What epilepsy and 31 fractures taught one lawyer about resilience
“Adversity introduces a man to himself.”
Karen Eckstein describes herself as “nobody special.” She's a lawyer turned risk management consultant. Not an Olympian, or a Nobel Prize winner. Just someone who has broken more bones than she cares to count, nearly lost her leg, and found ways to keep going anyway.
She came to speak at a Female Lawyers' Club masterclass earlier this month. Karen had so many useful things to say, I wanted to share some of my takeaways here.
Karen said she hadn’t always been resilient – she hadn’t needed to be. However, life had other plans for her. For years, Karen fractured bones at an alarming rate without anyone joining the dots. She assumed everyone broke their toes when they stubbed them. That everyone broke both rotator cuffs playing squash. It turned out she had a parathyroid tumour that had been dissolving her bones for the best part of 16 years. When it was eventually diagnosed and removed, the bones started to heal, but her ankle had already sustained 31 fractures. She walked into hospital telling them she thought she'd broken it, and they told her she couldn't have because she'd walked in. They X-rayed her to prove the point and then, somewhat shamefacedly, had to admit she was right.
Two operations later, nothing had worked, and she was in constant pain. The specialist told her there was nothing more he could do. Then he mentioned an experimental surgery being performed by two surgeons in the world, one of them fairly local, and she agreed to try it.
The surgeon told her upfront that the rehab would be the worst of any operation she could have. That the pain would be immense, and pain was not a reason to stop. That she would probably be sick during the rehab, and nausea was not a reason to stop. That she might pass out, and passing out was not a reason to stop. She agreed anyway, because what did she have to lose?
The operation worked. Karen now completes ski tours in the Arctic and has done the Tour de Mont Blanc, 170 miles around the mountain, camping throughout, one leg visibly smaller than the other because she hadn't fully regained the muscle at the time.
When she tells this story, she says she is the luckiest person alive. Most people would not describe it that way!
So, what did she learn?
She has eight tools in what she calls her resilience toolkit, and she went through them all. I've picked out a few to give you some inspiration.
Take the next step. Just the one.
Karen climbed Mont Blanc before everything fell apart, when she was at peak fitness. She described standing at the bottom of the mountain, paralysed by how big it was, completely unable to imagine reaching the top. She just stopped looking at the top. She took one step, then another, and she didn't look up again until the mountain had done most of the work for her.
She uses this as a direct analogy for overwhelm, and I love this image of standing at the foot of a literal mountain. If you've got a project, a problem, a situation that feels too enormous to start, the issue is often that you're trying to see the whole thing at once. You’re letting the mountain psyche you out! The key here is not to look up - just take the next step. Everyone can take one step. This reminds me of a quote I heard recently that I love, by Tolstoy:
“A man on a thousand-mile walk has to forget his ultimate goal and say to himself every morning, ‘Today I’m going to cover twenty-five miles and then rest up and sleep.’”
Look back in praise.
This one encourages us to do something most of us were trained not to do long ago. We were taught not to brag, not to be self-congratulatory and to downplay achievements rather than own them. Karen's point is that this actively gets in your way when you're trying to build resilience, because if you can't acknowledge how far you've come, you can't use it as fuel to keep going.
She's not talking about becoming insufferable at social events. She's talking about recognising what you have already managed to achieve, and letting that register. If you'd celebrate a colleague for what you've just done, celebrate yourself for it.
Victim or survivor: you can choose.
This is the one that sounds glib until you hear the specific example she gives. When Karen was diagnosed with epilepsy, her boss at the time told her to keep it secret, even from her team. She described feeling deeply ashamed of having an illness "in her brain." Her previous coping mechanism for any problem had been to work harder, but you can’t work your way out of epilepsy. The harder you work, the more tired you get, and the worse it becomes.
So she decided, consciously and over time, to make epilepsy her friend. She listed the things it had genuinely improved in her life: forced breaks from the screen, better work-life balance, and, because her medication made her taste buds hypersensitive to processed food, a much healthier diet. She noted, with amusement, that she now has a much better life as a result of having epilepsy.
She was clear that this reframe didn't happen immediately. It took time. But her point is that the reframe is always available, that there is almost always a way to be a survivor rather than a victim of a given circumstance, and that this is a choice that has to be made deliberately rather than arriving on its own.
Your reason why has to be stronger than your reason why not.
Before her ankle surgery, Karen came across a sports professional speaking at a corporate event. She asked him how she could motivate herself through the rehab she'd been warned would be the hardest of her life. He gave her a phrase that she has carried ever since: your reason why has to be stronger than your reason why not.
So she set herself two concrete goals: ski touring in the Arctic the following April, and completing the Tour de Mont Blanc in September. Rather than setting the goals and then forgetting about them, she put pictures representing each goal on a dream board on the wall above her laptop. When she didn't want to stand up and try to do a knee dip, she looked at the board. When she couldn't face leaving the sofa, she looked at the board. She said the phrase got her through things she would never have been able to withstand otherwise.
This has a very practical application for lawyers who often face things they don't want to do. When the thing you least want to do is the thing you most need to do, the question is whether your reason for doing it is vivid enough and specific enough to outweigh the reason not to bother. A vague goal usually isn't. In that situation, it’s time to make yourself a vision board.
Karen now runs a risk management business and has built her whole working model around a good work-life balance for everyone in the team. She is also a member of Female Lawyers' Club. You can find out more about her work at www.kareneckstein.co.uk.
The toolkit she has built is, as she freely admits, the product of an unusual amount of adversity. Most of us will thankfully not face what she has faced. But the tools work regardless of the scale of the crisis, and that's rather the point. She used them recently when her horse got ill and she was struggling. She used the same tools and they still worked.
Alongside her legal work, Karen now delivers her message about resilience to communities and schools around the country to spread her inspiring message of what adversity has taught her.
I disagree with Karen when she says she is “no one special”. I think she’s a hero.
Enjoy the rest of your week.
Rachel