the resilience dilemma

If you are like most people, resilience comes at a cost. We have been resilient in so many ways throughout history, throughout our lives, and certainly this past year has tested our resilience. 

I asked someone recently about being resilient and what she needed to get through what lies ahead. She got very upset. Not with me, but with the concept of resilience.  

Her answer did not surprise me, because that’s exactly how we tend to think of resilience. She said “as a Black woman I’m tired of being resilient. I have had to be resilient for my entire life. I have had to just shut up and keep going. I have had to swallow my pride, my self-esteem has taken blows, and I have had to just keep going with a smile on my face. I’m tired of being resilient.”  

All I could do was agree with her. She had been trained to be resilient by ignoring herself. She had learned that resilience meant to be quiet while being disrespected and everything else that happens in a racist society and non-inclusive work culture, where she just had to just take it, pretend she was ok and keep going. I’m certainly not dismissing that’s been a survival skill and we have thought of it as resilience for a very long time, but that doesn’t make it ok.  

Maybe resilience for you is like a lone fighter. The boxer who gets into the ring to fight, hoping to just keep standing until the end of the day. Where all day long is a fight of navigating trouble and problems, trying to predict the next blow that will come your way, duck, step out of the way, duck again, get thrown back, and get back up.

Feeling like all day long is just a one-pointed focus of survival. Getting to the end of it and hope to have achieved something. You can argue it takes resilience to succeed, yes. But how we reach success is the questions between burnout and sustainable success. For the boxer there is long time of training before every single big fight. He or she is preparing their body and mind for the fight, carefully training every muscle, mentally preparing, and they only have to pay attention to one challenge throughout the entire fight. No emails or phone-calls to answer in between. And they spend time actively recovering afterwards too. A boxer takes their body and mind very seriously, it’s their tool for success. A whole human training not just skills and techniques.

For people at work, resilience is the daily grind, without the physical and mental training and without the recovery before we get back in the ring the next day again. And yet, our bodies and mind are also the very tools we use every single day to do our best work.   

Resilience is about support instead of abandoning ourselves to push through

So, what’s my point?  We ignore and abandon our physical needs for getting our bodies ready and stay supported for a day at work, yet even the boxer sits down between sets and drinks water. Do you pause between meetings, reset, drink water, stretch, look at something other than the screen, refocus your mind, shake off the last couple of blows that landed on your ego and consider what you need for the next sprit? Most people go from meeting-to-meeting thinking that they don’t have time for a pause. Actually, we don’t have time not to.   

If we were machines maybe we could keep going for hours without pause, however even if we use the good old car analogy, we need gas in the tank to keep going. How many hours can you drive without refueling? If you really think about it, why do we expect of ourselves to be superhuman and at the same time don’t even value the human advantage?   

our human advantage

Our human advantage is also our human potential. Please don’t get stuck in the old version of resilience as the path to harnessing your human potential. The version where you have to be so mentally tough, that nothing can derail your focus and your body doesn’t need anything for 10 hours a day, and you just keep going, because you are untouchable. That old version where we celebrate excessive work hours and long stints as if that’s what makes us do good work.

I know we are all busy and we have a lot on our plate, especially during this pandemic, the extra stress has asked us to really tap into our resilience to keep going. But please don’t make the mistake of thinking that your self-care can wait. I have been through the old version of resilience. Ignoring my human needs, even the most basic ones. Ignoring that my emotional health needs connection with other humans, and my mental health needs space to pause, notice, listen and sort things out instead of just keep going on automatic.

I burned out. I even did it twice before I learned that my body needs me to take care of it as much as I need my body to be there for me. I also learned that ignoring and suppressing my emotional / mental health and my self-esteem in a toxic work environment, not speaking up for what I needed, cost me my work-performance, my relationships, and health. I didn’t gain success by ignoring myself. I lost it instead.    

Rethinking resilience as inclusion

Are you willing to consider that there is another way to be resilient than to ignore you emotions and stay silent, to abandon your physical and mental needs for fuel and pauses, and instead reconnect with your human needs for connection, care, and community?  

See when we don’t feel that we are included and respected in the work environment, we also don’t respect ourselves or include ourselves and our core human needs. That’s the self-care paradox and the challenge of believing in our old version of resilience.

We think that to be respected and included, we have to ignore our human needs and who we are to fit in and just keep working without self-care to perform. And yet our human advantage is that we care. What makes us an asset in the workplace is not how fast we work, it’s how well we think, engage, and act with care, mindfulness and on purpose.   

To care better and show up as our best selves, we need to support ourselves in not just getting through every day, not just shutting up and take it, but rather include and respect ourselves and our core human needs. That’s how we thrive and perform at our best. It’s not just so that we can prevent burnout. We need to learn that resilience comes from the inside out, so do joy, happiness, and health and to get through this continuously challenging time, we need to care about our humanity, together. Because what we care about grows stronger. That’s what feeds resilience.