“Bounce back” implies elastic return to original form—you compress under pressure, then spring back to where you started. Three conversations about handling setbacks reveal why that metaphor doesn’t match what actually happens when people face adversity and move forward.
Anna Bezuglova learned resilience from watching her father navigate 1990s Russia, a period she describes as “very hard times for everyone.” He was a martial arts teacher who never directly taught her, but his example during hardship shaped how she approaches obstacles now. When discussing teaching, she emphasizes: “you can also learn on their mistakes of course. But what you need to do is to make your own.”
That distinction matters. Learning from observing mistakes creates one kind of knowledge. Making your own mistakes creates something else—the embodied understanding that comes from having actually failed at something, felt the consequences, and figured out what to do differently. Bezuglova’s father provided the model of how to conduct yourself during adversity. She had to provide her own adversity.
Giles D’Souza describes a completely different mechanism. When someone cheats him out of money, time, or love, his immediate response: let it go. Not eventually, not after processing—immediately. He explains his reasoning:
The faster you let things go and the faster you’re able to move forward and bounce back, it’s a great thing.
Interestingly, D’Souza does use the phrase “bounce back,” but what he’s describing isn’t bouncing. It’s cutting. He talks about decisively removing people from his life, not holding resentment, refusing to create “negative feedback loops” by expecting apologies or restitution. This isn’t returning to a previous state. It’s actively choosing not to carry forward the weight of what happened.
He frames this as practical philosophy rather than personality trait: “the only other thing that can hurt you in your life is your own brain.” If you don’t ruminate on the injury, the injury loses power. But this approach requires continuous active choice, not automatic resilience.
Jamie Holmes faced stage 3b melanoma at 33 with a 36% chance of surviving five years. She rejected conventional treatment and pursued holistic healing. Her approach to this particular setback: make plans for the future. She reached out to cancer survivor podcast hosts and booked herself on their shows two years in advance. They told her that was premature. She insisted.
This reveals a third pattern. Holmes wasn’t letting go of the diagnosis or learning from the mistake of getting sick (she explicitly doesn’t see it as a mistake). She was using commitment to future action as a way to stay oriented forward. The plans functioned as anchors—fixed points pulling her through the present difficulty toward a specific imagined future.
These three approaches share almost nothing in common. Bezuglova emphasizes learning through direct experience of failure. D’Souza emphasizes immediate release of attachment to past injury. Holmes emphasizes commitment to future action. They’re not describing different techniques for the same process. They’re describing fundamentally different relationships to adversity.
What they reveal about resilience: it’s not a skill you develop and then deploy consistently across contexts. It’s a philosophical stance shaped by experience, temperament, and the specific nature of what you’re facing. Bezuglova’s father modeled resilience through hardship—sustained, grinding difficulty that required endurance. D’Souza describes acute interpersonal injuries that require swift cutting away. Holmes faced life-threatening illness that demanded sustained forward orientation.
The setback determines which approach fits. Or maybe the person’s existing orientation determines which setbacks they can handle effectively. Either way, the idea that there’s one correct way to “bounce back” collapses immediately when you listen to how different people actually move through difficulty.
Here’s what gets lost when we treat resilience as a simple skill: the recognition that it’s actually a set of incompatible strategies that work in different contexts for different people. Treating it as a single transferable competency—something you could teach in a workshop or develop through practice drills—misses that Bezuglova, D’Souza, and Holmes aren’t describing variations on a theme. They’re describing different themes.
Bezuglova’s approach requires time, direct experience, and tolerance for making costly mistakes. D’Souza’s approach requires decisiveness and willingness to cut away relationships without resolution. Holmes’s approach requires the ability to commit to a distant future while navigating a threatening present. You can’t do all three simultaneously. They pull in different directions.
The implication: when someone tells you they’re “not resilient,” the actual problem might be that they’re trying to apply the wrong resilience strategy for their situation or temperament. Or they’re facing something that doesn’t have a resilience strategy—some things just damage you, and the only honest response is to acknowledge the damage rather than trying to bounce, release, or commit your way through it.
Movement practice reveals this because physical setbacks make the philosophical differences obvious. Break your hand, and D’Souza’s immediate release might work—accept it happened, adapt training, move forward. But develop chronic pain, and you might need Bezuglova’s patient learning-through-experience approach. Face a life-altering injury, and Holmes’s future-commitment strategy might be what keeps you engaged with rehabilitation.
The practitioners themselves don’t claim universal applicability. They describe what works for them, shaped by their history and current context. The error is in hearing these stories and trying to extract general principles. There aren’t general principles. There are people who have found specific ways to stay in practice despite specific obstacles. The resilience is in the finding, not in what they found.
This field note references the Movers Mindset podcast episodes “Awareness with Anna Bezuglova” (published February 26, 2024), “Perspective with Giles D’Souza” (published March 2, 2024), and “Perspective with Jamie Holmes” (published March 20, 2024).