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I'm your host, Elise Hugh. Success doesn't happen in a straight line. We often face setbacks.

And leadership coach Amy Schoenthal studied setbacks

to develop something she calls the setback cycle.

In her 2024 talk, she explains how our setbacks are a precursor to our biggest successes.

Think back to your biggest setback. Not an obstacle, not a mistake. A setback is defined as a reversal or check in progress. It's when you're on a path, you're moving forward, and you are unexpectedly bumped backwards.

Through all my years as a journalist, I have interviewed hundreds of founders, business

leaders, senators, celebrities, cultural icons. And in every interview, I saw a common theme.

What they learned during their biggest setback led them to their most successful venture.

I wanted to know why.

Perhaps if I could learn from it, I could understand it, and I could help others work through their next

inevitable setback and come out the other side with a sense of resilience, creativity, and hopefully

success. So I spent three years doing a deep dive into research, interviewing psychologists, executive coaches,

a neuroscientist, reading academic papers, every business book I could get my hands on,

all to come up with the framework, now known as the setback cycle.

I did all of this while holding down a full-time job at a marketing agency.

Who does that?

A lot of people, actually, turns out you don't make a lot of money writing books, so most of the authors you know and love are finding ways to earn an income elsewhere as well.

So at the end of that journey, I handed in my manuscript. I took a deep sigh of relief. And I was

laid off from that full-time job 48 hours later.

The setback expert finishes her work and is hit with one of the most common career setbacks.

Oh, I loved that job.

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