Stop Asking Employees to be Resilient
A deep dive into the NPR Life Kit podcast on “why being resilient might matter less than you think”
I work for myself, alone, at home. I don’t have any face to face meetings to attend and no coworkers to chat with over coffee. While I’m very happy with my work, I know that if I don’t schedule time to get out of the house, I might not emerge from my apartment for days.
My favorite way to take a break from the 4 walls of my home is to head out on a long walk (ideally straight uphill–I am in San Francisco after all) and listen to podcasts. I listen to people talk about building their freelance businesses, improving their social media strategy, and detailing their hilarious dating experiences.
During a recent jaunt through my neighborhood and into the Presidio (a beautiful and awesome national park next to the Golden Gate Bridge), I tuned into this NPR Life Kit podcast episode on “why being resilient might matter less than you think.”
This really got me thinking. Just a few weeks ago I published an article interviewing an expert about how to practice mindfulness in sales. He discussed resilience as an important component of sales success. But is resilience the cure-all that business leaders want us to believe?
Do I have to be resilient forever?
Having the skills to do your job is one thing. Sales absolutely requires resilience. There’s lots of rejection, competition, and sometimes not-so-nice customers. The difference is that salespeople choose to sign up for this. They know it’s part of the job and accept the challenge, ready to get back up after a loss and try again.
But feeling like we have to be resilient in the face of constant life challenges is another thing entirely. In this NPR Life Kit episode, host TK Dutes talks with Lourdes Dolores Follins, psychotherapist and licensed clinical social worker, about why we shouldn’t have to be resilient all the time. TK opens the episode with this:
When people called me resilient, I would say… thank you? But it didn't feel like a compliment. It's one of the weirdest compliments one can get. The only one where people make a pity face when they say it. “You’re so resilient”–and then that face.
I know that feeling. I’ve made some bold choices in life, like moving to Australia for 4 years or quitting my full time job to freelance, and I’ve been called brave quite a few times. This can feel really nice in context. But when I have told someone about past health concerns, like battling depression, I don’t like hearing, “you’re so brave.” Uh…okay? I’m not trying to be brave, I’m just trying to survive!
Dr. Follins put into words what the whole concept of resilience feels like for me:
Resilience is a process that involves adapting positively in the context of significant adversity. It’s not something that you have, it’s something that you work at developing, like muscles. The workout is constant hardship, usually from systems we have no relief from.
Receiving praise for surviving in economic and social systems that make your life harder than it needs to be doesn’t feel good. In fact, when low wage workers, people of color, women, and LGBTQ+ people have to fight obstacles in their life that others do not, being resilient is just freaking exhausting.
Are we all secretly crying at work?
Last week I posted on LinkedIn about crying at work, which is definitely NOT seen as a sign of strength and resilience. I've cried more times over the years than I can count. I used to feel very embarrassed afterwards but I just couldn't hold it back.
What many people think of as “resilience” boils down to: not addressing our feelings at all. Pretending like everything is fine when a manager throws you under the bus, or a customer yells at you, or any number of instances when we’re treated as less than human in the workplace. It’s ignoring the full breadth of human emotions because–so we’re told– anger, sadness, or embarrassment just don’t “belong” in the office. Dr. Follin says:
When we’re trying to be resilient, we stop and ask which emotions are socially appropriate for the situation. It's always about what’s socially acceptable. This is how neoliberalism works. It's designed to focus on, not just peoples’ worth as workers, but to focus on individuals, and separating and dividing us.
The way we define resilience is solitary and lonely. We have to be strong. We can’t show softness or weakness. It discounts the basic human need to lean on your community, learn coping skills, and most importantly, get support from our family, friends, church group, colleagues, whoever.
In my LinkedIn post comment feed, I mused that maybe all of us are sneaking away to cry at work and hiding it from each other. When I used to look around the office, I saw a room full of stoics who powered through difficult conversations, led through strength, and didn't let anyone cut them down.
But a fly on the wall in bathrooms, courtyards, and in our cars might show that we’re all crying, at least sometimes. When we operate in survival mode, we feel the need to hide our true selves. We bury “negative” feelings like sadness, anger, and shame deep down and pretend we’re fine.
But we as humans have been gifted such complex and amazing emotions! Why shouldn’t we use them all? We should cry as a way to physically deal with something upsetting. We can show frustration when a colleague intentionally does something to harm us.
Some people are forced to be more resilient than others
I still stress out about work. I don’t have a team to lean on, or a manager to ask for guidance, and I have to pay social security taxes out of my own pocket. But I haven’t cried about work since I quit my full time job in December 2020. I will cry if I need to at any point in the future, but knowing that I can change my situation instead of being forced to be resilient, makes all the difference in my mental and physical health.
TK Dutes and Dr. Follin also discussed how the concept of resilience can be used by those in positions of power to put pressure on certain communities that they “feel” have a larger capacity for resilience, to fix terrible problems. That CEOs and politicians only invite these groups to lead when things are falling apart, instead of when building something in the first place.
There is a current trend to listen to black women, to hire black women, to make them fix everything. Due to our capacity to bear the weight of difficult situations… That the people in power choose who gets to clean up and fix things–without being the hero. They pick marginalized groups because “these people know how to clean.”
Please listen to the podcast to learn more about TK and Dr. Follin’s personal experiences–they explain things better than I can ever summarize. Better yet, click on the article link to view the awesome comic, created by Connie Hanzhang Jin, that narrates this conversation.
Resist being resilient
I’ll leave you with Dr. Follin’s advice on the whole idea of complimenting people for being resilience:
Stop saying this to people. It’s not a compliment. If anything, we should think, what can we do to change things that give people these experiences?... It’s insulting to compliment people for this. It disregards all the foolishness they went through, but that they shouldn’t have had to go through…
Resistance can sometimes be better than resilience. Resilience can be giving up and going back to a way of being that isn’t good… Resist by leaning into sadness, anger, frustration, disappointment, or overwhelm. Use these emotions to collaborate with others to fight back and change things.
No matter who we are, how strong we may be (or are perceived to be), at the end of the day, we’re simply human beings. Human beings who work at endlessly stressful jobs because that’s how we survive in our world. Human beings with deeply complex emotions.
Human beings who hide how much we actually cry at work.