What if we've got Resilience all wrong? How 'resilience' is burning out your team.

We're in a bit of a pickle, aren't we? Most of our workplaces are feeling over-stretched and we seem to have reached a 'new normal' when it comes to thresholds of stress, fatigue and anxiety at work. Amplified by the complexity of our world right now. 

This is the point where I throw out stats our brains can't really make tangible, in our small-scale teams. But they are important either way. 

• Nearly 1 million workers (964,000) reported stress, depression or anxiety caused or made worse by work in 2024/25, continuing an upward trend that already sat above pre-pandemic levels. (HSE)

• 22 million working days were lost to work-related stress in 2024/25, prompting the TUC to officially declare a "work-related stress crisis." Trades Union Congress

• Work-related mental health issues now cost the UK economy £57.4 billion each year, nearly doubling in recent years. MHFA Portal

I'm not writing this to put a Debbie-downer on ambitions for growth and progress. Neither am I saying all our workplaces are a pile of sh*t. But it seems like we are moving so fast that we've forgotten to pause, look around and observe what is unattainable to our well-being (in work or life). 

Resilience has been sold as a solution by coaches, consultants, and trainers like me for decades. Yet along the way, we appear to have got ourselves a little carried away with what that actually means. Misconstrued resilience as keeping going, trying harder, pushing ourselves through, putting up with too much. Ignoring the suffering and fatigue that we cause when we stretch ourselves too far or too thin. And it's been making us more miserable and ill. For some people even costing their lives. 

As many as 650 suicides in the UK were believed to be associated with work related issues, and its suspected its hard to track this, due to the difficulty in reporting and disclosure. Hazard Campaign so it could be more. 

Alongside the plethora of teams and individuals I have supported with mental health and well-being needs. Over the years, I have also worked to support teams impacted by the loss of a colleague by suicide or ill health, and let me tell you, it's a real shock to the culture when organisations have to look in and explore the lessons learned from the loss of someone's life. 

As biological beings, we are designed to regularly assess our environments for risk. These days, risk comes in the shape of a shirty email, a deadline, a passive-aggressive comment from a colleague, worrying about job stability, our wage being stretched even thinner for our efforts, or saying yes to something when you should have said NO! (to name a few). This is where the factors of fight, flight, freeze, faint or fawn come in. They help us with survival. But we need recovery time between these states of stimulation and preparation for protection. 

This is why we have the parasympathetic and sympathetic functions of our nervous system. 

The sympathetic prepares us for fight or flight, it doses us up on cortisol and adrenaline and the like. In moderation, it can actually help with personal growth, but too many spikes in the day can lead to mental and physical ill health. The parasympathetic helps us rest, restore, and even reflect. But when our 'normal' sits in a threshold of busy, frantic, fearful, worrying or high-pressure more times than not. Our body and mind have to work even harder to reset. Impacting everything from our gut health, sleep patterns, interpersonal relationships and well-being. Etching away at confidence and purposefulness. As we end up with too much on our plate, whilst spinning the plates at the same time. Messy stuff, right? 

Our ambition, our creativity. It's all wonderful stuff. But for many workplaces it has led people beyond a place of psychological and sometimes physical safety. Some cultures are functioning with generations of trauma, contributed to by overworked or unsafe cultures. 

And we keep calling on people for more resilience. 

At some point, we have to pause and ask ourselves the question. How did we make this happen? How did we get like this? Is this actually acceptable?

And crucially, if we learned our way into it? How do we learn our way out?

Most of the leaders and teams I meet. Wouldn't buy the offer of a burnout culture. Most care about their teams; they see the human beyond the role. And yet somehow become accidentally complicit in the conditions that keep us stuck here. 

I once asked a leader if what she was talking about in her team was resilience or hopelessness. 

Her answer 'Oh Sh*t'

Have we just been inviting problems in, as a measure of our success? 

The definition of Resilience, from the Oxford Learners Dictionary, details

"the ability of people or things to feel better quickly after something unpleasant, such as shock, injury, etc" 

Cool, Cool if that's once in a blue-moon. Something to get over, a challenge to face occasionally. But speaking with teams, leaders, and individuals. The 'unpleasant' is the norm. And we've not yet evolved for 24/7 resilience!

We can't just wait for the robots to take over, for this to right itself surely. As humans and leaders, we are remarkable innovators.

So maybe it's time to innovate ourselves out of our current definition of resilience. 

Maybe its less about resilience and more about safety. We need conditions to thrive, not survive. Work should not be a daily apocalypse or gauntlet.

This change isn't just down to leaders. It's a matter of mutual responsibility. It's a place for community and teamwork. That could even reach as far as partnership, commissioner, or sector responsibility (But let's not wait for that, hey?). Because even if the trend to go too fast, do too much was created by a chair of trustees or a goal-driven leader. Now the whole team is part of that 'ecosystem'. 

But how do you find that courageous space to begin exploring and unravelling? When the very symptom of a fast-paced, over-stretched culture of distorted resilience often leads to trauma, trust issues, withdrawal, anger or resentment, appeasing for ease, avoiding, or dominating? These are all natural survival mechanisms that have bred themselves into the space of 'resilience'. They don't make for the easiest of conversations about change. 

It might annoy you to know that I can't give you one answer. Because the real answer lies within your 'ecosystem' -live and present, in the will to explore it. The culture, the team, the environment, the individuals, the collective, and the inherited stories. 

But what I can share is this. Grown out of working with teams, alongside and in Nature for many years now. 

• Seeing yourself as a living system, or ecosystem, instead of a machine, can profoundly change perspectives and result in business evolution. 

• Prioritising emotional regulation and being trauma-informed will support longer-term conversations that begin to create change and form a sustainable version of resilience. 

• Maintaining curious states of being, particularly in leaders who hold space for conversations around team culture and well-being, will invite more solutions.

• Designing your culture with energy and seasons as a concept of 'resource-currency' can support adaptability. 

• Shifting resilience to be a perspective of bouncing forward, not back, will also support healthy change. We can't actually bounce back anywhere. Time moves forward, as does progress. So perhaps we need to learn to develop ourselves and our teams to new, safer spaces and cultures. 

• Embracing the ability to compost - let go, unlearn, change - with compassion will begin to free us all of the narratives that hold us in this rough-and-tumble with 'resilience'. 

• Nature can help you with all of these. Whether the simple act of being in it and the neuroscience of what happens to our bodies in Nature. Or learning to see it as a mentor in the complexity of living systems being. Your team is a living system; nature can help you understand that and be a better part of it too. 

I believe we will begin to really know resilience and be it when we choose to understand that we have to redefine what resilience is right now. To recognise where the threshold lies for a culture of being well, not operate our normal on the edge or far beyond it, the safety zone. 

If you'd like some further time to reflect on this idea and explore how Nature can help your teams heal and restore. Come along to my free workshop Friday 29th May 2026 10:30am-12:00pm 

Register for free here - the event will be recorded. 

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