Resilience is often praised as a strength

Be careful you don’t have too much resilience.

I see constant posts about resilience. Tips. Quotes. Frameworks.

But here’s the thing nobody tells you:

Too much resilience can be dangerous.

Let me explain.

I started out as an actor. I wasn’t out of work much, but the rejections were brutal. “Too small.” “Not the right look.” “Too handsome for this part” (I know…). Years of constant judgment and knockbacks built an iron resilience in me.

That resilience carried me into later work with disengaged youth, and within secure care and prisons. Trauma, chaos, rage — I could take it. I'd had worse.

But here’s the problem.

Resilience can become a mask.

It lets you stomach what should never be normal. Criticism, chaos, incompetence. You get used to it. You stop noticing. Until it’s too late.

I once worked under a so-called leader who made this crystal clear.

She was erratic, hostile, and emotionally immature. One minute lashing out, the next wallowing in faux-remorse. But never accountable. Her leadership was a trail of destruction dressed up as “high standards”.

I once built a bloody AI bot to decipher her emails. A team joke, but also a coping mechanism. Because asking her for clarity just led to more deflection. “You’ve embarrassed me,” she’d hiss. “I now have to apologise to our partners because of you.”

What she really meant: You’ve exposed my lack of control.

She dismissed every attempt to offer structure or thought. “Too long. I’m not reading that.”

If you dared push back? You were either not smart enough, not loyal enough, or just didn’t get it - her favourite move was to question your intelligence, despite giving no evidence of her own.

And when she knew she was making a pig’s ear of an important system build - badly planned, confused, all over the place - she didn’t fix it. She weaponised my appraisal instead.

It was classic her. A mess of contradictions and nonsense. Her signature style. I red-penned it. Gently, at first. Gave her the benefit of the doubt. But the more I corrected the gaps in self-awareness and the sheer lack of operational grip, the more she panicked. And when she panicked, she escalated.

Her usual fallback — the tired line about “oops, sorry, a senior moment” — wore thinner with every repetition. As tedious as her constant overstatement of her own abilities. This wasn’t charm. It was evasion. A performance designed to dodge responsibility.

Suddenly, I was the problem. The threat. I had to go.

Then came the narrative control. A quiet rewrite of events, supposedly endorsed by the board. A board who, let’s be honest, understood maybe two percent of the damage she had done and were asleep for the other ninety-eight. So disengaged that even when I raised a very public red flag — in the form of a staff survey — they shrugged it off.

And that survey? Utterly uninspiring. No room for honesty. No space for context. Just a generic, costly one-to-five tick-box exercise in managed appearances. Staff were asked to complete it, then left wondering how anyone thought it would surface anything meaningful. It didn’t. That was the point.

This was a Chair who treated everyone like mugs, while being the biggest mug in the room. Blind to her own failings. Inflated by her own myths. And utterly unaware that the only person still convinced by her act was herself.

I suspect this was a woman who has never once been challenged in her adult life. Not properly. For reasons rooted somewhere in unchecked ego, she believed people feared her. They didn’t. I certainly didn’t. I just got bored. Bored of the monologue. The endless stream of words with no substance. No accuracy. No accountability. Always convinced she was right, and almost never was.

Her version of leadership was volume over value. Opinion over evidence.

And my refusal to nod along? That was unforgivable.

And me?

• I tolerated it.

• Laughed it off.

• Dusted myself down.

Resilience, right?

But it wasn't resilience. It was suppression. And it made me complicit.

I worked unpaid hours to prove that the ideas she dismissed out of hand were, in fact, entirely correct. Not for glory. Just to protect my credibility - because it was exhausting having to constantly mop up behind her and re-establish the truth.

I stayed online while grieving. Not because I was okay, but because I knew the chaos she’d unleash if left unchecked. I dreaded taking holidays, knowing she’d swoop in, destabilise everything, make unilateral changes without consultation — and never for the better.

I found myself regularly emailing the team, telling them to ignore her latest outburst and let me handle it. That became routine. Shielding good people from her incoherent ramblings and reckless interference became part of my actual job.

I tolerated the belittling, the deflection, the control. Until I saw what it was doing to the team.

This wasn’t just flawed leadership. It was inconsistent incompetence. Disguised as high standards. And enabled by silence…..

Then I finally said: Enough.

She painted me as the problem, of course. People like that always do. They don’t lead. They offload.

So I walked.

Because resilience without boundaries is just endurance.

And enduring the wrong things makes you lose sight of what right even looks like.

The best leaders don’t weaponise resilience. They create conditions where it’s not your only survival tool.

They foster clarity, not chaos. Direction, not dominance. And when they get it wrong, they own it.

This experience sharpened everything I believe about leadership.

It reminded me that:

• Toxicity tolerated is toxicity rewarded

• Leaving isn’t failure. Sometimes it’s survival

• Real leaders don’t need control to feel powerful

I won’t spend resilience on the wrong people again. And I won’t pretend staying silent is strong.