When Resilience Turns Against You

Resilience Without Boundaries Is Just Endurance

Resilience is praised as a strength. But too much resilience is dangerous.

I learnt this first 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…). Those years built an iron resilience. Later, working with disengaged youth and in secure care and prisons, that resilience carried me through trauma, chaos, and rage.

But here’s the problem: resilience can become a mask.

It lets you stomach what should never be normal. Criticism. Chaos. Incompetence. 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, emotionally immature. One minute lashing out, the next wallowing in faux-remorse. Never accountable. Her trail of destruction was dressed up as “high standards”.

I even built an AI bot to decipher her emails. A team joke, but also a coping mechanism. Because asking her for clarity led only to more deflection: “You’ve embarrassed me. I now have to apologise to our partners because of you.” What she really meant: You’ve exposed my lack of control.

Every attempt to offer structure was dismissed. “Too long. I’m not reading that.” Push back? You were disloyal, not smart enough, didn’t get it. She questioned everyone’s intelligence but never evidenced her own.

And when she botched a critical system build - badly planned, incoherent - she didn’t fix it. She weaponised my appraisal instead. I corrected it gently at first, but the more I exposed the gaps, the more she panicked. Panic meant escalation.

Her fallback was the tired “oops, senior moment” routine. As hollow as her constant overstatement of her abilities. Not charm. Evasion. A performance to dodge responsibility.

I became 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 asleep for 98% of the damage. Even when I raised a red flag through a staff survey, they shrugged.

And that survey? Generic, costly, box-ticking. No room for honesty, no space for context. Staff completed it, then wondered how anyone believed it would surface anything real. That was the point: it wasn’t meant to.

This was a Chair who treated everyone like mugs, blind to her own failings, inflated by her myths. The only person convinced by her act was herself.

I tolerated it. Laughed it off. Dusted myself down. Called it resilience.

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

I worked unpaid hours to prove the ideas she dismissed were correct. Not for glory - just to protect my credibility. I stayed online while grieving, not because I was okay, but because of the chaos she’d unleash if left unchecked. I dreaded holidays, knowing she’d destabilise everything in my absence. Shielding good people from incoherence became part of my job description.

I tolerated the belittling, the deflection, the control. Until I saw the cost to the team.

This wasn’t flawed leadership. It was inconsistent incompetence, disguised as standards, enabled by silence.

So I 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 endurance, in the wrong places, makes you lose sight of what right even looks like.

The best leaders don’t weaponise resilience. They create conditions where resilience isn’t your only survival tool. They foster clarity, not chaos. Direction, not dominance. And when they get it wrong, they own it. Because real resilience isn’t about swallowing poison. It’s about refusing to drink it in the first place.

This experience sharpened everything I believe about leadership. It reminded me:

• Toxicity tolerated is toxicity rewarded.

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

• Real leaders don’t need control to feel powerful.

Resilience without boundaries is just endurance. And endurance, in the wrong places, destroys you. I won’t spend resilience on the wrong people again. And I won’t mistake silence for strength.