A few different people have said some version of the same thing to me lately: I’m tired of being resilient.

They are not tired of working hard, nor are they unwilling to deal with difficult things. They are tired of always being the person who can handle it, the one everyone calls when something goes wrong, who covers the shift, takes care of the family, keeps the business running, listens to everyone else’s problems and, somehow, finds another solution. These are often the same people who feel strangely guilty when they need something themselves.

I understand this more than I would like to admit. I have spent a lot of my life being proud of my resilience. I’ve built businesses, raised a family and coached people through incredibly difficult seasons. My husband and I are both self-employed. We employ other people. I’ve reinvented myself more than once. I know how to hustle, and lately I’m kind of tired of being "good" at it.

I own a brick-and-mortar business in one of the most expensive places in the country, and there are months when keeping the doors open feels less like entrepreneurship and more like an elaborate game of financial Tetris. Move this here, pay that there, work another job, pick up another client, create another offer. Figure it out. Again.

What strikes me is how ordinary this story has become. I hear it from people with good jobs who still don’t feel financially secure, from small-business owners becoming increasingly candid about what it actually takes to stay open, and from parents piecing together multiple sources of income while trying to preserve some portion of their lives for their families. I hear it especially from women in their forties and fifties who did many of the things they were told would create stability and are discovering that stability remains remarkably elusive.

It has made me wonder when resilience stops being a strength and starts becoming something we use to tolerate conditions that need to change.

Resilience is valuable. Life will always require it. We will lose people we love. Businesses will struggle. Bodies will change. Plans will fall apart. Children will need us at inconvenient times and economies will shift regardless of what we had planned for Tuesday. There is no version of a meaningful life that can protect us from difficulty, and I don’t think we should aspire to one.

But there is a difference between developing the capacity to move through difficulty and developing an extraordinary capacity to tolerate the intolerable.

We tend to talk about resilience as though more is always better. If you can withstand this much pressure, perhaps you can withstand a little more. If you managed the last crisis, surely you can manage the next one. Competence has a peculiar way of becoming its own punishment: the better you are at carrying things, the more likely people are to hand you something else.

Eventually, even we begin to participate in the arrangement. We stop asking for help because we are accustomed to being the helper. We accept the late email, the extra responsibility or the relationship in which care seems to travel mostly in one direction. We become so practiced at adapting that we forget adaptation is not our only option.

Sometimes the environment needs to change. Sometimes we need support rather than another strategy for functioning without it. We need reciprocity, boundaries and stability. We need families, workplaces and communities in which the person who usually carries everyone else is occasionally carried too.

There is, of course, a larger conversation here about work and money and the systems in which all of this takes place. I don’t believe we can shop our way out of structural problems, nor do I want to hand exhausted people one more responsibility by suggesting that every purchase, career decision or interaction must become an act of moral perfection. Most of us are making choices inside constraints we did not create.

Still, within those constraints, we have agency. Where we spend our money matters. So does whom we hire, recommend and support. The way we treat the people who work for us matters. The decision not to answer the email at nine o’clock can matter. Asking the dependable friend how she is doing, and staying long enough to hear the real answer, matters. So does asking for help ourselves before we are completely underwater.

I think about this often in my own industry, which is crowded with people selling certainty where certainty does not exist. There will always be someone promising faster weight loss, better hormones, a perfect body or an effortless transformation. It can be difficult to stand beside those promises with something slower and less glamorous: evidence, nuance, patience, honesty.

There are days when I wonder how someone trying to work ethically is supposed to compete with that. Increasingly, I think the answer is that I don’t.

I can tell the truth. I can do good work and charge fairly for it. I can admit what I don’t know and refer people to someone else when the problem is not mine to solve. I can refuse to manufacture fear so that I can sell someone the antidote. I can support other people who are doing good work, even when their work competes with mine. I can try to build businesses and relationships that I can still respect when I am standing on the other side of them.

None of this is particularly revolutionary. Maybe that is the point. For years, I have thought about strength in terms of capacity: the ability to carry more, withstand more, recover more quickly and keep moving. I still believe there is tremendous value in building that capacity. It is, quite literally, much of my life’s work.

But I am beginning to think there is another kind of strength in becoming more discerning about what we carry in the first place.

Resilience asks us how we will keep going. There are seasons when that is exactly the question we need. There are others when we might be better served by asking what we are trying so hard to endure, whether it is ours to endure indefinitely, and what might become possible if we stopped automatically assuming that our job was to figure it out.

I don’t want to become less resilient. I don’t want that for the people I coach either. I want resilience to be something we can call upon when life genuinely requires it, rather than the permanent operating system through which we live.

Maybe being strong is not only knowing that you can carry the weight. Maybe it is knowing when you no longer should.

NBC-HWC | ACSM-CPT

Mental PEAKS: The Resilience Audit

Resilience is useful when life knocks you down. It becomes exhausting when you need it just to maintain your normal life.

Chronic stress without enough recovery can contribute to burnout, particularly when demands stay high while control, resources, support, or reward stay low. So instead of asking, “How can I get better at handling this?” try asking whether everything you're handling needs to remain yours.

Try this:

Think about one thing that has been draining you lately and ask:

• What am I carrying? Name the actual demand.
• Does this need endurance, or change? Some hard things can't be avoided. Others can be renegotiated.
• Where do I need support? And have I actually asked for it?
• What can I put down? Delegate it, change it, say no, lower the standard, or stop doing it altogether.
• Where can I give support? Look for someone in your life who is usually the strong one.

Then choose one action this week that reduces the load instead of making you stronger at carrying it.

6 Weeks 2 Strong starts September 14. This is six weeks of structured strength training, coaching, and practical support designed to help you build consistency without making fitness your entire life. You’ll get three scalable workouts each week, guidance to help you keep going when life gets messy, and a plan built around progress—not perfection. ​Join 6 Weeks 2 Strong →​ ​ Join Now

A First Look at Power in Practice 2027

A little preview of what’s next…Power in Practice is heading to the Dolomites, Italy in Spring 2027. Our retreats are about intentional movement, adventure, connection, great food, and stepping outside everyday life for a while. Think alpine trails, daily movement, spa time, incredible meals, and a small group of very good humans in Ortisei. We’re still finalizing the details, but this one will be intentionally intimate. If this already has your attention, hit reply and tell me you want first dibs on the Dolomites details!

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