What is Resilience? What It Isn’t, And Why It Needs Careful Resourcing.

There’s a word I’ve been sitting with lately. It's a word I use often in my work, but it is met occasionally with deep sighs, side-eyes, and even outright frustration. The word is resilience.

It’s a word that shows up everywhere—in workplace wellness workshops, parenting books, leadership development seminars, and countless conversations about mental health.

Overused and wrongly used, it sometimes gets thrown into conversations where it doesn't belong. Without the proper context or supportive framework, it lands badly and can feel heavy, burdensome, or even dismissive.

And I understand why.

People are tired of being told that they should be resilient, or that they already have resilience, as if resilience is a fixed label rather than a lived, evolving experience. When “resilience” is tossed out as a quick prescription for hardship—without acknowledging the context, the weight someone is carrying, or the systemic barriers at play—it loses its supportive essence. It becomes less about care and more about performance. 

They are right to feel frustrated with being told to “be resilient” without any acknowledgement of their context, capacity, or personal cost. So I’ve been thinking: is it time to stop using the word resilience, or should we work to reclaim it by asserting and acting in a way that speaks to the core of resilience?  

I strongly advocate for reclaiming the word, and that is why I created a series of video posts where I examine the concept and ways to return to the true meaning of psychological resilience.

What is Resilience, Anyway?

So what do I mean when I talk about resilience?

The short definition of resilience is to have the “ability to adapt and thrive, despite challenges.” Some people mistake this for perseverance, mental agility and mental toughness, an ability to “bounce back” after significant setbacks. But resilience is at its core a process of navigating through adversity, adapting to life change, and continuing forward in the face of difficulty. 

But here’s the part we often miss: resilience is not an individual trait. There are personal, social, and environmental factors that contribute to resilience—factors that can help or hinder our ability to recover, recalibrate, and sometimes reimagine life after challenge or loss. Our access to quality support, safety, resources, and community influences our capacity for resilience. 

Resilience grows stronger in environments that nurture access to these factors, and environments that undermine these factors diminish it. That means telling someone to “be resilient” without addressing the conditions that make resilience possible is not only unhelpful—it can be harmful.

Avoiding a Moral Imperative to “Be Resilient.” 

Framing resilience as a moral imperative—something a person “should” have—takes away its supportive essence. It becomes a measure of worth, strength, or failure, rather than what it is: a complex and adaptive response to life’s challenges. A moral imperative treats psychological resilience as a trait, implying a person either has it or doesn’t. 

We need to stop placing the burden solely on individuals, especially those already carrying so much, and acknowledge that resilience is a collective effort that consists of supportive and quality relationships, community, coping mechanisms, and an optimistic outlook.

When we let go of the moral language and talk about the set of proactive factors that are either present, absent, supported, or diminished—it shifts the focus to what can we can do to help ourselves and others feel well-resourced so that our capacity for adaptation, flexibility, and even growth in the face of challenges can come to the fore.

That shift matters. It takes resilience out of the realm of moral judgment and into the realm of collective care. After all, it is our access to care, community, safety, and meaningful opportunities—not just our mindset—that shapes our resilience. 

Why Reclaim the Word Resilience?

Resilience is navigating forward in the face of adversity with accessible and quality supportive factors in place. It shows up as the messy, human process of moving through hardship while carrying your grief, your uncertainty, your complexity and having effective coping strategies, a strong sense of community and belonging, and an optimistic worldview as travel companions.

The trouble is, we often hear that we “should” be resilient, yet many of us do not have the resources—and let’s be honest, some of us may have had it and lost it along the way—to even fathom surviving our hardships and challenges, let alone adapt and thrive. It’s no wonder resilience feels like a bad, heavy, exhaustive, and judgmental word.

I started this four-part video reflection series not to discard the word resilience, but to ask: Can we reclaim it? Can we give it space to breathe and come into its own once again? Can we let go of the unrealistic expectations and cultural soundbites and redefine resilience as a feature of our lived experience?

Because resilience isn’t a destination, and it’s not always triumphant or graceful. Sometimes, resilience is being able to get out of bed because a supportive friend came to your front door with coffee at 11 AM. It can also look like showing up and giving less than 100% because, while you know your purpose, your coping strategy during tough times is to grant yourself more grace with specific tasks. 

And sometimes, it’s recognizing that rest, retreat, and asking for help are also resilient acts.

I love the word resilience, and I sometimes wonder if there is another term that I could use in my work to convey how coping strategies, human connections, self-awareness, and an adjusted mindset or self-narrative can help us thrive despite life’s challenges. But the truth is, nothing else quite captures the scope of what I mean. Resilience comes from the Latin verb salire, which means to leap or jump; hence, resilire—to spring back or recoil—found its way into the English language, mainly through the study of physics, as a way to describe how materials and objects absorb and release energy. 

So instead of discarding resilience, I want to reclaim it by stripping away the unrealistic expectations and reconnecting it to the nuanced, human reality that psychological resilience represents. For me, reclaiming resilience means:

• Recognizing it as a process, not a fixed state.

• Returning to the idea of absorbing or releasing energy, the energy we get from community, environmental, and systemic forces acting against our personhood, bodies, and psyches.

• Naming and addressing the systemic factors that shape someone’s access to quality support, coping strategies, and mindsets that would feed their ability to adapt and recover.

• Prioritizing rest, reflection, personal relationships, physical and mental wellness, and asking for help— or to be left alone—when it's needed.

• Valuing the small, steady steps forward, and permitting ourselves to seek and find what supports us, what steadies us, and what frees us in our daily lives.  

Reframing the Resilience Narrative

So imagine if we reclaimed resilience—changing it from a demand or trait, to discourse and collective action?

We could engage in discourse that honours the stories we carry, the different kinds of healing that we each need, the capacities that we have to help each other rebuild, and even the systems that must change for each of us to thrive despite life’s challenges. 

Together, we could engage in actions that promote relationships and community connections, making others feel more included and understood. We could take small steps to help ourselves and others be proactive and purposeful, leading with curiosity and self-discovery, and being less judgmental about what we find. 

We can also take a breath now and then and keep things in perspective, recognizing that we cannot change what we do not understand, and that it takes time, patience, and testing to get to understanding.

Let’s keep the conversation going.

How do you define resilience for yourself? Share your resourcing strategies with us in the comments below. And if you need help resourcing psychological resilience for yourself or your team, feel free to contact us here.

Reyou is committed to creating space for this fuller understanding of resilience through workshops, retreats, coaching, and mindfulness-based programs that embrace an intricately connected approach to psychological resilience.

Whether you’re holding space for others or just trying to hold it together for yourself, you deserve more than a buzzword. You deserve support, understanding, and care that meet you where you are. We are here to help you reclaim resilience on your terms.

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About the Author

Dr. Patlee Creary is the founder and lead facilitator at Reyou. Patlee brings over 15 years of experience in adult education, leadership development, conflict transformation, strategic and operations planning, and mental health advocacy to her work with individual and corporate clients. An accomplished author, creative writer, and social science researcher, her work is grounded in lived experience as a Black, immigrant woman navigating academic, entrepreneurial, nonprofit and community leadership spaces.