A conversation with Meghan Buchanan, rocket scientist, mountaineer, and founder of the GGRIT framework

We tend to celebrate grit in simple terms: perseverance, determination, the ability to push through. But a recent conversation with Meghan Buchanan, a rocket scientist, mountaineer, and the founder of the GGRIT framework, reminded us that grit is far more layered than that.

For Meghan, resilience was never just about pushing harder. It was about navigating identity, confronting the stories she told herself, and learning to move through discomfort on purpose.

Her journey changes the conversation about what it actually takes to lead.

The Early Story: When Difference Felt Like Deficit

Meghan was diagnosed with dyslexia as a child, not through a supportive process, but after being singled out and shamed by a teacher in front of her class.

Like many people with learning differences, she grew up knowing she was capable while constantly feeling she had to prove it. Traditional measures like reading, writing, and testing rarely reflected her actual ability.

Her family worked hard to build her confidence, yet a quieter belief followed her for years: the sense that she wasn’t quite enough.

That belief didn’t stop her. It fueled her. She worked harder, pushed further, and set bigger goals, driven in part by a need to prove she wasn’t someone who would give up.

When Grit Becomes Identity

That mindset carried Meghan through school and into college, where she pursued a degree in aerospace engineering. The volume of required reading became overwhelming, and she eventually landed on academic probation, facing the real possibility of stepping away from her goal entirely.

She stood at a decision point many high performers quietly face: walk away, or redefine what it would take to keep going. She chose to continue, not only because of her passion for the field, but because persistence had become part of who she was.

“I didn’t know how to be the person who quit,” she said.

That choice shaped her future, but it also revealed something important: grit can be both a strength and a pressure. When it hardens into identity, people can end up pushing forward for the wrong reasons. When it’s understood and channeled well, it becomes a genuine tool for growth.

The Turning Point: From Survival to a System

Over time, Meghan began to reinterpret her own history. What she once saw only as obstacles, dyslexia, ADHD, setbacks, were also shaping skills she would rely on for the rest of her life: adaptability, resilience, and the ability to keep moving through uncertainty.

Those experiences eventually led her to build what she now calls the GGRIT framework, not as an abstract set of values, but as a repeating cycle:

• Gratitude
• Growth
• Resilience
• Integrity
• Tenacity

What stood out in our conversation was where the cycle starts: not with resilience, and not with strength, but with gratitude.

Why Gratitude Comes First

When Meghan talks about gratitude, it isn’t the version we usually hear, positivity for its own sake. It’s a starting point for moments when everything feels difficult.

As a child, when she came home discouraged, her mother helped her shift her focus, not to ignore what was hard, but to reconnect with what was still good and still within reach.

That habit became foundational. In a moment of real difficulty, people rarely need a full solution. They need a foothold, and gratitude creates just enough perspective to take the next step.

The Hardest Phase: Growth

If gratitude opens the cycle, growth is where most people get stuck. Meghan described it as the most uncomfortable phase: self-doubt, frustration, and an internal voice that questions whether you’re capable at all.

In this phase, progress often doesn’t feel like progress. It feels like failure, and it’s where many people turn back. But for those who stay in it, something shifts. Every time you move through that discomfort, you build proof that you can handle hard things, recover, and keep going.

That is where resilience actually gets built.

Resilience, Reimagined

One of the most striking examples Meghan shared was her recovery from a severe snowboarding accident. She shattered her femur, and doctors told her she might depend on a cane or wheelchair long-term. Complications from a titanium surgical rod left her in chronic pain for more than a year.

At one point she had to leave her job, relocate, and manage physical recovery alongside real emotional strain. Even then, her mindset stayed anchored in the GGRIT cycle: she looked for small points of gratitude, stayed in the growth process even when it hurt, and held onto one goal, returning to the mountains.

After discovering an allergy to the metal implant and having it removed, her recovery accelerated. Within months she was back on her feet, and not long after that, she was trekking to Everest Base Camp.

The experience didn’t just rebuild her physically. It reshaped her relationship with challenge itself. Difficulty stopped feeling like a signal to stop, and instead became part of the process.

Integrity and the Shift to Authentic Leadership

For years, Meghan hid her dyslexia in professional settings, worried about how it would be perceived. In doing so, she created a gap between how she experienced herself and how others saw her.

When she finally chose to be open about it, something shifted. She felt more aligned, people understood her more clearly, and new opportunities began to open.

As Meghan defines it, integrity isn’t just honesty with others. It starts with honesty with yourself, and in leadership, that kind of alignment matters more than we often acknowledge.

Tenacity, Neurodiversity, and a Broader Mission

The final piece of Meghan’s framework is tenacity, not simple persistence, but the willingness to re-enter the cycle again and again: to face new challenges, take risks, and keep growing even after setbacks. That mindset eventually led her to high-altitude mountaineering, including some of the world’s most demanding peaks.

Today, she uses that platform to raise awareness for neurodiversity, dedicating her climbs and her work to helping people see learning differences as strengths rather than limitations. As she puts it, the real challenge for many people isn’t capability, it’s the story they’ve been told, or have told themselves, about what they can or can’t do.

What We See at BenchStrength Coaching

Meghan’s journey mirrors what we see regularly in our own work with leaders. High performers are rarely held back by a lack of capability. More often, they’re held back by patterns formed early and reinforced over time, patterns they can no longer see clearly.

The leader who avoids conflict usually isn’t missing a skill; they’ve learned that conflict is risky. The leader who overworks usually isn’t missing discipline; they’ve tied their value to output. The leader who defaults to working alone usually isn’t unwilling to collaborate; they’ve been conditioned to succeed individually.

Like Meghan, many leaders are operating from an identity built years earlier, one that once helped them succeed but may now be limiting their effectiveness. The work isn’t only about building new skills. It’s about recognizing these patterns, challenging them, and building new ways of leading that are more aligned, more intentional, and more sustainable. That’s where real growth happens.

Final Reflection

GGRIT isn’t only about pushing through. It’s about moving through challenges with awareness, intention, and honesty, recognizing where you are in the cycle and what you need next. Perhaps most importantly, it’s about rewriting the narratives that shape how we see ourselves, because when those narratives shift, so does what we believe is possible.