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I Wore Resilience Like a Badge—Until I Realized It Was Holding Me Back
Not all resilience moves you forward. Here’s how to spot the kind that doesn’t.
I’ve watched talented people unravel after a single bad quarter. Not because the situation was hopeless, but because they couldn’t absorb the hit and keep moving.
Over the past decade inside startups, I’ve had my own resilience tested in brutal ways: a funding round collapsing with weeks of runway left, a key team member resigning at the worst possible moment. In those moments, the question wasn’t whether things were hard—of course they were. The question was whether I could function inside the difficulty, think clearly, hold the team together, and find the next move in a fog of chaos.
I’ve heard “You’re so resilient” and “You always get back up” more times than I can count. I took pride in being that leader.
But sometimes, pride blinds you. We get so busy bouncing back that we forget to ask whether we should be bouncing in a different direction entirely.
Two Kinds of Resilience
There’s the good kind: staying calm, practicing self-compassion, avoiding the quicksand of self-pity.
Then there’s what I call performative resilience—and it’s dangerously hard to recognize. In a working world that rewards endurance above almost everything else, most people never learn to tell them apart. That gap costs us more than we realize over our careers.
What Real Resilience Actually Builds
Real resilience—the kind built when we work through challenges we’ve chosen and ones life throws at us—changes us on a cellular level. Every time we navigate a new hardship, our brain gathers evidence that we are capable.
Think about the moments in your career where you were in over your head. Maybe it was the first time you led something that actually mattered and could fail. Maybe it was when someone looked at you in a crisis and suddenly you were the leader, freighted with responsibility.
You probably didn’t feel resilient in those moments. You felt scared, uncertain, maybe even fraudulent. And yet, you did what needed to be done.
That’s the thing: resilience changes how we make decisions under pressure. It changes our relationship with failure—not because failure stops mattering, but because we’ve already proven we can absorb it and keep moving. Most importantly, it changes our relationship with ambition. Real ambition requires risking real failure, and we can only afford that if we trust that failure won’t break us.
I’m naturally optimistic. My default is forward motion. Optimism and resilience feed each other. But there’s a catch: optimism can mask the moment when real resilience quietly becomes performative resilience.
The Other Kind: Performative Resilience
Back in 2019, when I joined the Muse, most of our millions of monthly users arrived via Google after finding our career articles. The problem? Very few knew we had a job board, let alone interacted with it.
We spent months in weekly exec meetings planning tactics to convert content readers into job board users. Each time, we’d align on a plan, set our engineers loose, and wait. Nothing moved. Over and over, we deployed new tactics. Same outcome. No material impact.
We kept getting back up, forging ahead with more resilience each time. But we were operating inside a broken system. We didn’t have the right expert at the table.
This is performative resilience in the making. We were in denial about our ability to solve the issue, and we kept pushing through.
So we paused. I went out and brought on a Head of Product with a proven track record in marketplace conversion. It took two months to get this person onboard. Imagine the negative self-talk: You’re wasting time! We don’t have two months! We need results now!
Within 3–4 months of his onboarding, we saw a >150% increase in the metric we’d been banging our heads against for nearly a year.
We could have kept forging ahead with more resilience, more persistence. Instead, we recognized our approaches weren’t working. We had resilience but no destination.
The pause wasn’t free. Two months to hire, three more to see traction. But a year of performative resilience had been far more expensive.
The Sneaky Difference
Performative resilience doesn’t announce itself. It arrives gradually, almost sneakily. You’re still showing up. Still killing yourself to deliver. Still the person the room turns to when things get difficult. Still accepting compliments on how resilient you are.
From the outside, nothing has changed. From the inside, something has.
The difference is destination.
The first kind of resilience has a specific destination. You’re pushing through something difficult because on the other side is a version of yourself that doesn’t exist yet. Your discomfort has a direction. You can feel it even in the hardest moments—something building underneath the difficulty, a sense that your effort is taking you somewhere real.
The second kind has no destination. You’re enduring rather than growing. The challenge in front of you today looks like the same damn challenge from six months ago. You’re not being stretched toward something new. You’re being tested by the same test.
That’s what makes performative resilience dangerous. Not that it breaks you—it doesn’t. It keeps you performing beautifully on the outside while something underneath goes awry. Everyone is complimenting you on how gracefully you’re handling stress, but the system is suffering.
How to Tell Them Apart
Ask yourself two questions. Answer them honestly, not quickly:
1. Is this difficulty increasing my ability to create meaningful change—or just my tolerance for difficulty?
2. Am I expanding my capacities? Or am I just bandaging recurring issues over and over rather than finding solutions?
If the challenge in front of you is building your confidence and credibility, it’s probably the right kind of resilience. A good “tell” is if you feel enthusiasm to solve the problem.
If you feel like you’ve been working to solve the same problem over and over, and it’s draining your soul—that’s information you can use.
The people I’ve witnessed build momentum in their careers are not only resilient—they’re honest about where to apply that resilience. They push hard through worthy challenges. But they recognize when their efforts are counterproductive and have the wherewithal to stop and redirect. Not dramatically. Not a flip-the-table moment. Rather, a deliberate decision to channel their strengths in the right direction.
What To Do With This
I’m not suggesting you blow anything up. The obligations we have matter, and not everyone has a safety net. There are dozens of reasonable reasons why a dramatic exit isn’t the answer.
But here’s what I’ve learned:
If you’re building the good kind of resilience right now, stay in it. Let it build you. Don’t flinch from the difficulty. This is the kind of hard that compounds over your career.
If you’re in the second kind, you don’t need more endurance. You need redirection. Pause to think instead of doing more. Reassess. Ask: Why are we doing what we’re doing? Is it working, or is there another approach?
Offer a point of view. Volunteer to help clean something up—not because you’re struggling, but because staying close to the problem is how you start building again.
And if you’re not sure which mode you’re using, that uncertainty itself is worth paying attention to. The first kind rarely leaves you wondering.
The Badge Is Real
I want to end where I started. Resilience matters. I’ve watched what happens without it. I’ve seen talented people lose—not because they lacked skill or intelligence or opportunity, but because they couldn’t manage the hard parts.
That’s why resilience deserves to be understood precisely, rather than just blindly celebrated.
If you’ve built resilience, protect it. If you’re still building it, keep going. Teams need people who can work through challenges rather than admiring problems.
Just make sure you’re swimming forward—and not just treading water.
What Real Resilience Looks, Sounds, and Feels Like
Looks Like:
- Pausing before reacting
- Saying “I need a minute” instead of forcing a response
- Asking for help before drowning
- Having a bad quarter and talking about it transparently
- Moving slower when things get harder, not faster
Sounds Like:
- “This is hard, but I’m working through it”
- “I don’t have the answer yet, but here’s what I’m doing to figure it out”
- “I spoke to someone, and it changed how I’m seeing this”
Feels Like:
- Uncomfortable but grounded
- You feel the fear but you name it
- You don’t wait for uncertainty to pass—you move with it
What Performative Resilience Looks, Sounds, and Feels Like
- Never missing a beat because you’ll feel weak
- Volunteering for more when you’re underwater
- Needing to be the first to respond to everything
- Being the one who “doesn’t let things get to them” no matter what
- “Honestly, I’m fine”
- “It is what it is. I’m putting my head down and going”
- “I don’t need to talk to anyone, I just need to execute this”
- Everyone is admiring the outside. You’re the only one who knows what’s happening structurally
- The praise keeps coming—”You handle everything so well”—but that compliment makes you feel more alone
A Final Thought
There’s an old fable about the oak and the reeds. When the storm came, the oak stood firm and broke. The reeds bent, survived, and stood tall again afterward.
Resilience isn’t rigidity. It’s knowing the difference.
