“You're juggling multiple challenging tasks at once. How can you build resilience under stress?”
LinkedIn briefly introduced “collaborative articles”, which were questions that anyone could answer. They wound up abandoning the feature, but I enjoyed responding to them with my own brief mental health focused rants. I also only had 750 characters and no options for gifs, so this is WAY better. :)
So let’s get into it.
“You're juggling multiple challenging tasks at once. How can you build resilience under stress?”
Ah yes, resilience. The corporate catch-all for “we’re going to keep overloading you, gaslight you into thinking it’s a compliment, and then hand you a webinar on mindfulness when you start to crack.” :)
Let’s be clear: resilience is not about absorbing more punishment. It is about recovery after the stress ends, not survival while you are drowning. You don’t “build resilience” by stretching yourself thinner. You build it by having the space to rest, repair, and come back with your energy intact.
If companies actually cared about resilience, they would build some of their own. They would hire enough people to cover the work. They would stop expecting ten people’s output from a team of three. They would set deadlines that make sense. They would actually reward sustainable pace instead of glamorizing collapse.
But they don’t. Instead, they keep stacking the load higher and then tell you that you need to be more resilient. Translation: “we won’t fix the broken system, but please fix yourself so you can survive it.” That! ISN’T! Resilience!! It’s neglect and it’s abuse, plain and simple.
The research is clear: humans need about 42 percent of their time in rest and recovery. No, really, 42%. Wild, right? Ask yourself: when was the last time your company even came close to creating conditions where that was possible? When was the last time your calendar left you room to think, let alone rest?
If you want to know what real resilience looks like, it is not working twelve-hour days while your boss praises your grit. It is setting boundaries and refusing to carry impossible loads. It is saying no. It is cutting back. It is asking for help. It is calling out when the workload is unrealistic instead of quietly absorbing it and suffering.
Resilience is not about surviving the circus while juggling fire. It is about looking around and realizing the tent is on fire because the ringmasters refuse to fix the system. And then deciding that the most resilient thing you can do is walk out, take a breath, and demand something better.
If companies truly cared about resilience, they would stop handing out stress and calling it opportunity. They would build systems that do not grind people down. They would take accountability instead of offloading it onto the people already doing the heavy lifting. Until then, resilience will keep being used as a way to blame individuals for breaking under loads they never should have been carrying in the first place.
The Threadsmith Group Approach
At The Threadsmith Group, we don’t believe in cookie-cutter advice. We believe in real answers for real people, backed by experience, strategy, and a healthy dose of common sense.
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