Resilience Isn’t Toughness
For much of my corporate career, I believed resilience meant endurance. The resilient leader was the one who could absorb the late nights, the reorganizations, the difficult conversations, and keep going without showing a crack. I admired that kind of strength, and for a long time I tried to embody it.
What I didn’t see then was how much it was costing me, and how much it was costing the people around me.
I learned this the hard way. During one of the most demanding periods of my career at General Mills, when I was deeply involved in a major acquisition, I was also losing both of my parents. I did what I had always done: I pushed through. I kept showing up, kept delivering, kept going. From the outside, I probably looked resilient. Inside, I was running on empty. It wasn’t until I stepped away for a week of retreat that I began to see how depleted I had become, and how much of my life I had been missing while simply getting through each day.
In the years since, working with leaders across every kind of organization, I’ve come to understand resilience very differently. Resilience isn’t the ability to ignore depletion. It’s the capacity to notice it, and then to respond with wisdom rather than habit.
The trouble with toughness
When we equate resilience with toughness, we train ourselves to override the signals that something needs attention. The tight shoulders. The shortened temper. The way we read the same email three times without taking it in. The sense that we are moving fast but not quite arriving anywhere.
These aren’t signs of weakness. They are information. And when we push past them again and again, we don’t become stronger. We become less present. We make decisions on autopilot. We listen less well. We lose access to the very qualities that make us good leaders: clarity, focus, creativity, and compassion.
Toughness asks, “How much more can I take?” Resilience asks a different question: “What is happening right now, and what is the wise next step?”
Resilience begins with noticing
You cannot respond wisely to something you haven’t noticed. This is why the foundation of resilience is attention, the simple, trainable capacity to be aware of what’s happening in your body, your mind, and your environment as it is happening.
For example, when I teach mindful leadership to professionals, I teach them to take a purposeful pause, a few moments in the day to step out of the rush and simply notice. Many are surprised by what they find. Fatigue they hadn’t acknowledged. Worry that has been quietly shaping their decisions. Sometimes, too, a steadiness underneath it all that they didn’t know was there.
That noticing creates space. And in that space, we have choices we didn’t have before.
Responding, not reacting
Resilient leaders still face hard seasons. The difference is in how they meet them. Rather than reacting from depletion, they can respond with intention. Sometimes that means rest. Sometimes it means asking for help, or letting go of a commitment that no longer serves. Sometimes it means continuing forward, but doing so with awareness rather than grim determination.
This is where compassion enters. I often describe compassion as deep understanding. When we turn that understanding toward ourselves, we can see clearly what we need, not what we think we should need, or what we believe others expect of us. That clarity is what allows us to recover, and to lead from a place of fullness rather than exhaustion.
A practice for this week
Before your next meeting, take one minute. Sit with both feet on the floor and let your attention rest on your breath. Then ask yourself, gently: How am I, really? Don’t try to fix anything. Just notice. Then walk into the meeting carrying that awareness with you, and see what’s different.
It is a small practice. But leadership is built in small moments, and so is resilience.
Join us on October 16
If this reflection resonates, I’d love to have you join me for our one-day virtual program, Mindful Leadership to Build Resilience, on Thursday, October 16. We’ll explore these ideas together through practice and conversation. The program is held online, and financial aid is available on a case-by-case basis for nonprofit leaders. There are only a few seats left.
Leading well has never been only about leading others. It begins with how we lead our own lives, and that includes how we care for ourselves.
