Let me say this upfront, I’m not anti-resilience. i understand why organisations invest time and energy into this work. I mean who wouldn’t want resilient people and resilient teams?
But often, resilience quietly becomes shorthand for: cope more, push through, and whatever you do, don’t show any weakness.
And that’s where it can all start to go wrong
Because what I often hear isn’t a lack of resilience but a lack of confidence, self-belief and trust.
So when organisations ask for more resilience, I tend to ask a different question.
What are people being asked to be resilient to?
Resilience without confidence just becomes endurance
What actually helps people stay steady is confident resilience. The ability to hold pressure without crashing or withdrawing.
For emerging leaders, that pressure often shows up as: questioning their worth before they’ve even found their feet, worrying about getting it wrong in very visible ways, mistaking confidence for certainty or assuming everyone else has it figured out.
For experienced leaders, this can mean:
- carrying responsibility for everyone else
- staying composed while quietly running on empty
- asking teams for resilience while modelling urgency
- confusing control with stability
So when confidence wobbles, resilience takes a back seat.
One of the most useful reframes I share is this:
resilience isn’t about coping more. It’s about understanding what’s actually triggering the strain and addressing that properly.
Is it constant self-criticism?
The emotional labour of managing how you’re perceived?
The pressure to perform without the right support or clarity?
When people trust themselves, they recover faster. don’t spiral after feedback and don’t over-adapt just to survive work.
And when leaders understand their role in this, resilience stops being an individual responsibility and starts becoming an organisational priority.
This is exactly why I developed the seven-habit BELIEVE framework. It was never designed to create louder leaders. It was designed to create steadier ones.
Each habit builds sustainable professional confidence in a way that works for individuals and organisations. It helps people take ownership of their own development, while giving leaders a clear foundation for building resilient teams without burning themselves or others out.
• Boldness without bravado
• Empathy for others and yourself
• Learning instead of perfection
• Integrity over approval
• Empowerment rather than control
• Vulnerability without oversharing
• Energy that’s sustainable, not draining
This is what confidence looks like in practice and this is what resilience is actually built on.
A leadership reality check
If you lead people, resilience isn’t something you demand. it’s something your behaviour creates.
Teams don’t burnout because they lack resilience. They burnout because confidence quietly erodes and no one notices until it’s gone.
So if we’re serious about resilience, we also need to talk about:
- self-trust, not self-sacrifice
- steadiness, not suppression
- compassion as a performance skill
- confidence as something you practice, not prove
That’s the kind of resilience that lasts.
Not the hard-edged, grin-and-bear-it kind. It’s always the humankind that wins out. And frankly, work could do with a lot more of this.
If you enjoy these types of discussion and content then check out my brand new podcast “Decoding Confidence”. New episodes are released every Monday morning. You can find and listen to all the episodes on my website or wherever you listen to your pods.