Resilience gets a lot of praise.

Push through.
Adapt.
Keep going.

And resilience matters. Life rarely follows the plan, and our ability to recover, adjust and keep moving can carry us through some incredibly hard seasons.

But I’ve been thinking about another side of resilience.

What happens when we get too good at enduring what shouldn’t continue?

Consider the employee everyone describes as a rock star.

People leave. The workload grows. Something goes wrong, and this is the person everyone calls.

Again.

Each time, the work gets done.

From the outside, that’s resilience.

From the inside, the experience may look very different.

When Strength Hides the Problem

Sometimes the people who cope best make broken situations easier to overlook.

The employee keeps covering the vacancies.

The caregiver keeps rearranging life around everyone else’s needs.

The family member everyone depends on keeps answering the phone.

The leader keeps finding workarounds for a process that should have been fixed years ago.

They can handle it.

So we let them.

That’s where resilience becomes a trap.

Being able to carry something doesn’t mean you should have to keep carrying it.

Ask a Different Question

When the same problem keeps demanding resilience, perhaps the question isn’t:

How do I get better at handling this?

Try:

Why does this keep requiring so much from me?

That changes the conversation.

Maybe you need rest.

Maybe you need help.

Maybe a boundary needs to change.

Maybe the workload isn’t reasonable.

Maybe the process is broken.

Maybe the situation has reached the point where adapting to it is helping it survive.

Resilience can get us through difficult circumstances.

It shouldn’t become the maintenance plan for them.

There is strength in perservering.

There is also strength in recognizing when endurance has done all it can do.

Sometimes the next courageous move is to keep going.

Sometimes it’s to stop carrying what everyone has become accustomed to watching you carry.