I used to have the idea that if you’re the last one standing, you are resilient. The individual who never cracked, never complained, answered emails during a hospital waiting room if it had to. Years, and one very burnt-out colleague named Dave, later in my life, before I discovered that this is the same version of resilience, but with a veneer of good public relations.
Who was the guy that everyone admired? Dave First in, Last out, Never said no! One Tuesday he just didn’t come in, and didn’t come back for four months. Everyone was caught off guard which says a lot about poor work place reading.
Let’s get to the bottom of what resilience is, the origins of the conversation and how you can realistically do something about it, whether you’re an employee who’s running on empty, or a manager who’s aware that half the team is secretly suffering.
We Haven’t Been Having This Conversation Very Long
It’s worth remembering how new all of this is. Go back a hundred years and “workplace wellbeing” meant not losing a hand in the machinery. The Victorians gave us factory acts, not feelings. Even into the 1970s and 80s, the prevailing wisdom in most offices was simple: leave your personal life at the door.
Things shifted slowly. Occupational psychologists started proving what common sense already suspected, that miserable people do worse work. Employee assistance programmes crept in during the 90s, often as a phone number pinned to a noticeboard that nobody rang. Burnout got its own entry in the World Health Organization’s classification in 2019. And then the pandemic arrived and did in eighteen months what decades of HR seminars couldn’t: it made mental health at work impossible to ignore.
We’re still living in the aftermath of that shift. Younger employees talk about therapy the way older generations talked about football. Meanwhile plenty of senior leaders grew up in the “just get on with it” era and honestly aren’t sure how to respond when someone says they’re not coping. That awkward gap between generations is exactly where most workplace tension around this stuff lives.
What Resilience Is (and What It Isn’t)
Here’s the reframe that changed my thinking. Richard Reid, a psychologist who has spent more than twenty years working with organisations on exactly this, makes the point that resilience isn’t a personality trait you’re born with or without. It’s a set of skills. Learnable ones. That matters, because it means the question stops being “am I tough enough?” and becomes “what haven’t I practised yet?”
Real resilience looks less like endurance and more like elasticity. Bad quarter, difficult boss, restructure number three in as many years: the resilient person bends, absorbs it, and returns to shape. The “tough” person just accumulates cracks until, like Dave, they shatter on a random Tuesday.
Things That Actually Help
A few strategies I’ve seen work, in real offices, with real people:
Notice your own weather. Spend two weeks jotting down when your energy tanks or your patience evaporates. The pattern is rarely what you expect. A project manager I know assumed deadlines were her problem. It turned out it was meandering meetings with no agenda. Deadlines she could handle. Ambiguity was killing her. You can’t fix a stressor you haven’t correctly identified.
Treat recovery as part of the job. Athletes rest between sessions because recovery is where the strength gets built. Office workers somehow decided this doesn’t apply to them. It does. A real lunch break, an actual weekend, a holiday where you delete the email app. None of this is laziness. It’s maintenance.
Get help before you need rescuing. This is the one people resist most. There’s still a lingering idea that mental health therapy services are for emergencies only, like a fire extinguisher behind glass. In reality, a good therapist is more like a personal trainer for your head. Firms such as Pinnacle Therapy work with plenty of high-functioning professionals who aren’t in crisis at all. They just want to think more clearly and stop repeating the same unhelpful patterns.
If you’re a leader, watch what you model. Your midnight emails speak louder than your wellbeing policy. If you take proper breaks, admit when a week has been rough, and don’t glorify overwork, you give everyone underneath you permission to be human too. Some organisations bring in outside expertise for this. Pinnacle Wellbeing, which Richard Reid founded, does this kind of embedded culture work, and the honest truth is that a one-off lunchtime webinar changes nothing. Proper workplace wellbeing support has to be woven into how the place actually runs.
Make it safe to say “I’m struggling.” Not with posters. With responses. The first time someone admits they’re overwhelmed and gets support instead of side-eye, word travels. That’s how culture actually changes, one handled conversation at a time.
The Bit Worth Remembering
Dave came back, by the way. Different man. He delegates now, leaves at five most days, and last year his team had the best retention numbers in the building. His resilience didn’t come from toughening up. It came from finally accepting workplace wellbeing support he’d spent a decade pretending not to need.
That’s the whole lesson, really. Resilience isn’t armour. It’s flexibility, honesty, decent habits, and knowing when to ask for help. You can start small: track your energy, guard your evenings, have one honest conversation. None of it requires a budget or a committee. It just requires starting before your own random Tuesday arrives.
