I was recently asked, very reasonably, “What is resilience?” Which is awkward, because I’ve written tens of thousands of words about it. That’s a bit like hosting a braai and realising you forgot the fire. So, let’s fix it. Because if we get this wrong, we’ll keep confusing endurance with strength – applauding people for “pushing through” while quietly labelling the fallout character building, and then acting surprised when the wheels come off and we call it “just a busy season.”
Stick with me, we’re going to talk about plates, capacity leaks, and why “pushing through” is often just a slow-motion car crash with a performance review.
If you Google the resilience definition, you’ll find something along the lines of: the capacity to withstand or recover quickly from difficulties; toughness. That’s not wrong. But it’s incomplete. Because resilience isn’t just toughness. And it’s not just recovery. If we only see resilience as grit, we end up building burnout instead of strength.
So what is resilience, really?
For me, resilience isn’t grit. It’s capacity.
When I’m not building this work, I’m a marketing generalist. Which means if there’s a marketing problem and a room full of talented humans staring at it like it’s a confused pigeon that’s wandered into a boardroom, I can usually step in and hold things together long enough for something sustainable to emerge. I enjoy it because it changes constantly – new teams, new markets, new personalities, new problems. It’s corporate speed-dating with deliverables, and it’s excellent fun until you realise the bill is paid in cortisol.
Most people hate that level of change. My ADD brain thrives on it like a Labrador in a ball factory. One year, I’d been in a role for less than six weeks when the VP of Marketing asked me to shift again. I said yes. She told me I had more resilience than most people she knew, and I took that as a compliment. What I didn’t realise was that all my resilience was being fed directly into the corporate furnace – and furnaces, as it turns out, are not known for giving energy back.
Work became the ecosystem, not a subsystem. And when work becomes the ecosystem, everything else feels bigger than it actually is. Not because it is catastrophic, but because you’ve already spent your entire resilience budget on meetings. When something went wrong at work, it was “fine.” When something went wrong outside of work, it felt like collapse.
That’s when I started to understand personal resilience properly. It isn’t about being able to endure anything. It’s about how much capacity you have left when something unexpected happens.
The Plate of Doom
The metaphor that still does the most work for me is stupidly simple. Imagine your life is a plate. Not a tasteful, Michelin-starred arrangement. No. A plate absolutely annihilated by ambition, obligation, and “I’ll just handle it.” Let’s say the plate looks like this:
- 500g T-bone
- Two lamb chops (South African compliance requirement)
- Three slices of garlic bread
- Garlic roast potatoes
- Three decorative leaves pretending to be salad
- And enough gravy from Granny Beril to qualify as a swimming pool
It’s magnificent in the short term. Eat like that every day and you’ll be mainlining antacids like they’re Skittles, wondering why you’re tired, irritable, and one minor email away from dissolving into rage. That’s what most of us do with our lives. We pile on responsibility, expectations, availability, obligation, prestige, and notifications, then we call it “strength.” It’s not strength. You’re just full.
So quick check, what’s currently taking up most of your plate? Work, people, money stress, or just… life admin?
Resilience, in its most practical sense, is about managing capacity. Whether we’re talking about personal resilience or resilience at work, the principle is the same: when your system is overloaded, something eventually gives.
In plate terms, it might look like this:
- 120g steak
- One chop
- Granny Beril’s sweet potato mash
- An actual salad, not botanical garnish
It’s less exciting in the moment, but the capacity it gives you over time is exponential. That’s the point. Resilience isn’t about surviving a single heroic week. It’s about being able to keep going without burning down everything else you care about. More than that, it’s about still operating perfectly well while deliberately leaving space for more. You may not need the spare capacity today, but we generally don’t get a calendar invite for the moment we will need it. Change shows up unpredictably but certainly, knocking on the door like it owns the place. Resilience is making sure you’ve got a bit of room in the system when it does.
If tomorrow hit you with a surprise change, what would break first: your time, your mood, your relationships, or your body?
We’ve glamorised survival so much that thriving feels suspicious.
Letting Go Feels Like Failure
Knowing you need to let go of something is relatively easy. Actually letting go is hard, because letting go feels like failure – even when it’s actually self-respect. The gap between knowing and doing is where most people’s good intentions go to die. The decisions you make in managing your resilience get dramatically easier once you’ve defined your purpose, because purpose becomes the filter that tells you what stays on the plate and what gets cut, even if it’s tasty.
When you don’t know what you’re building toward, everything feels urgent. Everything feels important. Everything makes it onto the plate. But when purpose is defined, managing your resilience stops feeling like sacrifice and starts feeling like strategy. As Angela Shurina said to me recently, it’s about “choosing the hard you’re willing to deal with,” instead of letting life choose it for you. What “hard” are you currently tolerating by default, because you haven’t chosen a better one yet?
I know this in a very real way because I chose to let go of my corporate job. Not because I couldn’t do it. But because it was consuming all of my resilience and leaving nothing else. I had no capacity left for social life, hobbies, or curiosity. Even my family relationships suffered – not through conflict, but through absence. I was there, but I was buried.
Letting go initially felt irresponsible. But in shifting how I work now, I have more purpose in the work I want to be doing and more clarity in the environments I’m willing to operate in. It wasn’t that life got easier. It’s that I got capacity back.
Here’s what that looked like:
- More clarity about the work I actually want to do
- Better relationships because I’m more present
- Less drinking because I don’t need to dull the noise
- New hobbies (I can now play the guitar, to the mild horror of my neighbours)
- Exercise done for enjoyment, not punishment
There are costs. Some relationships shift. Some people don’t like the new rhythm. That’s part of it. But if you’re defining your purpose, you find better rhythms – ones that are more manageable and more rewarding.
Resilience at Work: How It Gets Used Up
Resilience at work is often treated as a personality trait. It isn’t. Workplace resilience is shaped heavily by systems and culture. When those systems are poorly designed, burnout becomes predictable.
Most of these patterns are now considered “normal,” which should terrify you slightly. Resilience at work gets chewed up by:
- An always-on culture where you’re expected to be available 24/7
- Unmanageable workloads with no recovery time
- Constant change and shifting priorities
- Unclear communication that fuels anxiety
- Low-trust environments
- Skipping breaks and holidays until recovery becomes a fantasy, not a plan – and your annual leave balance looks like a museum exhibit titled “Unused Potential”
If a system depends on your exhaustion to function, the problem isn’t you.
The Leak You Don’t See
Personal resilience doesn’t usually collapse dramatically. It leaks. Emotional resilience erodes through chronic stress, unresolved tension, and constant low-level pressure. Capacity disappears by subtraction, not explosion.
You adjust. You rationalise. The water warms.
Until one day something small tips you over and you react like the house is on fire. Not because it is – but because your capacity is gone.
Designing, Not Surviving
So maybe the most honest question in all of this is: where is your resilience slowly leaking? What are you pretending you can “handle” that is quietly handling you?
Resilience isn’t surviving the week. It’s designing a life you don’t constantly need to recover from.
Here’s the practical bit: write down everything that’s taking up capacity right now – work, family, friends, obligations, side quests, guilt-commitments, all of it. You’ll usually be surprised by two things: it’s often not as much as it felt, and once it’s visible you can finally see what’s unnecessary.
Then do the only step that matters: choose one thing to cross off and remove this week. Not dramatically. Just deliberately. Because resilience isn’t grit. It’s capacity – and capacity starts with making space.
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