Postcards from the Field: Deep Resilience

Postcards from the Field is where I share brief field reports from my work with real leadership teams. Rather than polished case studies, these notes surface the moments that stop me mid-session and point to the everyday habits that shape performance when conditions are uncertain. My aim is to translate what I’m seeing in the field into practical value readers can apply in their own teams.

Last week, I was invited to keynote on resilience at an HR conference.

As I prepared for the session, I found myself thinking carefully about which tools to bring into the room. There are many practical resilience skills I use with leaders and teams that would have been useful to this audience. I could have stayed close to the visible layer of the work: protecting energy, recovering more intentionally, creating better boundaries, building steadier habits in the middle of pressure. Those tools matter, and I use them often.

But the more I thought about the people who would be sitting in that room, the more I felt that surface-level resilience tactics, while valuable, would not be enough on their own.

This is an unusually hard time to be in HR.

In many organizations, HR leaders are being asked to carry contradictions that do not resolve cleanly. They are expected to help steady culture while the ground keeps moving. They are asked to support leaders, respond to employee anxiety, interpret strategic shifts, absorb political tension, and maintain credibility across groups who often want very different things. Much of that work is emotionally demanding even when it is done well. And because HR sits so close to both the human and institutional consequences of change, the pressure often arrives not as a single sharp event, but as a steady accumulation of strain.

That was what led me to include a tool I sometimes call the deep resilience engine.

 The premise is simple, but not simplistic. In crucible moments, our nervous systems are trying to keep us safe. They scan for threat, look for patterns, and mobilize quickly in the presence of emotional danger. The problem is that your nervous system is not only responding to the facts of the current moment. It is also reacting to what feels familiar. When a present-day challenge carries an emotional tone that resembles something we have felt before, especially from earlier chapters of life, the body can begin to respond as though the old moment is happening again.

That is often when limiting beliefs get loud.

Under intense stress, many people find themselves saturated by a story that feels immediate, persuasive, and deeply personal. “I am not enough for this.” “I always fall short when it matters.” “This is going to end badly.” I have seen capable, accomplished leaders get pulled into these internal narratives even while they are functioning at a very high level externally. From the outside, they may still look composed, strategic, and highly effective. Inside, however, an older script may be taking over the meaning of the moment.

What makes this so difficult is that the story is not irrational, it is protective. In many cases, the nervous system is doing what it evolved to do. It is saying, in effect, you have felt something like this before, and it hurt. Get out now before it happens again.

There is wisdom in that protective instinct. But there is also a distortion built into it. Our nervous systems often over-index on pain, failure, rejection, and fear. They are more likely to preserve the emotional charge of difficult experiences than the quieter evidence of endurance, adaptation, and competence. Over time, that means many of us unconsciously build an internal narrative from a partial archive. We remember the moments that wounded us. We forget, or at least underweight, the many moments that revealed our strength.

This is why I describe limiting beliefs as limited. They are not always false. But they are often incomplete.

The work of deep resilience is not to deny the painful parts of our history, and it is certainly not to invent a fantasy version of ourselves in which we are fearless, flawless, or superhuman. It is to widen the record. It is to make contact with the fuller truth.

One of the ways I do this in coaching is through a reflective writing process I call drafting the counter story. I ask leaders to document experiences that challenge the narrow narrative their stress response is feeding them. Where have you already been tougher than you remember? When have you adapted under difficult conditions? Where have you shown wisdom, courage, steadiness, creativity, or resolve? What evidence exists that you are more capable than the current story allows? What have you survived that once felt impossible? What have you already learned how to do?

When people begin to write these accounts down, and then revisit them repeatedly, something important starts to happen. The counter story becomes more available. Not as a motivational slogan, but as evidence. The body needs repeated contact with a fuller account of who we have been. Over time, that broader record can begin to settle in more deeply. A leader can start to feel, with greater credibility and less strain, yes, I have struggled before, and yes, I have also been resourceful, capable, and enough many times.

That is a different kind of resilience than the one we usually talk about.

Most workplace conversations about resilience focus on tactics for managing energy and reducing overload, and those conversations are important. I teach those tools too. But resilience also has a deeper layer. It asks whether, in moments of pressure, we are able to access the truest and strongest parts of ourselves, or whether an old survival story has taken over the controls.

For many HR leaders right now, that is not a theoretical question

The demands of the role can trigger a very particular kind of thrashing. You are trying to hold steady for others while your own doubts get louder. You are carrying complexity that does not always have a neat solution. You are being asked to remain strategic, relational, and composed while navigating uncertainty that keeps changing shape. In that kind of environment, resilience cannot only mean getting through the week. It also has to mean reclaiming the parts of yourself that pressure is trying to bury.

That is why I brought the deep resilience engine into the keynote.

In a room full of HR professionals who spend so much of their time helping other people navigate pressure, the invitation felt important to name. Sometimes the work is not only to regulate the nervous system in the moment, though that matters. Sometimes the work is to gently challenge the story the nervous system is telling about what this moment means, and about who you are inside it.

The hard chapters are real. The fear is real. The scar tissue is real. But so are the moments of wisdom, endurance, growth, and hard-won capability. So are the times you stayed in the room, figured it out, adapted, led, recovered, and kept going.

Resilience grows in the places where truth is given more space than fear.