Surviving the Unthinkable, Building Resilience, & the Alignment of Purpose with Geralyn Ritter
Read time: 4.5 min
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How do you build resilience when a catastrophic accident upends your life? What does personal resilience have to do with company purpose and sustainability?
In this episode of the healthy brand podcast, I sat down with Geralyn Ritter and we had an honest conversation that connects the dots between brand, reputation, and pain. Geralyn survived near-fatal injuries in the derailment of Amtrak 188 outside Philadelphia where eight passengers were killed and over 150 injured in 2015. She is an author and Executive Vice President of External Affairs and ESG at Organon, a health care company focused on women’s health.
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In this episode, we cover off on a variety of topics:
Resilience is skill anyone and any company can build
What pain can teach us about perceptions and brand reputation
How to build a personal brand while being an employee
Authenticity is easier when you focus on others and not yourself
Aligning your personal purpose with your company’s purpose
Shaping a company culture of inclusivity and belonging
KEY LESSONS
Resilience is a skill anyone and any company can build
Credit: GeralynRitter.com
One of the amazing things about Geralyn is that she can find the humor and silver lining in just about anything. But she also talks about resilience being a skill that can be built over time. She talks about the power of reframing.
“I was sitting there feeling sorry for myself when it was about three o'clock, and the boys came home from school. Something just clicked. Here I was six months in with who knows how long in front of me, and I was gonna be home every single day when they got home from school. And I thought, you know, I need to treasure that. I called 'em in and they jumped in bed with me. And we watched a movie that afternoon, and I said to myself, you know, when, when have I ever curled up at 3:30 in the afternoon for no reason? It just kind of hit me that I needed to reframe.”
It's a deliberate practice that can help us go through the toughest times.
“Reframing is the heart of resilience, but it doesn't come easy. Like I said, sort of deliberately trying to reframe this enforced slowness and look for the good part of it. I think it's really healthy. It really helped me. But it was hard work”
If our identity is one of resilience, or if we are trying to build resilience into our identity, every time we reframe something bad that is happening, we are essentially making a vote for that type of person.
Every reframe becomes a vote for your resilience.
For companies, resiliency is a brand competence. When the market and the external factors are not in your favor, how can a brand continue to deliver on its promise? And part of the answer is to take a longer-term view.
“ESG is resiliency for companies over the long term. Long-term resiliency to the shocks that are gonna come. Whether it's climate related, social related, change in long-term macroeconomic trends. Preparing now, investing now in programs around equity, around reducing admissions, good governance that considers the perspectives of all your stakeholders. Fundamentally, that's how you build a resilient company over the long-term”
A healthy brand is a resilient brand, and when you start asking some important questions, you will know where to focus
“What are the issues that matter? Where can you make a difference? Where can your company actually have an impact? Or what are those issues that would actually affect your company? That's where you focus.”
What pain can teach us about perceptions and brand reputation
Geralyn had to go through pain. A lot of pain. And the more she dealt with it, the more she learned that pain is perceived very differently by those who are experiencing it and those who see it experienced.
“Fundamentally, pain cannot be measured, you know, in, in some ways it is subjective. And what I mean by that is it's the brain responding to whether the body is in danger. And it may be a signal of tissue damage, or it may not be, you know, many people have heard of phantom limb pain. There are lots of examples where the body is injured and the brain doesn't actually feel pain or the body is not injured, but the brain does feel pain”
“How our brain interprets pain is very complicated, and it is a matter of perception. It's the same thing as we talk about telling our story…perception is reality”
The lesson here is that, like pain, brand and reputation is also a matter of perception, where there is not really a universal truth about pain or reputation. It only makes sense from the perspective of the individual, or a group of homogenous individuals – aka audience segment.
“When you think about reputation, people say, oh, well they have a good reputation. My question is always with who? With who? Does this company have a good reputation? Well, with who? Does the man on the street know them? Maybe, maybe not, but maybe their customers love them and would never go anywhere else. Yes. Maybe they're the darling of Wall Street, but yet, you know a lot of activists or social groups think that they're horrible. What does it mean to have a good reputation? You've gotta go deeper”
Geralyn emphasizes that broad quantitative metrics about reputation is not useful.
“You try to reduce it to a number who has the best reputation. That's kind of meaningless to me”
How to build a personal brand while being an employee
One of the most asked questions about personal brands is how one balances between their company brand and their own personal brand. Geralyn talks about how it needs to be separate.
“When I have purely leaned into trying to get word out about my book, I hired a separate publicist on my own dime…I do try to keep a, a certain separation of church and state but, but keep the two sides informed enough that, that we don't step on each other.”
But at the same time, look for opportunities to leverage her personal story to talk about the company purpose, both internally and externally, because her experience is her identity, and it doesn’t make sense to hide it.
“I am fortunate that part of my job is to talk about our company's purpose internally and externally. And it is very genuine. And the fact that it does connect to a personal sense of purpose, that's not kind of a stretch or strained…So I don't hesitate to draw on that personal narrative as I am talking about the need for more research, for example into women's pain”
In fact, she feels that not acknowledging her experience and disability is disrespectful.
“I don't wanna be train wreck girl, but it's always front and center in my mind, but it in a way that it shapes my perspective, not that it needs to come into every conversation. But at the same time, if you ignore it, if you just never talk to me about it, if you pretend that it didn't happen, you dishonor me that way”
Conclusion
Resilience is an important skill personally and for company brands. Geralyn’s story of not only surviving, but thriving after her devastating accident is inspiring. Listen to the full episode, hear Geralyn talk about her story on your favorite podcast player.
Learn more about Geralyn:
Resources
Bone by Bone by Geralyn Ritter (100% of proceeds go to non-profit organizations that support trauma professionals and trauma survivors)
Ways I can help you:
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