We’ve spent decades telling employees to be more resilient, and burnout rates continue to climb. Maybe the problem isn’t the amount of resilience. Maybe it’s the definition.
The working definition in most workplaces is some version of pushing through: absorb more, complain less, keep going. By that definition, the most resilient person is the one who never stops working. And as we covered a few editions ago, that person is often the one who collapses hardest, because pushing through isn’t resilience. It’s deferral.
Real resilience, the kind the research supports, is closer to processing through. The stress still happens. The difference is what happens next: whether the load gets metabolised or just accumulated.
Processing is the honest conversation instead of “I’m fine.” It’s the team meeting where staff can talk openly. It’s the peer support group where those working in the same roles and industries get together to chat about how their work affects them. It’s the work supervision sessions where staff can be honest. It’s the leader who is askable and tellable. It’s taking the lid off the boiling pot before the pot boils over. Processing through reduces the pressure.
This is also why so much resilience training disappoints. Teaching people to endure more, without changing whether their work supports processing for the team, just raises the load the system permits before someone breaks.
So a quick audit, for yourself or your team. Not “how much can we take?” but “how do we process our work, and when did we last actually do it?” If the honest answer is that processing happens by accident or not at all, the problem isn’t that you aren’t tough enough.
It’s a pressure release problem in your system, and that is fixable.
Human Foundations is a weekly look at the science behind high performance and wellbeing at work, from keynote speaker, psychiatrist, comedian and author Dr Jo Prendergast. Subscribe to get each edition as it lands.
Next week: what the healthiest workplaces actually do differently. Spoiler: it isn’t the wellbeing app.
Dr Jo turns this thinking into keynotes for conferences and leadership teams.
