If you feel like it’s hard to unplug and catch a break from work, you’re not alone.
In the new world of work, high-stress, “always-on” roles are more prevalent than ever.
Whether you’re leading a team, managing critical projects, or facing a demanding work environment, building resilience will be your key to thriving under pressure.
What is Resilience?
At a basic level, resilience is your ability to recover back to baseline after an effortful struggle.
To put it simply, think in terms of exercise.
Runner 1 trains hard 3-4x per week, sleeps well, and tunes their diet for optimal performance (high resilience).
Runner 2 runs once every other week, and doesn’t recover or eat with the same level of discipline (low resilience).
If both of these people run a marathon, they will see very different results afterwards. Runner 1 might be sore for a day, while Runner 2 might be fatigued for over a week.
Becoming more resilient isn't about avoiding stress. It’s about building yourself up as a system that can face stress, recover quickly, and be ready to take on a struggle again.
It’s not so different when it comes to work. In the workplace, resilience just means building your capacity to recover, adapt, and succeed in demanding environments.
By building resilience at work, you’ll empower yourself and your team members to navigate challenges while elevating your abilities to achieve more.
How to Build Resilience at Work
At Exos, we support people as whole humans. So we know that building resilience in the workplace (or anywhere else) starts with your well-being as the foundation of sustainable performance.
To expand your resilience, try these foundational practices:
1. Build Your Overall Capacity
Think about the first time you took on a new skill.
The first presentation you ever made, or the first client meeting you ever attended. It feels a lot easier now, doesn’t it?
To build resilience over time, you’ll need to expand your performance capacity — aka your mental, physical, and emotional bandwidth to do hard things.
It’s all a feedback loop. You do the hard thing. While reflecting on it, you recognize that you survived it and built your capacity. Then, you learn you can do hard things.
The next time a hard thing comes up, it then feels much easier to handle because you know you have done hard things in the past.
But let’s not overcomplicate it. Building your capacity just involves practice, along with the basics of well-being:
- Keep a Growth Mindset: Remember that as you practice your skills, you’re expanding your capacity. In other words, things will feel easier over time so long as you sustain a growth mindset. Give yourself grace — and a healthy dose of grit — as you continue to grow.
- Build Your Physical Capacity: Practice getting regular exercise, adequate sleep, and proper nutrition to help your body handle stress. The stronger your physical well-being, the more resilient you will be.
- Expand Your Mental and Emotional Capacity: Practices like mindfulness, journaling, and reflection enhance your self-awareness and emotional regulation. These strategies prepare you to respond thoughtfully rather than react impulsively to stress. Over time, challenges that feel incredibly stressful now won’t feel like a big deal at all.
2. Show Up in Your Best State
It doesn’t matter if you’re the strongest and most talented person in the world.
If you’re showing up dehydrated after only 2 hours of sleep, you won’t be very resilient at all.
Optimizing how you show up in the moment — aka your functional state — allows you to stay calm under pressure, enhancing focus and decision-making when it matters most.
Think of it this way: If your overall capacity is the size of your bucket, optimizing your functional state is how you remove existing water (stress) from your bucket so that you can take on more.
By increasing the size of your bucket and improving how well you remove water from your bucket through recovery, you become more resilient.
So, take good care of your day-to-day well-being to show up at your best in the moments that matter to you.
- Recover, Recover, Recover: Recovery is one of the most important contributors to resilience. Regular recovery breaks, like short walks or breathing exercises, keep your stress levels in check. But most of all, make sure to get 7-9 hours of high-quality sleep on a consistent schedule.
- Move Well, Move Often: Spending all day hunched over a laptop mounts physical tension in your body, and therefore fills your “bucket.” Movement counters that tension, and pours some stress out of your bucket.
- Be Smart With Your Energy: Prioritize tasks based on energy levels. For example, tackle challenging tasks when you have the most energy, and save routine work for lower-energy periods.
3. Lean On Your Support Systems
Practicing resilience doesn’t mean going it alone.
Leaning on the people who care about you gives you emotional support, fresh perspectives, and practical advice.
- Seek Mentors or Coaches: A mentor or coach can help you navigate high-stress situations with confidence. Coaches often focus on personalized strategies for building resilience, guiding you to unlock your full potential.
- Nurture Your Support Network: Surround yourself with people who uplift and inspire you. These relationships can be incredibly supportive against the stressors of demanding roles.
Grit and Resilience: A Winning Combination
Grit and resilience are two sides of the same coin.
High-stress roles often require both qualities: grit to stay committed to your goals, and resilience to pivot and recharge when circumstances demand it.
The more resilience you build, the easier it feels to build grit — and vice versa.
Final Thoughts
Remember, resilience isn’t about avoiding challenges, but thriving because of them.
By building resilience, you can succeed in high-stress roles with strength, adaptability, and purpose — emerging stronger and more capable than ever before.
Want to help your organization improve its resilience across the board?
Check out Exos’ Human Performance Coaching for organizations.
