Last week in my Vistage meetings, I passed a box around the room. I had placed an object in it and told the attendees that they had to guess what was inside the box.
People shook it, smelled it, tilted it, watched each other’s faces, listened to one another’s guesses, and glanced at me to see if my expression might give them clues. The energy in the room was focused and alive. And when we’d gone all the way around and nobody had guessed correctly, I shrugged and put the box away.
I did this exercise with three different groups, and when I put the box away, every room erupted.
There was a wide range of emotions – surprise, frustration, curiosity, detachment. I asked the members what story they were telling themselves in the face of the uncertainty. Some were telling themselves stories about whether or not I would tell them what was in the box later, that I may be trying to teach them something, for some, they didn’t care what was in the box. We talked about how we might show up in uncertainty, maybe we over-explain or over-control, or we avoid and retreat. We talked about what “box” was showing up for them in their work or at home, and how they were holding that uncertainty.
Most of us dislike uncertainty. It zaps our nervous system and we are wired to react to it, fast. And when we can’t, regardless of whether we run towards it or away from it, we do what high-functioning people tend to do: we keep moving. We stay busy. We find something we can control and control it. We convince ourselves that motion is the same thing as progress.
You may be asking yourself how uncertainty ties into resilience. Uncertainty is the impetus. Resilience is the reaction. In leadership culture, we celebrate the bounce-back. We promote the people who seem unshakeable. We use the word resilience like it’s an unlimited resource, like some people simply have more of it and the job is to emulate them. Keep going. Push through. Get back up. But here’s what I want to say plainly: bouncing back and never landing are not the same thing and leaders are paying a steep price for the confusion.
Resilience Is Not a Personality Trait
In Sparking Greatness, I describe resilience as “the quiet, steady force behind transformation.” I also write that it’s not about saving someone from a burning building. It’s about getting up and doing the hard thing again and again, even when no one is watching.
Notice what that definition includes and what it leaves out. It doesn’t say anything about speed. It doesn’t require that you bounce back quickly, seamlessly, or without visible effort. Sometimes resilience moves at a pace so slow, we can’t see it. Resilience requires return, persistence, and the daily decision to show up.
We’ve stripped that nuance out of the way we talk about resilience at work. Instead, we’ve created a culture where the expectation is not just that you recover, but that you recover without anyone noticing you needed to. I wouldn’t call that resilience, it feels more like performance. The concern is not only is performance difficult, it can stymie resilience.
The Hidden Tax of Perpetual Recovery
Every time you absorb a setback without processing it, file it away, and keep moving, you’re borrowing against yourself. It works for a while. When we attempt to time our resilience, to speed it up, there’s an accumulating deficit underneath, and at some point, the math stops working.
It reminds me of the Stockdale Paradox that Jim Collins references in his book Good to Great. The Stockdale Paradox comes from Admiral James Stockdale, who was a U.S. Navy pilot shot down over Vietnam in 1965 and held as a prisoner of war for over seven years, enduring torture and brutal conditions at the Hanoi Hilton.
Jim Collins introduced the paradox in Good to Great after interviewing Stockdale about how he survived when others didn’t. Stockdale’s answer was essentially this: he never lost faith that he would eventually get out, but he also refused to pretend the situation was anything other than what it was. He held both truths simultaneously — unflinching honesty about the brutal present, and unwavering confidence in the long-term outcome.
The prisoners who didn’t make it, Stockdale told Collins, were the optimists. Not optimists in the deep sense, but optimists on a schedule. “We’ll be home by Christmas.” When Christmas came and went, it became Easter. Then Thanksgiving. Then Christmas again. Each missed deadline eroded something that couldn’t be rebuilt. They didn’t die of despair exactly — they died, as Stockdale put it, of a broken heart.
It wasn’t hope that failed them, but hope with an expiration date. The moment resilience gets attached to a timeline, it becomes fragile. It has a failure condition built right into it. Stockdale’s own resilience had no deadline. He didn’t know when he was getting out, he just knew he would. That’s a fundamentally different relationship with uncertainty, and allows for a different, more sustainable resilience.
What We Lose When We Never Stop Bouncing
Here’s the deeper problem: we’ve told leaders that resilience is the answer, and in doing so, we’ve made rest feel like surrender.
There’s a reason the foundation of recovery, what I call the Big Four in Sparking Greatness, starts with the body: sleep, nutrition, hydration, breath. Notice it doesn’t start with the mind, we’re not talking about strategy or goal-setting. The body first, because without it, nothing else works. The brain can’t regulate emotion, prioritize tasks, or make sound decisions when it’s running on a physiological deficit. Sometimes we as leaders treat rest like a reward instead of what it actually is: a structural requirement of sustainable performance.
Think about the box exercise again. The discomfort in those rooms wasn’t really about the box. It was about tolerating ambiguity without resolving it. Sitting in not-knowing, even briefly, without reaching for control. That is genuinely hard. Most leaders have trained themselves to resolve uncertainty faster and faster, to the point where they’ve lost access to the pause altogether.
The challenge is that the pause is where integration happens. It’s where you make meaning of what just occurred rather than simply surviving it. It’s where your nervous system gets the signal that you’re okay, not still under threat. When we skip that, we don’t actually recover. We reset and resetting over and over is not the same as healing.
The Real Leadership Conversation
Resilience isn’t a single moment in time, it’s a pattern and a posture. It requires persistence, yes, but it also requires recovery, and those two things have to exist in rhythm with each other.
The people who sustain resilience over time aren’t the ones who never go down. They’re the ones who’ve figured out how to come back without pretending they didn’t fall and it takes something different than toughness. It takes honesty about the cost, and a willingness to attend to it.
The tension between “be resilient” and “but at what price?” is where the real leadership conversation lives and it’s less about the heroic comeback story, and more about the quieter, less celebrated practice of building the conditions that make coming back possible at all.
Nobody in those rooms could tell me what was in the box. And when I put it away without revealing the answer, something interesting happened: the discomfort didn’t last. It passed. They were fine. The not-knowing turned out to be survivable, and they survived it without doing a single thing.
That’s the practice. Not every uncertainty needs to be solved. Not every setback requires an immediate sprint forward. Sometimes the most resilient thing a leader can do is stop, let the weight of what just happened register, and give themselves enough room to figure out what it means before deciding what comes next.