It Starts With You: Building Resilience the Real Way

By Sam Adams

I am a Black, gay woman in business. Statistically, that doesn’t put me at the front of the starting line.

We know the data. Black women are underrepresented in senior leadership roles across the UK. LGBTQ+ professionals are more likely to experience discrimination at work. Mental health disparities are well documented. The odds, on paper, are not neutral.

And yet here I am,  not in spite of that, but shaped by it.

Resilience is often spoken about as if it’s a personality trait. Something you either have or you don’t. My experience tells a different story. Resilience is built. Sometimes the hard way.

2020 was one of the toughest years of my life. I went through a divorce. My dad died. The foundations I thought were solid shifted beneath me. I was holding grief, identity change, uncertainty, and doing my best to keep functioning. From the outside, I was still capable. Still delivering. Still the strong one.

But strength without support has a cost.

In 2022, I was diagnosed with a brain tumour. It was another moment where life didn’t ask for my permission before it changed. Around that time, I also faced a period of deep mental health struggle that forced me to confront how much I had been carrying alone.

I had already been a coach for a decade by then. I understood mindset. I understood behaviour change. I knew how to set goals, create strategy, challenge limiting beliefs. What I hadn’t fully grasped,  until my body made it impossible to ignore, was the role of the nervous system.

You can know what to do and still not have the internal capacity to do it.

That realisation changed everything.

I had been practising breathwork for several years, but it was during this period that it stopped being a tool and became a lifeline. Conscious Connected Breathwork helped me process grief that talking alone couldn’t shift. It helped regulate anxiety when my thoughts were loud. It helped me reconnect to my body when I felt detached from it.

It didn’t remove the pain. It helped me stay present with it.

Out of that experience, Life and Breath was born,  a methodology that blends coaching, breathwork and nervous system regulation. Because insight without capacity doesn’t create change. And pressure without regulation leads to burnout.

Today, I work with senior leaders, high-performing professionals and athletes who look successful on paper but feel stretched behind the scenes. Many are women navigating visibility and expectation. Many are people carrying responsibility for teams, businesses and families. Many are operating in environments where vulnerability feels risky.

I’ve delivered sessions for Netflix, contributed as a breathwork expert within Fearne Cotton’s Happy Place community, led experiences at festivals, appeared on podcasts, and worked with professional athletes who understand performance at the highest level. Across all of those environments, one truth remains consistent: we cannot outperform our nervous system forever.

In corporate settings, I blend coaching, breathwork and nervous system education to help leaders build sustainable resilience. We work on emotional regulation, imposter syndrome, decision-making under pressure and increasing capacity so that success doesn’t come at the expense of wellbeing. Businesses benefit through clearer leadership, reduced burnout, improved communication and cultures where people can perform without constantly operating in fight-or-flight.

Alongside that work, I run standalone Conscious Connected Breathwork sessions locally in Sussex. These are some of the most meaningful rooms I hold. People arrive carrying stress, grief, ambition, exhaustion, hope, and for an hour, they are given permission to breathe and feel. The transformation that happens in those spaces is quiet but profound. It reminds me why this work matters beyond titles and corporate strategy.

Resilience, I’ve learned, is not about pushing through. It’s about building capacity. And capacity is built through regulation.

As a Black gay woman, I know what it feels like to walk into rooms aware of perception. To navigate systems that were not designed with you in mind. That reality has sharpened me, but it has also taught me the importance of self-trust and internal safety. When you cannot always control the external environment, you must strengthen the internal one.

That is what I now teach.

Not hustle. Not performance at any cost. But regulated, sustainable power.

On 21 March, I will be hosting Rise: Breathwork in the Sky at the Brighton i360,  a three-hour immersive experience 450 feet above the ground, with a live DJ and a three-phase breathwork journey designed to elevate physically and emotionally. It’s a bold, one-off event, and intentionally so. For me, it represents what this work is about: rising, even when you know what it is to fall.

International Women’s Day often celebrates achievement, and rightly so. But I believe we must also celebrate capacity. The ability to feel, to process, to regulate, to lead from a grounded place. Especially for women who have had to work twice as hard to be seen as half as capable.

My story is not one of overcoming adversity neatly. It is one of continuing,  with awareness, with support, and with responsibility.

Resilience built me the hard way.

Now I help others build it with intention.

Because it starts with you. And when you strengthen yourself from the inside out, the impact reaches far beyond you,  into your business, your community and the generations watching.