Introduction
Rebecca Scott calls herself a recovering Eeyore, after the gloomy donkey from Winnie the Pooh, and for years, she says, that really was her identity. She has lived with multiple sclerosis for two decades, watched her own mobility change in stages, from walking unaided, to a cane, to a rollator, and moved from a two-storey home to a single-storey condo to accommodate a body that keeps shifting the terms of what's possible.
None of that reads like the starting point for a conversation about joy. But Rebecca has built something specific out of it: a practice she calls "microdosing joy," deliberately placing small sources of delight into ordinary life so that when the harder feelings arrive, and she's clear they still do, there is already something steady to return to. This conversation, recorded for Everyday Leadership, is about what it actually takes to build that practice when your body and your circumstances keep changing the rules.
From Confident Ten-Year-Old to Recovering Eeyore
Rebecca describes her ten-year-old self as supremely confident, "the smartest girl in class and I knew it," raised in a household that valued both knowledge and wit. That confidence started eroding in middle school, partly through ordinary social friction, and partly through a harder realisation: that the world contained real conflict and cruelty, arriving alongside her awareness of the first Gulf War. She names this directly as the moment it became easy to lean away from confidence and toward the Eeyore identity that would define her for years.
She frames this using a psychological idea she credits to Jennifer Garvey Burger: that who we were at each stage doesn't disappear, it becomes a ring inside the tree, with new layers growing on top. The ten-year-old who corrected people's grammar is still in there. So is the teenager who stopped trusting the world to be safe.
Losing Her Drama Teacher, and Losing Herself
At seventeen, Rebecca would have introduced herself as a theatre person first and foremost, her entire identity organised around acting and the fine arts school she attended. That year, her drama teacher, who she'd worked with since she was twelve, died of AIDS-related complications. She describes the loss as throwing her hard toward depression and sadness, to the point where recognising joy even when it was directly in front of her became genuinely difficult.
She reflects that teenagers have a particular kind of licence to fully collapse into grief, leaning on the adults around them without worrying about the burden of it, in a way she says she no longer has as an adult. It's a specific, honest observation about how grief changes shape depending on what stage of life carries it.
Diagnosis, and Loss in Stages
Rebecca says nothing since has shaken her world quite like that first loss, except her multiple sclerosis diagnosis. Unlike a single event, MS has delivered what she calls "gradual mourning periods": losing the ability to walk unaided, moving from a cane to a two-handed rollator, downsizing her home to a single storey. Each stage is its own small grief.
Her process for each one is consistent: she cries, she gets angry, she writes about it, and then she takes a breath and asks what she can actually do about it. That question, repeated deliberately, is where her practical resilience comes from, not from skipping the hard feeling, but from always eventually turning back toward agency.
Choosing the Fabulous Version of What You Can't Avoid
One of Rebecca's clearest practices is what she calls deteriorating "on your own terms." If she has to use a cane, she'll have a striking one. When she needed a rollator, she got the cutest, most purple one she could find, and says it now makes strangers stop her on the street to compliment it. She's candid that a purple rollator is nowhere near as good as walking down a hallway unaided, but within the loss, she has found a genuine, specific source of pride and connection.
She extends this into a broader observation about control: you don't get to choose whether you get the job you interviewed for, or what happens next to your body, but you can identify and act on the narrower set of things you do control. That distinction, she says, has slowly built her into a more resilient version of herself.
What Microdosing Joy Actually Looks Like
Rebecca traces the idea back to a talk on positive psychology from the University of Pennsylvania, which introduced her to "awe" as a distinct positive emotion. She describes lying on a lakeside in New Zealand under a sky full of stars, and says even recalling it now visibly changes her heart rate. Since she can't fly to New Zealand on demand, she has built smaller, repeatable sources of the same feeling into ordinary life: a photo of her late drama teacher above her desk, an R.E.M. poster from her childhood library reproduced in her office, art from her family, a purple chair.
She also credits carefully curated social media use, following farmers, a Swiss shepherdess who films goats and sheep grazing in the Alps, and comedians, as a genuine, if unconventional, source of the same repeated small joy. The point isn't the size of the input. It's the intentional repetition.
Turning Toward the Discomfort, Not Away From It
Asked how she moved from theatre, to a decade of adjusting to MS, to leadership coaching, Rebecca is blunt: mostly, it was time. She still gets frustrated daily by her circumstances, including symptoms she's candid about finding genuinely inconvenient. What changed is her relationship to discomfort itself. She now runs her own blog under the name "Stumblr," a deliberate pun that doubles as an honest description of how she now approaches life: willing to stumble through conversations and attempts, and treat the stumble as useful information rather than proof of failure.
She credits her early scepticism toward leadership coaching, and the discomfort of realising she was often the least experienced person in the room when she started at Cultivating Leadership, as the real beginning of her shift. Being the smartest person in the room, she says, is fun briefly, but you don't grow from it.
A Practical Test for Rumination
Rebecca offers one concrete tool drawn from a teacher she credits as Buddhist in origin: when caught in repetitive, self-critical thought, ask "is this useful?" If the answer is genuinely yes, she says, let yourself have the full weekend of it if that's what's needed. If not, it may be time to do something small and human instead, cook dinner, take a shower, and let the return to ordinary tasks pull you back toward yourself.
She's careful to note there's no fixed timer on grief or difficult feelings. The test isn't about speed. It's about checking, honestly, whether staying in the feeling is still serving you.
Defining Leadership as Thoughtful Choices With Others in Mind
Rebecca defines leadership as thoughtful choices made with others in mind, arguing that everyone leads something, even if it's only themselves or their family, and that titles like "leadership coach" are often misunderstood as applying only to executives. She adds that good leadership also means being able to say "I don't know" and "I was wrong," a form of humility she connects directly back to her ten-year-old self's certainty that she always had the right answer.
