Polly Boardman
Senior Learning and Talent Development Leader | Board Advisor
Over the past few years, something subtle but significant has shifted in how we talk about challenge.
Across professional platforms like LinkedIn — and more personal spaces such as Instagram, TikTok and Facebook — people are increasingly open about the realities testing their resilience. Redundancy. Returning to work after a career break or parental leave. Illness. Fertility struggles. Baby loss and miscarriage. Caring responsibilities. Financial uncertainty. Bereavement. Parenting anxiety and many other unforeseen stressors.
This is not performative vulnerability. It reflects a deeper truth: for many people, pressure is no longer episodic. It is layered. That has implications for how we define resilience — personally and organisationally.
The End of the “Bounce Back” Narrative
Traditional narratives of resilience assume a contained disruption: A crisis happens. We respond. We recover. We return to baseline.
That is rarely how modern life unfolds. Today, an individual may be navigating intense professional expectations while experiencing personal loss, financial strain, or health concerns. Before equilibrium is restored in one area, another demand surfaces.
The metaphor that resonates most for me is that of bowling pins. You are knocked down by one event. You stand back up. Then another pin falls. And another. The quiet anxiety is not just about the current impact — but whether eventually there will be a “full strike.” This cumulative effect is where resilience fatigue sets in.
Cumulative Strain Is the New Reality
When pressures stack, they don’t simply add — they multiply.
Professional uncertainty intensifies financial anxiety. Parenting challenges amplify work pressure. Health concerns heighten sensitivity to career instability. Yet most organisational support systems are designed around discrete events:
- A return-to-work plan
- A redundancy process
- A wellbeing workshop
- A mental health awareness campaign
These are valuable — but they often fail to acknowledge compounded strain. And often they come after a challenging scenario or event has happened.
For executives, this raises two important questions:
Are we equipping people to manage complexity, or simply to endure isolated disruption?
And how do you manage your own resilience challenges whilst simultaneously balancing those of your co-workers and teams?
Proactive Resilience: A Reframing
One of the most striking moments for me recently came during a life insurance review. I was asked whether I had ever experienced anxiety or depression and whether I had been “treated.”
When I clarified that I had engaged in counselling proactively — not because I was clinically unwell, but because I wanted support during particularly intense life events — the response was uncertain. The system seemed built to categorise support as reactive.
However, proactive resilience is different. Seeking counselling, coaching, or structured reflection before crisis is not evidence of fragility. It is capacity building. It is preventive maintenance and it is strategic self-leadership.
In high-performing environments, we normalise preventative physical healthcare. Yet emotional and psychological support often remains framed as remedial. That cultural gap matters.
And this is not to be mistaken with the tired tradition of ‘oh there’s a problem’ give them some coaching. This support is only helpful if there is a cohesive review of the environment and whether there are contributing factors testing one’s resilience that also require intervention.
What Builds Sustainable Resilience?
Resilience is not infinite toughness. It is structured adaptability. From both professional and personal experience, several patterns consistently strengthen resilience under layered pressure:
1. Deliberate Support Networks
Resilient individuals rarely operate in isolation. They cultivate trusted spaces to think aloud, sense-check, and process. Not to be “fixed” — but to feel understood.
2. Anchors of Stability
When uncertainty rises, routines become protective factors. Predictable rituals — exercise, structured time, reflection, even something as simple as a familiar playlist — provide neurological steadiness.
3. Managing Inputs
In times of stress, unfiltered information can escalate anxiety. Resilient behaviour includes curating what we consume and avoiding unhelpful comparison or panic-driven searching.
4. Early Intervention
Coaching, counselling, and mentorship are most powerful when accessed early. Waiting for burnout or breakdown reduces their effectiveness.
5. Language Matters
How we describe struggle shapes whether people seek support. If resilience is equated with silent endurance, support will always be delayed.
6. Knowing when to quit
The hardest to acknowledge but having the power to choose to no longer engage with the cause or remove yourself from environments which escalate your fight response, is commendable and should be reframed as taking positive action rather than defeat.
An Executive Responsibility
Resilience is often positioned as an individual capability. But culture either enables or suppresses it. Leaders influence:
- Whether vulnerability is punished or respected
- Whether support is viewed as strength or weakness
- Whether workload expectations acknowledge human complexity
In an era of economic uncertainty, AI disruption, caregiving pressure, and global instability, resilience cannot remain an informal expectation. It must be intentionally supported. That may include:
- Normalising preventative mental wellbeing support
- Designing policies that recognise compound strain.
- Training leaders to spot cumulative pressure, not just performance dips.
- Creating psychologically safe environments for early conversations
Perhaps resilience today is less about bouncing back and more about holding steady when multiple forces pull at once. It is about knowing when to stand alone — and when not to. It is about self-awareness, structured support, and environments that recognise people as complex human systems, not output machines.
Perhaps most importantly, it is about removing the stigma from proactive care — so that the next time a pin falls, fewer people feel they are standing alone in the lane.