Before You Call Someone Resilient

Before you call someone resilient, ask what it costs them to keep showing up.

The work gets done.

The deadline gets met.

They even make everyone laugh in the meeting.

👉 What you don’t see is the evening it takes to recover from an ordinary Tuesday.

😕 The conversations they rehearse before asking a reasonable question.

😕The ideas they keep to themselves because they’ve learned what happens when they speak.

😕The weekend spent trying to feel like a person again.

From the outside, resilience and survival can look remarkably similar.

I know because I spent years treating my ability to keep functioning as evidence that I was fine.

▫️I was capable.

▫️I was productive.

▫️I was also paying a price I had stopped counting.

Resilience can help us navigate difficulty, recover, and choose our next step. Survival can narrow the assignment to simply getting through the day.

👉 They can coexist. But when getting through becomes the permanent expectation, we need to ask harder questions.

Especially as leaders.

When someone handles everything, do we offer support or hand them more?

When they raise a concern, do we address it or compliment their strength?

“You’re so resilient” can become a very convenient way to leave someone carrying what should have been fixed.

There is dignity in surviving. Sometimes it takes everything a person has.

But people deserve room to recover, too.

And an organization should have more to offer its employees than another opportunity to prove how much they can take.

You don’t have to reach another breaking point to find out.

Musings of a Recovering Executive

Books 1 and 2 available now on Amazon.

Book 1: The Breaking Point

What has holding it all together cost you?

Book 2: Reinvention Outside the Realm of Expectation

What would you choose if you stopped choosing what was expected?

Lynn Cirillo

Author | Leadership Mentor | Founder & Principal

Grounded Leadership, LLC

Musings of a Recovering Executive