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Gail Muller is a bestselling author, resilience coach, and adventurer who overcame chronic pain to complete some of the world’s toughest long-distance hikes. Her memoir Unlost has inspired readers worldwide with its message of hope, perseverance, and the power of embracing vulnerability.
She is represented by The Champions Speakers Agency, where she shares her story with audiences across the globe. In this exclusive interview, Gail reflects on resilience, acceptance and the lessons she hopes people take away from her talks.
Bestselling author, resilience coach, and adventurer Gail Muller
From your own journey, what key lessons can others learn about resilience and overcoming adversity?
Well, I think the things I’ve been through in my life and overcome and still work to overcome have taught me that resilience isn’t what I used to think it was. I definitely used to have an understanding that resilience was pushing through, grinding through difficulties, clambering over obstacles, even through exhaustion, and maybe arriving at the finish line, whatever that might be, tattered, torn, beaten, emotionally bruised, potentially, and exhausted, yet having done it. And that was what mattered.
And actually, from all the different things I’ve dealt with, such as being told in my teens and twenties I’d probably be unable to walk past 40 and in incredible chronic pain, which I was for 15 years in horrendous chronic pain. My late diagnosis of neurodiversity and other traumatic events along the way, and long-distance hiking, thousands and thousands of miles on foot, since I managed to rehabilitate myself.
I’ve learned that true resilience is about knowing when to pause, knowing when you need to take a breath, knowing how to sit something out. So to sit something out or sit down and take time without then beating yourself up so much that you can’t carry on later, or that you feel humiliated, or that you feel like your self-esteem is too dented because you didn’t do it in one go, or you didn’t make it all the way to the end this time.
Actually, the real epitome of resilient people are those people who are able to suck it up when they can’t make it all the way on that occasion, who see difficulties and obstacles as learning lessons and who take time to think through those lessons and see how they can approach the task, the obstacle, the work mission, the adventure, whatever it might be, another time when they have recouped their energy, when they’ve had time to think about it in a different way, and then they go on to succeed.
And that success happening slightly later down the line doesn’t mean that it was a failure because you didn’t do it the first time. The first time is a trial run. Maybe the second time it might not work out, third, fourth, fifth. But real resilience is knowing what you want to achieve and being able to get there in the end, no matter how many times you have to catch your breath, pause, learn, relearn a lesson, ask for help, tell people you need some guidance, assimilate, and then go forward again.
That, for me, is true resilience. And my adventuring since my 40s in earnest, physically by foot on big trails all around the world, has shown me that. And it also is reflected in every other arena of my life — in my relationships, in my social life, in my volunteering work, my career coaching, all of the things I do. Resilience is best shown by knowing your limits, re-evaluatin,g and going.”
Over time, how has your mindset and approach to challenges evolved?
My approach to adversity now is to be flexible. And I think really I’d always innately known that in adversity, you need to be as malleable as you can. My dad, my very wise father, used to say to me that if I lived life like a really solid tree branch, you know, or a stiff tree trunk in a big storm, the only option that tree branch has is to break and snap and be broken.
But if you are more alive, more bendable, if you go with the wind, move with the storm, actually, it gives you much more chance of surviving bad weather metaphorically and getting through to the other side. Also, I’m minded of being on a ferry when I was younger, like for example, Brittany Ferries on the way to France.
When it’s a storm and you’re inside a ferry, a sleeping ferry, for example, you watch people going down the corridors desperately trying to hold their cups of coffee solidly, stiff-legged, trying to carry a tray of food, and inevitably it ends up all over them. Coffee up the wall, food down their front, trays on the floor.
Whereas if you were just to bend your knees a little bit, absorb the waves, try to anticipate where the dips and the troughs come from, the peaks and the troughs, then once you’re listening and more tuned into adversity, you’re able to move through it and let it move through you and come out the other side of it without sustaining so much damage and in fact have learned things along the way.
Being able to watch, listen, perceive the mechanics of adversity — because adversity also doesn’t ever stop coming. I think it’s really a great lesson to learn that it’s not like you have to scramble to get all of your adversity out of the way in your 20s or your 30s or your 40s or 50s or 60s, and then it’s done. Whatever period you’re going through that’s full of adversity in some way or another, every day will present something else that you could see as an adversity.
Or you could see it as a friendly lesson or a puzzle to solve or something to just wait out until it’s passed and see what you can gather up on the other side of it. So I don’t run into obstacles anymore. And I don’t just push through because when you battle things that just are reality, when you battle them and fight them, you are the one that ends up injured. Be that spiritually, mentally, physically, if you’re unwell or you’re burnt out or you’re injured or you have a medical condition and you need to rest, but you don’t want to tell anyone.
If you’re fighting and if your mindset is I’m going to fight through, the only person you’re fighting is yourself. And that’s even more exhausting than just waiting it out.”
You’ve spoken about the idea that “your broken bits are your superpowers.” What guidance would you give to someone who is struggling to accept themselves?
I think that phrase I coined when I was doing that talk originally, “your broken bits, your superpowers,” was born from the idea that for so long I and many of the people I work with, young people, students and adults, had things about us — and everyone has things about them — which they are embarrassed about, which they are unsure of, which they feel makes them different, unlovable, no good at their job, unable to fit in, struggle to make friends because of this thing or these things about themselves that feel different to everybody else and not right.
Whereas actually, we’ve all got them. They might all be different, but we all have them. Somebody has OCD and goes back and checks the door of the house a hundred times before they go to work, and they’re always late, but nobody knows why. Someone else always thinks they’re not good enough, and they don’t get invited to things. You know, there are a million different ways we all think we’re a bit not okay, not likable, not good enough.
But when we begin to look at those things with a little bit of distance and see them maybe as not us but just as ideas, if we can detach from them and see them or imagine them in a loved one — a mother, a boyfriend, a girlfriend, whoever it might be, family member — then you don’t judge them so harshly and you can look at them for what they actually are.
And what they actually are just your unique quirks or really useful ways you have found to cope with difficult circumstances at some point in your life that maybe you still have the actions of, and you haven’t let them go yet.
But the ways we behave and the things that we feel are embarrassing or shameful about ourselves are integral, important, joyful, useful things. And if we share them with others or we find ways to articulate them, love them, assimilate them together inside of ourselves, then we multiply our power as human beings so much because we’re not hiding a piece of ourselves.
We are whole. And then we can show up whole to our teams, to our friends, to our families, to those of us we might speak to online. We show up as really the full us.
And by being honest and claiming all of those slightly more shadowy parts of ourselves, we’re honoring them in other people, too. And we’re making other people feel comfortable to share theirs. And when you have those open dialogues, you can move everything forward faster, more effectively, and with much more integrity.
So I think acceptance of yourself, acceptance of others, and acceptance of what is reality really is really important for making super-fast progress in all walks of life. And that doesn’t just mean going fast to achieve more or earn more necessarily, but just progress in terms of better relationships, deeper relationships faster, better trust more quickly with people.
And those things, when they’re done with integrity and honesty, are absolutely vital. And I would also say that acceptance doesn’t mean that you like something. To accept something doesn’t mean that you will think it will always have to be this way, or it shouldn’t ever change. It just means not fighting with the moment and then having a little bit more energy and space to appreciate what you do and don’t like about that part, and then work to maybe start to shift it.
But if you keep denying it and hiding it, whatever it might be, internal or external, then it never really gets managed, dealt with, or dissolved. It just stays there. And you just keep bumping into it, which is no good to anyone. So yeah, acceptance is a really good thing, but it also goes hand in hand with hope, progress, development, all those other lovely things, too.
This exclusive interview with Gail Muller was conducted by Megan Lupton of The Motivational Speakers Agency.
Tabish Ali is a Celebrity Content and Outreach Executive at The Champions Speakers Agency. He has published over 200 interviews with global experts across AI, cybersecurity, sustainability and leadership, featured in outlets including MSN, Benzinga, The Scotsman and Express & Star.
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