There’s a particular piece of advice that gets handed to people who are struggling at work, and on the surface it sounds caring. You need to build your resilience. Do the breathing exercises. Take the mindfulness course. Learn the coping strategies. Toughen up, gently.
I want to suggest that this advice, however well meant, has the problem backwards.
What resilience usually means
When most organisations talk about resilience, here’s what they actually mean: get better at functioning while depleted. Build a set of techniques that let you keep going when you’re anxious, overwhelmed, running on empty. Become someone who can absorb more pressure without breaking.
Look closely and you’ll see the hidden assumption. It takes the depleted, overwhelmed state as a given, as the water you have to learn to swim in, and sets out to make you a stronger swimmer.
But what if that state isn’t the water? What if it’s just a state, one you move in and out of, and the real skill isn’t coping with it better but spending less time stuck in it?
Two states, not one
Most of us know both of these from the inside, even if we’ve never named them.
There’s a way of being where things flow. You’re clear, responsive, a bit playful. Problems that looked enormous yesterday are just things to handle. You’re present with the people in front of you. Call this your natural state.
And there’s the other one. Preoccupied. Tight. Everything feels urgent and slightly threatening. You reread the same email four times. The calendar that was fine on Monday feels crushing on Thursday, even though nothing on it has changed. Call this normal, in the sense of common, not in the sense of right.
Here’s the thing worth noticing: the circumstances often haven’t changed between the two. The workload is the same. The calendar is the same. What’s changed is the state you’re seeing it from.
Why coping is the wrong target
Once you see that there are two states, the resilience advice starts to look strange.
Building coping mechanisms to survive the normal state is like installing better shock absorbers because you’ve decided you live on a bumpy road. It helps you tolerate the bumps. It does nothing to get you off that road and onto the smooth one you were on last week.
And it has a cost. The energy you spend white-knuckling your way through a depleted state, managing it, coping with it, is energy you don’t get back. You can get very good at functioning in normal and still be exhausted, because functioning in normal is expensive.
The skill that actually helps
So if not resilience, then what?
The skill is recognition. Learning to notice, earlier and earlier, when you’ve slipped into the normal state. Not to fight it. Not to fix it with a technique. Just to see it clearly: ah, I’m in normal right now. This heaviness, this urgency, this is the state talking, not the situation.
That recognition does something no coping strategy does. It loosens the grip. The moment you see that the overwhelm is coming from your state rather than from the facts, the state starts to soften on its own. You don’t have to force your way back to natural. You mostly have to stop mistaking normal for the truth.
This is why the people who change most aren’t the ones who learn the most techniques. They’re the ones who get faster at spotting which state they’re in, and who learn to trust that natural is always still there underneath, available the moment the storm settles.
What this means for leaders
If you lead people, this changes what you offer them.
The depleted version of help is to hand your team more resilience: more tools, more strategies, more ways to endure the pressure you’re all under. It treats the pressure as permanent and the person as the thing that needs hardening.
The other version is quieter, and far more useful. It’s to help people recognise their own states. To make it ordinary and safe to admit that everyone drops into normal sometimes, that it isn’t a character flaw or a sign they can’t cope, and that the way back isn’t more effort. It’s recognition, and a little space for the snow to settle.
You don’t need more resilience. You need to stop believing that your worst state is the truth about your situation. The natural one was never as far away as it felt.
