You’re Not Running Out of Resilience, You’re Carrying Too Much

Many people wince at the word ‘resilience’. All too often it’s used to mean people need to toughen up, cope better and put up with increased demands piled onto people who are already overloaded. When organisations offer resilience training without looking at workload, culture or unrealistic expectations, it’s received as – the system’s fine, you just need to be stronger.

No wonder people roll their eyes, resist or stop listening when they hear this word.

Yet, beneath the misuse of this term, there’s something useful. Resilience is about capacity. It’s about your ability to respond, adapt, recover and think flexibly without using every drop of what you have. Which is very different from gritting your teeth and tolerating more.

Resilience as a reservoir

What if you were to picture resilience as a reservoir? Certain things keep that reservoir topped up – things like proper recovery, connection with others, moving your body, time outdoors, play, sleep and eating. All these things contribute to aliveness.

There are other things that constantly drain it. Things like holding too much responsibility, being the dependable one, overthinking, perfectionism, second-guessing yourself, never quite switching off, anxiety, stress, and certain lifestyle choices.

You can keep topping the reservoir up with things like yoga, spa days, holidays or another app and yes, those things can be genuinely restorative. Yet if you never deal with the leaks, you’ll spend your life refilling a leaky reservoir and that’s the piece we usually miss.

Resilience isn’t endurance

Endurance is – how much more can I take?

Resilience is – how do I stay resourced enough to respond well to what life brings?

It’s recognising your limits and not calling them a failure. It means being able to ask for help, to say no and, letting ‘good enough’ be good enough. At times it’s deciding that the thing or things demanding all you have to give are what needs to change.

Real resilience isn’t ‘bouncing back’ to who you were before. An experience can change what’s important to us, how we think or what we’ll tolerate. So resilience is more the ability to flow forward, adapt, stretch your comfort zone and recognise when you’re being stretched too far.

Having such flexibility depends on having something in reserve in the first place. If you’re operating at 95–100% capacity, there’s nothing left when life throws its inevitable curveballs! Resilience means having enough in reserve to respond, not just survive.

What fills the reservoir

Some is obvious and I’ve mentioned already – sleep, food, movement, relationships, recovery. Some are less tangible:

How safe and secure do you feel in yourself and your life?
Do you believe you have choices and do you trust yourself?
Do you have hope, and are you clear on your values and strengths?
Do you have people you can genuinely lean on?
Is there enough fun, curiosity and meaning in what you do?
Do you have a sense of contribution that isn’t dependent on being useful to everyone else?

They’re the psychological resources we draw on when things get challenging and tough.

Sometimes the drain is the need

We all need certainty, variety, significance, connection, growth and contribution in differing amounts. What matters is how we meet those needs.

You might meet significance by being the person everyone needs. Connection by avoiding disagreement. Certainty by overthinking every decision. Contribution by carrying more than belongs to you.

None of that starts as a problem, these are strategies that have probably worked well in the past. The trouble is when a strategy becomes automatic and keeps running long after it’s useful. That’s where resilience and self-awareness overlap: sometimes what drains you isn’t what’s happening to you, it’s the pattern you keep bringing to it.

The heroic leader is rarely as resilient as she looks

We continue to reward heroic leadership. You know, the person who handles everything, never drops a ball, stays calm regardless of what’s happening behind the scenes. There’s real pride in being that person, and a real cost.

If your identity is built on being capable, asking for help feels vulnerable. If everyone relies on you, stepping back feels selfish. If your standards are high, “good enough” feels like giving up.

Yet there’s enormous resilience in recognising and stating, both to yourself and others that you have limits, that you need help. Stating what’s not yours to carry or when something is costing you too much. Plus remember you’re allowed to change your mind and you don’t have to solve everything immediately. Most importantly perhaps learning to be OK with someone being disappointed in you.

Slowing down increases capacity

Often, we only slow down once we’re forced to – when we’re exhausted, irritable, run down or ill. Yet slowing down is a necessary requirement for health and longevity. Resting, reflecting, playing, creating and allowing your nervous system settle. Taking one thing off the list rather than finding a way to squeeze another one in. Often, slowing down is exactly what lets you speed up later on, because your thinking clears and you stop burning energy on that internal noise and stress response.

Better questions than “how resilient am I?”

How much am I carrying right now? Capacity isn’t fixed. Some days you have plenty in reserve and other days, ordinary life draws on you far more heavily.

What keeps draining the reservoir? Two people can have near-identical lives and very different internal experiences. One delegates easily; the other carries everything automatically. One makes a decision and moves on; the other replays it for three days. That second question takes you beneath workload and into pattern — and patterns can change.

Take a look at your own reservoir

Ask yourself:

What genuinely restores me. Ignore the fashionable fads, focus on what actually works?

What repeatedly drains me beyond my workload? Is it overthinking? perfectionism? carrying people? conflict avoidance? the belief that rest has to be earned?

Which of those drains is actually within my influence?

You won’t control everything. Systems, money, health and other people’s decisions all matter. Yet taking responsibility for what genuinely belongs to you, rather than everything, can return an extraordinary amount of capacity.

You may not need to become more resilient, you may be already. It might be you’ve just been asking that resilience to compensate for too much, for too long.

So instead of how do I get tougher, ask yourself – what would happen if I stopped draining so much of my capacity in the first place?

If you’re curious to know where you are right now, I’ve created two short check-ins:

How Much Are You Really Carrying? – this is a look at your current load and capacity. You can find that here.
What’s Really Keeping You Stuck? – uncovers the patterns that drain it: overthinking, over-responsibility, people-pleasing, self-doubt. You can find it here.

Start with whichever feels most relevant right now.

Sometimes a little more awareness is enough to show you where the leak in your reservoir is. If you want to talk more about your results afterwards, then book a complimentary call.