Standing at the Edges of Resilience

3 Ways to Explore Resilience

I've been turning toward resilience a lot lately and this Field Note is an expansion on the piece: Resilience Looks Like Many Things.

When I first encountered the word resilience, whilst working in financial services, it simply felt like a stick people used to beat others with: a way of saying you're not tough enough, you need to ‘man up’ (whatever that means), you just aren't coping well enough.

It took me a while to realise that’s not its only, or truest, meaning.

It’s led to three episodes of the podcast, looking more deeply at specific aspects of resilience that I feel don’t often get seen or named.

Resilience, I've come to feel, is loving ourselves sufficiently that we're able to keep showing up in the world.

That's what came out of my mouth when Adam Lind asked me to define it during our conversation in season 20, episode 19 (S20E19). I'd deliberately not looked up a definition beforehand, because I wanted to feel for the edges of it rather than start from something fixed. And that's what landed.

What does it mean to you, when you hear the word?

I've been looking at it from three angles - the self care bank, masking and performance, and the inner critic - and what I've found is that all three of them keep circling back to the same thing. Not toughness. Not grit. Something much truer than that.

The self care bank (S20E18)

The idea of the self care bank is one that's been with me for a while now - it actually started life as a one-day retreat I ran a few years ago. And the reason it keeps coming back is because I think it changes the conversation in a really important way.

So often, what gets labelled as lack of resilience is actually lack of resource.

When our self care bank is running low - when we've had nothing left for the things that restore us - it's extraordinarily difficult to feel resilient. And yet the cultural story we've absorbed, certainly in so many workplaces, is that this is a personal failing. That people who are overloaded, stressed beyond all reasonable measure, are simply not resilient enough. It used to leave me feeling deeply frustrated. If I'm honest, it still does.

Most of us, most of the time, are doing the best we can with the resources we have available. That feels so important to say.

One of the things that genuinely moves the needle is self awareness with self compassion - not so that we collapse under the weight of what we see, but so that we can also notice the tiny steps available to us. Even just noticing that our bank is getting low is part of how we begin to shift things.

What are the things that quietly drain your self-care account without you realising? And what are the things you’re actively choosing, to help you save for a rainy day?

Masking, performance, and being alone with ourselves (S20E19)

Adam and I had the most extraordinary conversation about this - it went places I genuinely hadn't expected.

We talked about masking, which in its broadest sense is about not feeling safe enough to show up as our true selves. It's something so many of us learned early. I know I did. I learned that if I felt uncertain, lost, uncomfortable, lonely - if it felt like I'd been abandoned by the people around me - I could put on a performance and show up as though I was okay. And for most of my life, I think I believed that was resilience. There is something resilient about it. But when you start to look at what's sitting underneath - the fear, the fragility, the pain - you begin to see that the performance might no longer be needed in the way you thought it was.

What struck me most in that conversation was something Adam said about being alone.

He said he thinks some of his worst habits show up when there's no one around - the scrolling, the things that don't really serve him - and yet in company, in conversation, on a stage, he's fully alive. And then I recognised something similar in myself. On my recent trip away in the van, I noticed this strange impulse to perform to nobody - to set the van up in the way that showed the world what kind of person I am, even when there was no one there to see it. It was only when I let that go and just... cocooned in... that I had the most wonderful time.

Who are you when nobody's watching?

I think this is actually where some of the deepest practice of self compassion lives. Not when we're in company and it's easier to show up well, but when we're on our own with those slightly younger, more habitual parts of ourselves, and we can meet them with kindness rather than criticism.

The inner critic - or whatever we choose to call it

And this brings me to the third thing - which is really the heart of all of it.

I will occasionally use the phrase "inner critic" because it's useful shorthand. But I want to be honest: I don't really think I have an inner critic. What I have is parts who are desperately trying to keep me safe in the world.

When I hear a voice telling me I'm not enough, or I've done too much, or I'm not capable - when I give that a bit of space and just breathe - what I usually find is a voice that’s been around a while. Often quite a young one. One that formed at a moment in the past and has been doing the same job ever since, trying to protect me from something painful happening again.

Richard Schwartz's latest (brilliant) book on Internal Family Systems is called No Bad Parts. And if we hold that premise - that there are no bad parts - then we have to extend it even here. To the voice that can feel like our worst enemy. To the thing inside us that can seem so counterintuitive to turn toward with kindness.

And yet.

When we can turn toward those voices and just ask - what is it, my love? What are you most afraid of? - the answers come so quickly. It's trying to keep me from looking foolish. It's worried about something that happened at school. It doesn't want me to feel shut out of the group again. It doesn't know that we're not eight years old anymore.

So the work, as I said in the episode, becomes a kind of parenting. Parenting those parts. Showing them what love sounds like by modelling it - by turning toward them with love ourselves.

None of this is a quick fix. Of course it isn't. It's a process.

And it means we can stop pedestalling ourselves - holding ourselves to this impossibly high standard that makes genuine self compassion almost impossible.

When we can stand rooted to the ground, feet in the grass, and see ourselves as the human that we are - perfectly imperfect - then we can also grow. Not because we've let ourselves off the hook, but because we're finally being honest about the reality of what we're experiencing.

I think being in the world with love, right now, might be the most resilient thing we can possibly do.

If you'd like to explore any of this more - the self care bank, resilience and masking, or working with those inner parts - you can find all three episodes of the podcast wherever you love to listen or just listen here.

And if everyday compassion feels like something that might support you in this - in those small daily pauses with yourself - this beautiful book of daily contemplation is available here.

With love
Henny