, no signs that the effort was accumulating into anything. It would have been easy, honestly reasonable, to decide the list wasn’t working and go looking for a shortcut instead. I didn’t. I showed up for myself the next day and did it again, because I’d decided the only way to find out if this actually worked was to give it the full run, not a partial one I could later blame for not producing results.
When the Calls Went Badly
The harder test of that resilience, though, wasn’t the repetition. It was the sales calls that went badly.
Not every call ended well. Some people were polite and still said no. Some got defensive when I asked questions I thought were reasonable. A few just went cold and stopped responding altogether after seeming interested. Each one of those was a small gut punch, especially early on when I had no track record yet to reassure myself that the no’s weren’t personal. It would have been simple to respond to that sting by hardening my sales approach, leaning into the high-pressure tactics I’d been taught, the objection-stacking and bonus-stacking and refusing to accept no as an answer, because at least that felt like doing something in response to the sting of rejection.
Turning Rejection Into Refinement
Instead, I did something slower and harder. After a bad call, I’d sit with what actually happened and ask myself honestly whether I liked how I’d shown up, not whether I’d closed the sale. And when the answer was no, I tweaked the process. That’s how I ended up telling prospects to think it over and email me their decision in the morning instead of pushing for a yes on the spot. It came directly out of calls that didn’t go the way I wanted, refined one uncomfortable conversation at a time until I had an approach I could feel proud of walking away from, whether the answer was yes or no.
What Resilience Actually Looks Like
That’s the part of resilience people don’t talk about enough. It’s not just gritting your teeth and repeating the same actions until they work, although that mattered plenty here. It’s also being willing to look honestly at what isn’t working, including the parts that are uncomfortable about yourself, and adjust without using the discomfort as an excuse to quit. I never let a bad call convince me the whole thing was broken. I let it show me exactly which piece needed to change, changed that piece, and got back on the next call.
A year of showing up for the power tasks and a habit of turning every hard conversation into something I could be proud of, that’s the whole story. Neither one is dramatic on its own. Together, they’re the reason I’m still here.
If you’re in the middle of your own ordinary Tuesday right now, keep going. Follow along for more of the story.