The Courage to Keep Going: Resilience at the Heart of From A Mother To A CEO
Resilience is one of the most overused words in modern life, and one of the least examined. We praise it in others and demand it of ourselves, usually without asking what it costs or where it comes from. Heba Salem’s memoir, From A Mother To A CEO, asks exactly those questions, and the answers it gives are more truthful, and more hopeful, than the slogans we are used to.
Salem is the founder and CEO of Breakthrough ABA and a Board Certified Behavior Analyst. Her book spans two decades of raising and advocating for her son across four countries, and it would have been easy to write that story as a straight line from struggle to success. She refuses to. The resilience in these pages is unglamorous and hard-won. It looks like showing up to the next meeting after the last one went badly. It looks like composure held in public and released in private, and like faith kept on days that offered no evidence for it.
She is clear from the outset that readers will not meet a woman who always knew what to do. “You will see me fail. You will see me doubt. You will see me cry in parking lots and question whether I am enough,” she writes. “And you will see me get up, again and again, because that is what mothers do.”
That candor is the book’s quiet gift. Too many inspirational memoirs offer a heroine the reader cannot recognize. Salem offers one who is tired, uncertain and still moving, and in doing so she gives readers permission to be all three.
What emerges over the course of the book is a fuller definition of resilience than endurance alone. Endurance absorbs difficulty. Resilience, as Salem comes to understand it, turns difficulty into something: a new skill, a sharper instinct, a clearer sense of what matters and what does not. Every setback in her story leaves her a little more capable than before, and the woman who closes the book is unmistakably different from the one who opens it. The transformation is gradual, earned, and rendered with enough care that readers can trace it in themselves.
The book also resists the idea that a resilient person must carry everything alone. The people who stood beside Salem appear throughout, and part of her growth is learning to let them. For readers who have mistaken self-reliance for strength, that may be one of its most freeing lessons.
There is a line in the introduction that many readers will want to write down and keep within reach. “The road is hard, but it is walkable. The load is heavy, but it is carryable.” It is neither a promise that things will get easier nor a demand that the reader be brave. It is true, and Salem has lived long enough inside its truth to say it without sentiment.
The final chapter, “A Letter to the Mother I Was,” turns the book’s attention backward, as Salem writes to the earlier versions of herself who carried her through the hardest years. It is best encountered without preview. It is enough to say that it reframes everything before it, and that readers who have ever been unkind to their own past selves may find it difficult to read without recognizing themselves.
What will readers take from From A Mother To A CEO? Perhaps above all, the reassurance that the hardest seasons of a life are not wasted. Salem believes that on the other side of a reader’s most impossible moment waits “a version forged by everything that feels like it’s breaking you.” This book is the testimony of someone who met that version of herself, and an invitation to believe the same is possible for you.
From A Mother To A CEO: A Story of Resilience, Advocacy & a Mother’s Unstoppable Will by Heba Salem is available on Amazon. Learn more at IamHebaSalem.com.