What Do We Actually Mean When We Talk About Resilience?
I want to be honest with you about something. I've used the word 'resilience' a great deal over my career — in coaching conversations, in staff wellbeing sessions, in frameworks and programmes. And for a long time, I think I was using it in a way that was subtly unhelpful. I was using it to mean toughness. The capacity to absorb pressure and carry on. A kind of emotional stoicism — the professional equivalent of not flinching. Resilience as armour. What I've come to understand — through working with clients across education, public sector, and corporate settings, and through my own experience of navigating change — is that resilience isn't armour at all. Armour is rigid. It restricts movement. And the people I've seen cope most effectively with genuine adversity aren't those who feel nothing. They're those who feel everything and have developed a relationship with their own inner world that allows them to keep moving. So this piece is my attempt to say...