What We Get Wrong About Resilience
How broadening your understanding can help you and your team.
Welcome! I’m Dr. Jillian, a physician leader, mom, and coach who is on a mission to help overwhelmed, ambitious women live less stressed, more satisfying lives. If the full post doesn’t show up in your e-mail, come over to the webpage or Substack App to see the whole thing. Subscribe here to get future posts straight to your inbox:
✨ Last time: You Don’t Have to Get Used to It: My Journey to Wellness Leadership- Listen here.
✨ Today: Exploring our misunderstandings about resilience.
About a month ago, I started seeing a new therapist.
Between navigating grief following my dad’s death and the regular onslaught of difficult emotions and experiences that I go through as a Pediatric Intensive Care Unit physician, I decided that it was once again time to process with another person rather than continuing to work through it on my own.
I say “once again” because I’ve been intermittently seeing therapists since my episode of major depression nearly 10 years ago. And I credit this practice with keeping me in remission.
Back then, I would’ve been terrified to tell you that I was seeing someone. Only a few people knew, and I certainly didn’t speak about it openly or write about it online. As a perfectionist, I thought it meant that there was something wrong with me because I wasn’t able to “cope” as well as other people around me experiencing the same things.
But here’s what I’ve learned since then: absolutely no one who experiences adversity is unaffected by it.
It’s just that some of us have an underlying predisposition to mental illness. It might be genetic or related to life circumstances or both. And it doesn’t mean anything about our character or ability to perform our jobs that this is true. It just means that it is one more thing for us to address as we navigate staying mentally, physically, and emotionally well.
Being able to ask for and accept help doesn’t make us weak.
It makes us resilient.
What is resilience?
Many people describe resilience as the ability to overcome adversity. I understand it better as the ability to cope with and navigate through adversity. I don’t think it’s about getting out the other side of adversity without being affected by what you’ve experienced.
Maybe I’m being picky about this because resilience is a tricky word for healthcare workers like me who had it weaponized against us during the COVID-19 pandemic (read: we were directly told to be more resilient).
When I was first asked to give wellness talks during that period, I was often asked to do resilience training for healthcare workers. Even before the public wanted to admit it, we knew that we were up against a terrible force and that we needed to do everything that we could to try to withstand it.
Part of that included trying to arm ourselves with the tools we needed to navigate hard things.
And we did.
But being able to persevere through hardship does not mean that we do not come out the other side without scars. Many healthcare workers that I know are still picking up the pieces. And we know from data that 30% of physicians with the highest resilience scores still experience burnout.
Being resilient doesn’t mean that you don’t need help.
Brené Brown’s book “The Gifts of Imperfection” discusses five factors associated with resilient people.
One of these is that they are more likely to seek help. In other words, part of being resilient is learning to admit that you are a human being who needs the help of other human beings in order to do life on this planet.
I had to learn this lesson the hard way, and now I’ve built part of my career around trying to help other people learn it before they experience serious disfunction.
Part of my own personal resilience practice is to utilize professional help when I need it as I discussed above. I’ve also been intentional about working to build up a supportive community in my workplace and in my life away from work so that I never feel like I have to do it alone.
And I teach other teams and organizations to do the same because resilience is not only an individual person’s responsibility.
Building a resilient workplace requires ongoing attention to supporting everyone who works there, especially if you are a leader.
If you’re looking to make your workplace a more supportive environment, here are some ideas to get started:
Acknowledge and Validate people’s experiences
If someone comes to you for support, acknowledge and validate their experience in a non-judgmental way.
For example, if someone tells you they are feeling overwhelmed by an upcoming deadline, don’t say “you’ll be fine.”
Instead, you can say something like, “It’s understandable to feel stress when deadlines are approaching.”
This allows the person to feel seen instead of feeling invalidated by being told they are fine when they don’t feel fine.
Then, instead of offering advice, take a “coach approach” to addressing next steps by asking a question: “How have you navigated feelings like this in the past?”
This allows the person to reflect on their own innate skills and see how they have navigated difficult situations in the past.
Proactively check-in
Don’t only wait for people to come to you. Check in on them.
Checking in, truly listening, and acknowledging/validating helps people feel cared for and seen without being judged- key elements of psychological safety.
You can use the quick process outlined here to check-in with yourself and with others.
Share your own experience with navigating adversity.
Know and use the resources available to you in your organization or workplace.
Build your own resilience and address your own wellbeing.
Hopefully, you’re starting to see how we’ve been getting resilience wrong:
Resilience doesn’t mean that you aren’t affected by the work you do or what’s happening in your life/the world.
Resilience doesn’t mean never needing help.
Building resilience shouldn’t only fall to individuals. It’s also an organizational and leadership resposibility.
How can broadening your understanding of resilience help you or your team?
I’d love to hear in the comments. Even if you have a tiny breakthrough or idea, it all counts. If you fancy sharing this post using the restack button to help more people discover how to give themselves permission to take vacation, I'd really appreciate that too.
x Jillian
Last week I noticed that I was getting a bit grumpy and tired with a lot going on at work and at home, and in the lives of my team. So I texted my boss and asked if we could fit in half an hour to discuss a few things and clarify my priorities. We did that early this week, and the following day he had followed up to help me address something that I couldn’t do on my own. I also leaned on my fellow leaders at our leadership gathering on Wed and while my challenges remain, I know I’m not facing them alone. That means that I can lean into this weekend’s family gatherings not worrying about the work that still needs to be done.
That's a good reframing of the word resilience, I agree it's not just about getting out the other end without being affected. I love the reframing to "navigating through it" and I would also say that if we are going through a rough patch we're always going to be affected, even in a positive way it could be that it changes us for the better or makes us stronger on the other end - but it's also ok if we just make it through unchanged.