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.
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:
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.