What a Survivor Winner Taught Me About Building Resilience
By: Eric Janssen"I remember being an 11-year-old kid watching Survivor and saying, 'I'm going to be on that show and I'm going to win.” - Erika Casupanan.
When Erika Casupanan was 11 years old, her grandfather passed away.
As she tried to make sense of experiencing grief for the first time, she found comfort in a TV show.
Survivor.
Watching strangers push themselves through hunger, storms, and exhaustion gave her something to hold onto. It was both an escape and a quiet lesson: that strength could be built, and that doing hard things could heal.
Years later, she quit her stable corporate communications job and made television history as the first Canadian to win Survivor.
I recently sat down with Erika (now a keynote speaker and host of the award-winning podcast Happy to See Me) to talk about what resilience really looks like in practice. Her story perfectly illustrates a framework I teach in my classes and workshops: the Four Cs of Resilience.
Cause: Your why.
Capability: Your how.
Capacity: Your fuel.
Community: Your people.
I started teaching this framework after realizing that resilience wasn't just about grit. It was also about structure. If you break resilience down into it’s component parts, it becomes less of a trait you inherit, and more of an attribute that you can build toward. By cultivating the 4C’s, you can strengthen your resilience the same way you strengthen any muscle.
Here's how Erika's journey shows each “C” in action.
Cause: Your Why
Erika was born in the Philippines. Her family immigrated to Canada when she was just one year old. She grew up in Niagara Falls, one of the only people of color in her school.
"I learned really early on that I had to figure out my own way of doing things and how to find belonging within myself."
When her grandfather passed away, Survivor had just premiered. That childhood promise (I'm going to be on that show and I'm going to win) became her cause. Not just a goal, but the deeper reason that kept her going through years of uncertainty and rejection before she ever made it onto the show.
Your cause is the deeper reason that keeps you going when conditions change. When the work gets harder. When staying doesn't make obvious sense anymore.
I learned this while working in the live events industry. Our company provided technology for music festivals: ticketing, payments, and entry management. We had partnered with major country festivals through Live Nation for years, until we lost the business to a competitor.
One of those festivals was Route 91 in Las Vegas. When the shooting happened in 2017, I wasn't there. But I knew that venue. I'd worked every festival on that site, until that one.
The industry changed after that. The work was already hard: long hours, constant travel, time away from family. After Route 91, it felt different. Not just demanding. Dangerous.
I had to ask myself why I was still doing it.
For me, it came down to something simple: I believed in what those spaces created. People coming together, experiencing something collectively, connecting human to human. In a world that's increasingly digital and isolated, that mattered to me.
That's what Cause looks like to me. It wasn’t crystal clear at first. For me, it took a crisis to reveal what I was really building for. For Erika, it was built through grief and personal discovery.
Capability: Getting On Stage
Growing up, Erika watched her family work around the clock just to make ends meet. She had to develop resourcefulness early.
"I had to figure out, okay, if I'm handed a deck of cards and there's probably not a lot in here, how can I make that work to last until tomorrow, and to the next day, and to the next day?"
"Before I was on Survivor, I was good with not having control. I was good with being flexible. I was always like, 'Okay, let's see what today brings. I'm gonna be able to figure things out.'"
Those traits (resourcefulness, flexibility, comfort with uncertainty) became her winning edge on the island. The quiet skills that help you survive early on often become your competitive edge later.
Capability is about actually doing the hard thing. Getting on stage when it matters.
It's a muscle. The more you do it, the easier it gets. But there are things you can do to make it easier to start.
Some people have a power playlist that pumps them up before a big presentation.
Others use Amy Cuddy's power poses: standing in a confident posture for two minutes before walking into a high-stakes conversation.
Think about the skills you developed because you had to.
Maybe you learned to read a room because you were the outsider. Maybe you got comfortable with ambiguity because nothing in your early career went according to plan.
Those aren't nice-to-haves. They're your capability stack. And they matter most when conditions get messy.
There's research on interrogative self-talk. Instead of saying "I can do this," ask yourself, "When is a time that I have done this?" and then recall a time you did something similar. Creating an inventory or stack of undeniable proof for yourself that you are capable of doing hard things acts as evidence that you can push through whatever comes next. That simple shift can boost performance.
Capacity: Protecting Your Energy
Winning Survivor could have been the mic drop to Erika's story. It wasn't.
"When people started to have negative feedback toward me winning, or tell me that I didn't deserve to win, I didn't realize the length of time it would go on,” said Casupanan.
“Every day for about a year, someone was either messaging me, DMing me, writing comments, or tagging me in videos or tweets talking about how I didn't deserve to win."
"I had to add this new tool to my resilience toolbox, where I had to be able to uncouple the exterior perception and the public feedback from my sense of self."
Then something shifted.
"I did everything right and people were still mad. So now, I may as well do whatever I want, because what people think doesn't really change anything anyway."
That's part of what capacity means. Not just the physical fuel, but the mental work of separating what happened from who you are.
Here's something I've noticed: how you feel today is a direct result of what you did yesterday. If you stayed up late, ate poorly, spent too much time on your phone, and sat at your desk all day, you probably don't feel great today.
But if you stayed hydrated, got outside, ate well, and went to bed early, you likely have more energy.
These are algorithms you build for yourself. The things they do to stay energized and whole.
For some people, it's prayer or meditation. For others, it's working out, eating clean, spending time with friends and family, or just getting outside. The specific actions matter less than knowing what your algorithm is and actually doing it.
The challenge is that when things get hard, those are the first things we drop. We skip the workout. We eat at our desk. We stay up late scrolling. Then we wonder why we can't sustain the effort.
I see this with founders and sales leaders all the time. You're going to hear no. A lot. Employees will quit. Investors will pass. Customers will churn. If you let every rejection chip away at your sense of self while also skipping the basics that keep you energized, you won't make it.
Capacity isn't toughness. It's endurance. And endurance requires fuel.
Community: Resilience Is Not a Solo Sport
Resilience isn't a solo sport.
Having a crew of people who show up in both hard times and good times makes all the difference. When you're struggling, they remind you why it matters.
But the real test of community isn't just who you call when things go wrong. It's who you call when things go right. The people who get genuinely excited about your wins, who don't diminish your success or make it about themselves.
Think about that for a second. Who do you call to celebrate when things go right? The person or people who will celebrate with you? Those are your people.
But here's what's interesting: community isn't just about having support. It's also about doing hard things together.
A 2014 study by Brock Bastian at the University of New South Wales found that shared hardship acts as social glue. In a series of experiments, undergraduate students either put their hands in very cold water or completed physically challenging exercises. The groups who went through more painful experiences reported feeling significantly more bonded to their peers than groups who did easier tasks.
Almost universally, at the end of doing a really hard thing with a team, you feel a huge sense of pride and accomplishment. Not just because you did it, but because you did it together.
I see this with my students and the founders I work with. The ones who are clear about what they're building and why they don't have to beg people to join them.
They create gravity. Their clarity becomes contagious. And when things get hard (and they always get hard), those people show up. Not just to support from the sidelines, but to get in the cold water with you.
What Resilience Really Looks Like
When I asked Erika what advice she'd give her 20-year-old self, her answer captured what resilience actually means in practice.
"First, you are enough. You don't need to prove your worth to anybody. Yes, do these things because you love them and you're getting the experience, but you are enough. Your worth isn't going to come from your output."
"The other thing I would tell her is that the point of life isn't to do everything perfectly based on your expectations. Really, the point of life is to explore. Nobody knows what they're doing. We're all doing our best. We're figuring it out with the experiences that we have."
Erika's story (from an 11-year-old making a promise to herself, to winning Survivor, to enduring a year of harassment and coming out stronger) shows that resilience doesn't have to be loud.
It's built quietly through purpose (Cause), doing the hard thing (Capability), protecting your energy (Capacity), and the people who lift you up when you're close to giving in (Community).
The framework is simple. But simple doesn't mean easy. Building resilience means doing the work on all four fronts.
You can hear part of my conversation with Erika on the first episode of Sales Reframed, where we dig deeper into each of the Four Cs and explore what resilience really looks like in practice.
- Eric