How I Learned Resilience Is Not Toughness. It Is Recovery.

When I interviewed Dr. Ken Ginsburg about resilience, I brought up a question I’d been wrestling with:

Have we hijacked the word?

Somewhere along the way, resilience started sounding a lot like toughness.

Take the hit. Get back up. Don’t complain. Keep moving. Push harder. Do one more.

I bought into that definition for a long time.

After my diagnosis, I thought resilience meant proving I could still do hard things. I wanted to go right back at the things that scared me. If fear knocked me down, I was getting back up. If something told me I couldn’t, my response was basically, “Watch me.”

That sounds inspiring.

It can also be incredibly unhealthy.

Because sometimes getting back up isn’t recovery. Sometimes it’s refusing to accept that something has changed.

I eventually realized that resilience wasn’t becoming the old Jeff again.

It was becoming okay with the new one.

That meant stopping the constant comparison between what I could do now and what I could do before. It meant listening instead of proving. It meant understanding that strength could look like pushing forward, but it could also look like adapting, asking for help, resting, changing direction, or accepting a limitation without allowing that limitation to define me.

Recovery isn’t always a return.

I saw another version of this recently with a coaching client.

He had been trying one new idea after another in his business. Some worked briefly. Many didn’t. But every day he could point to something he had attempted.

He was taking action. He was failing forward. He was showing his team he wasn’t afraid to try things.

It looked a lot like resilience.

Except he felt like he was beating his head against a wall.

So I started asking questions.

What originally made this business successful?

What were you doing when things were working?

Why did you stop doing those things?

And why are you assuming the next new idea is more valuable than something you already know works?

Something changed in his face.

He told me that period we were discussing was the happiest he had been since starting the company.

Well, that seemed important.

We started rebuilding around what he already knew worked. Not by retreating into the past, but by recovering the parts of the business that gave him energy, produced results, and made him feel useful again.

He could still challenge himself. He could still show his team progress. He could still have that sense of achievement he had been chasing.

But now his effort had direction.

That is resilience.

Not endlessly proving you can withstand more.

Recovering enough to recognize what matters, adapting to what has changed, and moving forward as the person you are now.

Maybe the question isn’t, “How much more can I take?”

Maybe it’s, “What would recovery actually look like for me?”

If you’ve been pushing harder and calling it resilience, I’d love to hear what this brings up for you. Leave a comment, or reach out and schedule a complimentary coaching conversation. Sometimes the next step isn’t trying harder.

Sometimes it’s asking a better question.