One Woman Shares How Business Failure Led to Career Success

Professional roadblocks happen — resilience is about how you choose to respond to them.

May 12, 2025

Before she was finally forced to shutter her tech startup, Plasticity Labs, in 2020, founder Jennifer Moss gave up a lot in her struggle to ensure the success of the company she’d co-founded with her husband in Kitchener, ON. She spent most of her evenings composing emails, joined every board she could to advocate for women in tech and seldom had time for her family. “We were feeding everyone on the team, but not ourselves,” she says. “We were constantly strapped for money and time.”

On the surface, everything seemed to be going smoothly — the product they launched in 2012, designed to measure happiness and well-being in the workplace, was gaining traction and Moss won the International Female Entrepreneur of the Year award in 2014. But when the pandemic hit, investments in workplace well-being took a hit. “The reality behind the scenes was that the business was failing,” she says. The pressure left her feeling burnt out and discouraged.

In today’s uncertain world, resilience is essential — not just for rebounding from setbacks, but for growing stronger through adversity and adapting to change. It's a lesson that Moss learned firsthand after shuttering the business she'd spent eight years building.

In the aftermath of that decision, Moss devoted the next four months to simply recovering. “I did some self-reflection, re-focusing on my family and the things that were real priorities to me,” she says.

That period of reflection helped Moss reframe her experience and build resilience. Rather than viewing her company’s collapse as a failure, she treated it as a learning opportunity. She asked the hard questions — what went wrong, what she had overlooked and how could she have led more effectively? Over the next year, she dug into the root causes of her burnout, consulting experts, journaling her experience and confronting the toxic patterns she’d once mistaken for ambition. What emerged wasn’t just a postmortem of a startup, but a redefinition of success — one built on boundaries, balance and the resilience to start again, this time wiser.

In 2021, that hard work culminated in the release of her book, The Burnout Epidemic: The Rise of Chronic Stress and How We Can Fix It, more than 200 keynote talks and speaking engagements and the launch of her consulting company, Jennifer Moss Inc. (JMI). In 2025, she co-founded the Work Better Institute, a global workforce policy think tank, and released her latest book, Why Are We Here?: Creating A Work Culture Everyone Wants.

Moss says that real resilience is built through experience, self-awareness and a willingness to learn and adapt during times of crisis — here are five of her top strategies for navigating times of change and uncertainty to become a more resilient leader.

1. Harness the power of hope — and recognize that problems are temporary

A February 2025 leadership study by Gallup, a global analytics and advisory firm, found hope is the most important quality people seek in their leaders. In a survey of more than 30,000 people across 52 countries, 56 percent of respondents identified hope as their top need, surpassing qualities like trust, compassion and stability.

“We need hope in our leadership, but we also need it to get through stressful times,” says Moss, “especially because uncertainty decreases our sense of hope.”

Fortunately, there are many small, incremental ways to build hope in your day-to-day. Moss says simple actions like making your bed, clearing your desk, taking a 10-minute walk before starting your day or changing into comfortable clothes after work can all help build “cognitive hope.”

Language also plays a crucial role in building hope and resilience, particularly in difficult times. Moss advises steering clear of words that convey permanence, such as “always” and “never,” as they can reinforce feelings of hopelessness. Phrases like, “It’s always going to be like this” or “It’s never going to change” are counterproductive. “If we don't view problems as temporary, we may feel they can't be solved,” she says.

Instead, she recommends focusing on solutions, such as looking for available resources that may help with a problem, identifying potential positive outcomes and reframing challenges as opportunities for growth.

2. Never waste a crisis

“There’s so much learning that comes out of surge-capacity moments where you muster all your energy together to come up with a plan. That’s where resilient leaders thrive, where they use a crisis as an opportunity to learn,” Moss says. “Failing isn’t failure — it’s just a chance for us to gain more knowledge and act more effectively in the future.”

Moss says one of the best ways to build resilience is to change your perspective. She finds it helpful to look back at challenging situations and identify the positive lessons or outcomes that came from them.

It was a tool she leaned on heavily while working with other leaders during the pandemic, a time when businesses everywhere were struggling. Rather than focusing on everything that had gone wrong, she encouraged leaders to shift their focus to the positives — whether that was more time with family, fewer time constraints or other silver linings.

“Once you create a new frame of reference based on the things that went well versus all the things that went terribly, you start to see that whatever happened that seemed so awful actually created something positive.”

3. Model a healthy and balanced approach to work

Moss says one of the most common mistakes she sees leaders make is preaching self-care to their teams while neglecting to practice it themselves. You can’t be a resilient leader if you’re on the brink of burnout. Self-care is about prioritizing your mental, emotional and physical well-being to maintain balance and prevent burnout.

It means setting boundaries, managing stress and taking time to recharge, whether through breaks, exercise or other healthy habits.

“Employees can't be what they can't see,” says Moss. “So, if you're telling everyone to engage in self-care, but you never do, it's not just a disservice to the people you're leading, which has a dramatic impact, but also to yourself.”

According to a 2024 survey by Robert Half, a recruitment and business consulting firm, 42 percent of Canadian professionals reported feeling burnt out in 2024. Of those, 52 percent cited heavy workloads as the top contributing factor.

If you want to foster a healthy and high-performing culture, Moss says finding and modeling a positive, balanced approach to work is crucial. One strategy is to take what she calls a “loud vacation,” where you inform your team that you won’t be answering calls or emails while you’re away. If you work remotely, you can also let your team know when you're stepping away for a walk and encourage them to do the same.

The bottom line is for leaders to practice what they preach. “If you're telling people not to answer emails on weekends and evenings, you shouldn't do that either,” she says.

4. Know your limits

When your to-do list becomes overwhelming, Moss recommends “naming a number.”

“When we use phrases like, ‘I have a million things to do,’ we never feel like the list is achieved,” she says. “And feeling a sense of accomplishment and hitting a goal is very healthy for us.”

Instead, Moss chooses to zero in on the essential tasks that must be done and uses them to create her daily to-do list. “If it’s five things, great — I have five things to do today,” she says. And as she completes each one, she checks it off. “Anything extra is just a bonus,” she adds.

Moss applies a similar approach before taking on a new project, asking herself if it truly aligns with her values, vision for the future and life goals.

“Every single decision about what I'm taking on and what I'm not taking on goes through that formula. It helps me to say no to things, whereas before I was terrible at saying no,” she says.

5. Fight imposter syndrome

Research suggests that up to 70 percent of people experience imposter syndrome — wherein you feel like a fraud, despite your accomplishments and clear evidence to the contrary — at some point in their lives.

“When I talk at leadership conferences with high-performing people, they all describe feeling imposter syndrome at a certain level,” Moss says.

Ultimately, Moss says the way to counter this insecurity is to catalogue your successes. Every year on her birthday, Moss creates what she calls a “reverse bucket list” where she reflects on everything she accomplished that year. The exercise, she says, is a great way to break free from feelings of self-doubt and celebrate the resilience she has cultivated in her career.

“We don't take time to acknowledge our wins,” Moss says. “We need to actually put time into our calendars to remember the things that make us as strong as we are.”