You need more than grit to survive and thrive in high-pressure environments. Discover how to build resilience at work.
There will always be moments that knock you off course at work. Feedback that stings. A quarter that doesn’t land. A change nobody asked for. A workload that never quite lets up. Life’s one dependable feature is that it keeps throwing curveballs, at you and at your team.
Here’s what most resilience advice won’t tell you: building it isn’t about being tough. It’s about being ready.
In this piece, we’ll cover:
- What resilience actually is, and the myths that get in the way of building it properly
- Why it matters, who benefits most, and who in your team is most at risk without it
- Four practical ways to build resilience, for a single setback, a specific change, an ongoing team culture, and sustained pressure
This is written for leaders, and for anyone building towards leadership. Most of what follows works whether you’re managing a team of twelve or managing yourself through a hard year.
1. The What: what resilience actually is (and isn’t)
The myths
Myth: resilience means being unbothered. “Half the internet sells resilience as a kind of emotional Teflon: nothing gets in, nothing sticks. That’s not it,” says psychotherapist Steve Bundy, “Resilience is stuff getting to you, and you still functioning and finding your way back. You’re allowed to feel disappointed, frustrated, even a bit of a wreck for a while, and still be entirely resilient.”
Myth: it’s just grit. Pushing through matters, but it’s only half the picture. As happiness researcher Declan Edwards puts it, you need considerably more than grit to survive and thrive in high-stress environments.¹ Yielding, flexibility, knowing when to renegotiate a deadline or ask for help, is just as much a resilience skill as endurance. A rigid structure breaks under pressure it could have withstood by flexing. People are the same.
Myth: it’s a fixed trait. Some people seem naturally resilient, and others don’t, or so the story goes. The research says otherwise: resilience is best understood as a dynamic, ongoing process, not a fixed personality trait, which means it can be built and strengthened with practice.²
Myth: it’s just positive thinking. Resilient people aren’t secretly delighted about difficult things. They’re better at holding two things at once: “this is genuinely bad” and “I can probably find a way through it.” That’s flexible thinking, not forced optimism, and it’s a meaningfully different skill.
The science: why you can’t think your way out of a full alarm
Two parts of the brain are doing most of the work here, and understanding them changes how you build resilience, in yourself and your team. Clinical psychologist Dr Sam Akbar puts it plainly: if you don’t learn to think a little better, your mind will pull you off track every time.³ Here’s why:
The amygdala is your brain’s threat-detector. It can’t tell the difference between a genuine physical danger and a tense meeting, or an uncertain email from someone senior. The alarm fires regardless of which one it actually is.
The prefrontal cortex is the more rational part of the brain that handles logic and problem-solving. It weighs up information, learns from experience, and makes considered choices rather than just reacting. The catch is that the amygdala reacts faster than the prefrontal cortex can engage, it’s wired for speed, not deliberation, which is why the alarm goes off before you’ve had a chance to think anything through.
When the amygdala triggers a stress response, it can hijack or override the prefrontal cortex, pushing it offline just when you need it most. And because the prefrontal cortex normally works by drawing on memory, that same memory can turn against you during a hijack, pulling up every past failure and making the fear of failing again feel viscerally real. Firing straight into problem-solving mode before a pause means you’ll get more catastrophising, more agonising over what went wrong, and less clear thinking.
This is why grounding has to come before reframing. Trying to have a considered, rational conversation with a fully triggered amygdala is a bit like trying to have a philosophical debate with a smoke alarm.
The American Psychological Association’s definition backs this up directly: resilience is adapting well in the face of adversity, and it’s explicitly not just about bouncing back. It includes how you view and engage with the world, the availability and quality of your social support, and the coping strategies you actually use.⁴
So, what is resilience?
Put simply: resilience is the capacity to notice the alarm, let the wiser part of your brain catch up, and find your way back, again and again, without needing to become a different person to do it.
One small, well-evidenced practice worth naming here: even in genuinely stressful periods, small wins and moments of connection tend to coexist alongside the hardship, they’re just easy to miss when the amygdala is doing most of the noticing. A short daily gratitude audit, naming three small things that went well and briefly noting why, has been shown to shift the brain out of permanent threat-detection mode, making it easier to spot resources and progress that would otherwise go unnoticed.⁵
Which brings us to the point worth repeating for any leader reading this: resilience isn’t about building a team of robots. It’s not that nothing gets to your people. It’s that they’ve got the tools, leadership and support to stay bendy rather than brittle, and bounce back from difficult periods, experiences and uncertainty. Because if there’s one thing we can depend on in working life, it’s change, challenge, and conflict. Building a resilient team is how you get through all three.
2. The Why: the benefits, the cost, and who benefits the most
Why it matters
Uncertainty, conflicting personalities, failure, the fear of the unknown, none of these are going away. Resilience is what determines whether they derail you or simply pass through.
The scale of the problem, if resilience is left to chance, is considerable, and it isn’t unique to the UK:
- 44% of the global workforce reported significant daily stress, the highest level on record, according to Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace 2026 report.⁶
- 964,000 workers in Great Britain experienced work-related stress, depression or anxiety in 2024/25, accounting for 22.1 million lost working days.⁷
- 91% of UK adults experienced high or extreme pressure at work in the past year, and 1 in 5 took time off due to poor mental health caused by stress.⁸
- Teams with high psychological safety, closely tied to resilience, show measurably stronger performance and adaptability under pressure.⁹
Who benefits most
Everyone benefits from a genuine resilience practice, but a few groups see an outsized return:
People navigating frequent change. Restructures, M&As, shifting leadership, or fast-scaling teams put resilience to the test constantly, not occasionally. For this group, resilience isn’t a fluffy nice-to-have, it’s the difference between flexing and freezing.
High achievers and early-career professionals. This group tends to set unrealistic standards for itself, struggles to delegate or step back, then burns out. This makes flexible, non-punishing coping strategies extra valuable.
People managers. Caught between senior expectations and their team’s needs, while managing their own workload on top, managers absorb pressure from both directions. Building their resilience has a multiplying effect, since a manager’s resilience shapes their entire team’s.
3. The How: four ways to build it
Before the detail, the short version: resilience is built through noticing (catching the moment before it escalates), reframing (finding the story that’s actually true, not the worst one), and support (doing none of this entirely alone). Everything below is a variation on those three moves, applied to a different situation.
3.1 Bouncing back from disappointment: CAGE to NEXT
A missed target. Tough feedback. A lost pitch. Being passed over for something you wanted. A restructure that’s landed hard. However disappointment shows up, the instinct is to manage the feeling away: change it, avoid it, get rid of it, eliminate it. Clinical psychologist Dr Sam Akbar calls this a CAGE response in her book Stressilient, and it rarely works.³ Try not thinking about a white bear for the next ten seconds, and you’ll see why. The more we push a feeling away, the harder it fights back.
NEXT is what to do instead.
- Name what happened. Get specific, no story attached. “We missed target by 8%,” not “we’ve failed as a team.”
- Extract what worked. Even a disappointing result has something that held up. Naming it stops the whole thing reading as a write-off.
- eXamine what didn’t. The honest part, without turning it into a verdict on anyone’s competence.
- Try something different. One concrete change taken forward, built directly from the review.
Bring to your Coach: Practise naming a setback out loud without slipping into the story around it. Work through which parts of a recent disappointment were genuinely in your control, and which weren’t. Build a standing “what worked” habit into your own or your team’s rhythm, so it isn’t only reached for after something goes wrong.
3.2 Leading through a specific change: the Change Curve and ADAPT
If you’ve been living inside a change for six months, you’ve already been through the change curve. Your team is only just starting. Under-communicating because a change feels old to you is one of the most common, and most damaging, mistakes in change leadership.
Adaptability itself is worth naming properly here: it behaves like an intelligence, sitting alongside IQ and EQ, and it isn’t fixed. It’s shaped by character, learned ability, and environment, and leaders have the most influence over that last one.
The Change Curve, adapted from Kübler-Ross’s work on grief, isn’t a straight line, people jump around, but it gives a useful shape for what’s normal: shock, denial, frustration, depression, experimentation, integration.¹⁰ The job of a leader isn’t to rush people to the end. It’s to create space for people to move through it in their own time, and extend themselves the same grace.
ADAPT is a planning tool for the change itself, five moves that stress-test a plan rather than just hoping it holds:
- Alternatives: generating options you’ll probably reject makes the original plan easier to stick to, because it’s actually been tested against something.
- Disruptors: change makes organisations turn inward. Looking outward, at competitors, other industries, peers, breaks the tunnel vision.
- Assumptions: what do you believe to be true, and is it actually true, or do you just want it to be?
- Plans: build in flex for what you don’t yet know. Confidence in change comes from having thought it through, not from a single fixed route.
- Time: uncertainty, not the change itself, usually causes the performance dip. The faster people reach clarity, the more time they have to actually adapt.
Bring to your Coach: Map yourself on the Change Curve before mapping anyone else, you can’t authentically lead a team through a change you haven’t processed. Practise naming discomfort about a change directly, rather than smoothing it over with forced positivity. Work through one ADAPT assumption you’ve been treating as fact without ever testing it.
3.3 Building a change-ready team: the Freeze, and the Experimental Culture Toolkit
Fight and flight are familiar. The third response, freeze, is what’s quietly happening across most organisations right now: heads down, hoping the danger passes. Executive coach and author Amale Ghalbouni, drawing on 17 years of working with organisations through restructures, M&As and AI adoption, identifies the trigger precisely: high threat combined with low autonomy. People stop raising their hand, stop showing initiative, stop flagging problems. They wait.
The redundancies, restructures and shifting priorities don’t even need to be happening in your organisation to trigger it, people hear about all of it from friends, family and the news, and the underlying fear, about mortgages, families, futures, is entirely real. The good news buried in this: the freeze is a system problem, not a people problem, which means leaders have genuine leverage over it.
Amale’s Experimental Culture Toolkit sets out five ingredients for a team that stays engaged rather than frozen.
Connection
You can’t force trust, and you can’t assume it’s already there. If your team is large, start in your corner rather than trying to reach everyone at once, one-to-ones before group sessions, especially where there’s history or tension.
Try this: have one honest one-to-one this week, rather than waiting for a bigger group moment to build it.
Clarity
Too many priorities, changing too often, make it impossible to build any real cohesion. A small number of co-created, stable priorities beats constantly shifting instructions, and gives your team more ownership over the work.
Try this: pick one priority to shape together with your team this week, rather than simply announcing it.
Curiosity
The common mistake is jumping straight to a solution before the problem’s properly understood. Saying “I don’t know” isn’t a weakness, it’s where good problem-solving actually starts.
Try this: next time a problem lands on your desk, ask one more question before reaching for a solution.
Courage
The mistake is asking your team to take a risk without making it safe to do so. Courage is contagious, and the fix is simple in principle: go first, lead by example.
Try this: be the first person to stick your neck out this week, not the last.
Celebration
The mistake is celebrating the good stuff and brushing failures under the carpet. Celebrating all the learning, not just the wins, is what makes experimenting feel safe rather than risky.
Try this: introduce one regular moment, a retro or monthly check-in, to talk openly about something that didn’t go to plan.
Amale’s book, Experimental: The Restless Leader’s Field Guide for Building High-Performing, Change-Ready Teams, includes a diagnostic to identify which of the five ingredients is weakest in your team, rather than guessing or trying to fix all five simultaneously.
Bring to your Coach: Map your team on the threat/autonomy spectrum, and identify which lever, reducing threat or increasing autonomy, is more actionable right now. Practise co-creating one upcoming priority with your team rather than simply announcing it. Work through where you might be modelling certainty you don’t actually feel, and what curiosity would sound like instead.
3.4 Staying resilient under sustained pressure
Some resilience challenges aren’t one event; they’re the accumulation of many small ones, over weeks or months, without a natural endpoint. This type of prolonged stress is a genuinely different problem from a single disappointment or a single change, and benefits from its own toolkit.
→ Window of Tolerance (Siegel) names the zone where you can think clearly, take feedback, and respond rather than react.¹² It narrows under sustained pressure. Outside it, in either direction, you’ll recognise the signs:
- Hyper-arousal (snapping at a five-minute fix, a tightening jaw, short replies) or
- Hypo-arousal (going blank mid-meeting, staring at the same email for twenty minutes).
The fix for hyper-arousal is grounding, a long exhale, repeated slowly, before attempting to solve anything. The fix for hypo-arousal is small movement, standing, stretching, two minutes outside, before returning to the task.
The timing matters more than most people realise. Stress is considerably easier to manage at a 4 out of 10 than after months of momentum have built it to a 10. Most people only notice their own stress once the whole system is visibly struggling, by which point the window has already narrowed significantly. Checking in with yourself before it’s urgent, not after, is most of the work.
→ The Stress Container Model (MHFA England) is a genuinely simple, visual way to explain a pattern most people recognise instantly.
Pressure flows in constantly, from work and from life, and coping strategies are what let it drain back out.¹³ A container that’s already near full doesn’t need a big trigger to overflow, a small one will do it. Your colleague’s seemingly oversized reaction to something minor wasn’t about the thing itself, it’s about how full the container already was.
Pay attention to what’s causing your container to overflow, and what helps drain it.
→ Yielding, Not Just Gritting ties back to the “not a robot” reframe we shared earlier.
Sustained pressure often gets met with pure endurance, and endurance alone eventually breaks.
The more resilient move is sometimes to yield: renegotiate a deadline, ask for help, admit a task doesn’t fit right now. None of that is a failure of resilience. It’s what flexibility actually looks like in practice.
→ Connecting with Purpose draws on an ACT (Acceptance and Commitment Therapy) approach.
Sustained pressure drains meaning as well as energy. Goals are finishable, values aren’t, and only values keep refilling the tank.
When the pressure starts to feel pointless rather than just hard, that’s the signal to check in with this.
The fix: ask what actually matters here, underneath the deadline, then take one small action this week in service of that, whether or not it moves the target at all.
→ Pause, Assess, Respond protects capacity at its source.
The moment between being asked for something and answering. Most requests get answered on autopilot, favouring short-term ease over longer-term capacity.
A simple pause, “let me think about that and come back to you,” creates room to check what saying yes will actually cost before it’s spent.
→ The Job Demands-Resources Lens (Bakker & Demerouti) is the one framework here aimed squarely at leaders, not individuals.¹⁴
When a team’s performance dips under sustained pressure, the instinct is to run a resilience session. This model checks something else first: whether what’s being asked of the team has quietly outstripped what they’ve actually been given to meet it. Where that gap is real, the fix is structural: more resource or less demand, not another individual coping strategy layered on top of an unreasonable load.
Bring to your Coach: Identify your own early signs of narrowing outside your window of tolerance, and what grounds you fastest. Map what’s currently flowing into your container, and which coping strategies have quietly dropped off your calendar. Practise the pause before your next reflexive yes. If you’re a leader, bring your team’s current demand-resource gap as a resourcing conversation, not a performance one.
Where resilience meets home life
Everything above applies well beyond work. The same nervous system that fires an alarm over a disappointing quarter fires one over a difficult family conversation. The same container fills from home pressures as readily as work ones, and the same yielding, rather than gritting, applies to a personal relationship as much as a professional one. Building resilience at work tends to build it everywhere else too, since it’s the same underlying skill, not a separate one you switch on at 9am.
Why coaching is a game-changer for building resilient teams
For forward-thinking organisations, coaching stands out as a scalable, impactful solution. Unlike mentoring, which relies on experienced professionals within the organisation, or therapy, which is clinical in nature, coaching is flexible and adaptable to a wide range of business contexts.
By offering coaching across your workforce, you:
- Empower employees to become more self-sufficient problem-solvers
- Strengthen resilience and adaptability in times of change
- Create a culture of continuous learning and growth
At More Happi, we make coaching accessible for everyone, not just the C-suite. Our on-demand coaching platform enables organisations to offer one-to-one coaching at a fraction of the cost of traditional coaching platforms. Loved by start-ups, scale-ups and enterprise businesses.
Ready to see the impact of coaching in your organisation?
Book a call with More Happi today and discover how our coaching platform can transform the way your people learn, grow, and thrive.
Already a More Happi member?
Every framework in this article works better with a thinking partner. A More Happi Coach can help you process a recent setback, prepare to lead through a specific change, or address a workload gap before it becomes a bigger problem, whichever of these you’re facing right now.
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FAQ
What is resilience at work? Resilience at work is the capacity to adapt well when faced with setbacks, change or sustained pressure, not by becoming unaffected by them, but by having the coping strategies, support and flexible thinking to find your way back.
Why is resilience important at work? Without it, ordinary setbacks and pressure tend to compound into burnout, disengagement and higher staff turnover. With it, individuals and teams recover faster, adapt to change with less disruption, and sustain performance through periods of genuine pressure rather than being derailed by them.
How do leaders build resilience in their team? By treating it as a buildable skill rather than a fixed trait: reducing unnecessary threat, increasing genuine autonomy, modelling the behaviour they want to see, and giving people practical frameworks, like NEXT, the Change Curve, or the Job Demands-Resources lens, for specific situations rather than generic advice to “be more resilient.”
What’s the difference between resilience and grit? Grit is endurance, the capacity to push through. Resilience includes grit but also includes yielding: knowing when to renegotiate, ask for help, or step back. A purely gritty approach without flexibility tends to break under sustained pressure rather than adapt to it.
References
- Edwards, D., Emotional resilience is becoming the most valuable skill. Here’s why, Fast Company, 2026.
- Southwick, S. et al., Resilience definitions, theory, and challenges, 2014.
- Akbar, S., Stressilient.
- APA Dictionary of Psychology, entry on resilience, 2026.
- Edwards, D., Fast Company, 2026 (gratitude and threat-detection).
- Gallup, State of the Global Workplace, 2026, as reported by Fast Company.
- HSE, Work-related stress, depression or anxiety statistics in Great Britain, 2024/25.
- Mental Health UK, Burnout Report, 2026.
- CIPD, Psychological Safety: An Evidence Review, 2024.
- Kübler-Ross, E., adapted change curve model.
- Ghalbouni, A., Experimental: The Restless Leader’s Field Guide for Building High-Performing, Change-Ready Teams.
- Siegel, D., Window of Tolerance model.
- Mental Health First Aid England, Stress Container Model.
- Bakker, A. & Demerouti, E., Job Demands-Resources model.
