Building a Business That Survives Anything with Dr. Terry Carter
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There's a version of resilience that looks good on a motivational poster. And then there's the kind Dr. Terry Carter has actually lived.
Terry came to the United States from Kenya with years of nursing experience behind her, only to watch her credentials sit in processing limbo for so long that she went back to school and earned a second nursing degree from scratch. She built a consulting firm, landed four contracts in rapid succession, and then COVID hit and froze everything mid-stream. When the world reopened, she returned to her clients to find that the entire landscape had shifted. The nurses she had been developing had stepped down, burned out, or quietly walked away.
Most people would have taken that as a sign. Terry took it as a redirect.
What this episode makes clear is that resilience isn't a personality trait you either have or don't. It's a toolkit. It's the decision, made in advance, that giving up is not an option. It's the willingness to do an honest inventory of what you actually have, prepare for the worst before you need to, and fill yourself up enough to keep leading when everyone around you is looking to you for direction.
When that toolkit is missing, the slow seasons feel permanent. The pivots feel like failures. And the dreams that once felt big start to shrink down to a size that feels safer but costs everything.
In this conversation, Terry walks through how she built Empowered Nurse Leaders and Terry International Consulting into a global firm serving nurse leaders across the United States, Dubai, East Africa, South Africa, and India, and the specific frameworks that kept her moving through every setback along the way.
Here's what this episode will help you understand and apply:
Why a personal inventory of your skills, including the ones you take for granted, is the first step to getting unstuck
What "banning the boats" means and when full commitment is the only path forward
How to prepare for the worst without abandoning your vision
Why the endurance toolkit is about internal infrastructure, not pushing harder
How to keep dreaming bigger even when the dreams scare you
Meet Dr. Terry Carter
Dr. Terry Carter, DNP, RN, NE-BC, is a nurse executive, leadership strategist, and author known for her work on sustainable leadership and burnout recovery. She is the Founder of Empowered Nurse Leaders and CEO of Terry International Consulting. Her books, including Leadership Redefined and Brilliance in the Quiet, explore leadership as a practice of clarity, stewardship, and renewal rather than self-sacrifice.
Terry International Consulting Website
Empowered Nurse Leaders Website
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Building a Business That Survives Anything with Dr. Terry Carter
You know the version of the story where someone starts a business, works hard, and it takes off. That's not this story. This is the one where nothing shows up when you open the doors. Where a pandemic freezes your contracts mid-stream just as you're finally getting traction. Where you come back after the shutdown to find the people you were building for have burned out and walked away. And where you keep going anyway, not because it was easy, but because stopping was never actually an option.
That's the story Dr. Terry Carter told in Episode 130 of the Spiral Up Podcast, and it's one of the most honest conversations about resilience I've had on this show.
Resilience Is Not a Personality Trait
Terry is the Founder of Empowered Nurse Leaders and CEO of Terry International Consulting, a global firm that now serves nurse leaders from the United States to Dubai to East Africa to South Africa and India. But before any of that existed, there were years of silence after she opened the doors. No clients. No traction. Just the decision to keep going anyway.
She kept her day job. She wrote her first book. She kept building. And when the first client finally came, it didn't come from where she expected. It came from Dubai. Within weeks, four contracts followed. And then COVID hit and took all of them.
What Terry did next is what separates people who build something lasting from people who don't. She didn't call it failure. She called it a redirect.
The Personal Inventory Nobody Talks About
When Terry rebuilt, she started where she always starts: with a personal inventory. Not just of degrees and credentials, but of everything. The currency she had to learn when she arrived in the United States from Kenya. The assessment tools she had been using informally for years in her own office to help nurses figure out whether leadership was actually what they wanted. The international experience that made her uniquely equipped to serve clients across multiple continents.
Most people doing an inventory only count the impressive things. Terry counts everything, because everything counts. And when she finds a gap, she goes and fills it. That's how she ended up at the Wharton School of Business after finishing her doctorate. Not because someone told her to, but because she looked honestly at what she had and identified what was missing.
This is the part of resilience nobody puts on a motivational poster. It's not dramatic. It's just honest, consistent self-assessment followed by action.
Banning the Boats and Building the Endurance Toolkit
There's a concept Terry talks about that has stuck with me. Banning the boats. It means removing the exits. Cutting off the mental escape routes that give you a way out when things get hard. It sounds dramatic, but Terry's version of it is grounded and practical: before you ban the boats, prepare for the worst. Know what you'll do if it doesn't work. And then commit.
The other piece is what she calls the endurance toolkit, the daily practices that keep her compass steady when her entire team across multiple continents is looking to her for direction. Nobody is coming to wake her up in the morning. Nobody is holding her accountable the way a job does. The endurance toolkit is how she shows up anyway.
For Terry, it comes back to filling herself up before she can pour into others. It's the practice of staying grounded enough to lead well, not just working hard enough to keep things moving.
Dream Bigger Than the Sky
Terry grew up being told the sky is the limit. She no longer believes that. Not because she's dismissive of the phrase, but because she has watched what happens when people actually commit to their dreams and refuse to let circumstances shrink them down to something more manageable.
She came to the United States and started over. Twice, really. She built a business through years of silence, a pandemic, and a complete market shift. And her message to anyone who is in a slow season and quietly wondering whether to keep going is simple and direct: if your dreams scare you, continue to dream.
You don't exit this world having accomplished someone else's version of what was possible for you. You build the toolkit. You do the inventory. You fill yourself up. And you keep going.
That's what Terry Carter did. And it's what you can do too.
