And What Else?
Welcome to 'And What Else?', your source for thoughtful and meaningful conversations about personal and professional growth. Host Wendy O'Beirne is an internationally recognised coach and consultant with a passion for exploring the layers of topics surrounding self-development. Together, we'll dig beneath the surface of subjects, stories, and possible solutions to uncover new perspectives we may not have seen before. With curiosity and open minds, let's embark on an adventure of self-discovery and uncover the possibilities of 'and what else'. Stay Curious!
And What Else?
What If Your Strength Is Actually Holding You Back?
I'm exploring my dislike for the word resilience and making the case for using "agility" instead. Most people who describe themselves as resilient mean they'll be strong, take anything thrown at them, and weather any storm—regardless of whether they're thriving or barely holding it together.
• The problem with resilience is it's built around "toughening up," getting through suffering, and surviving rather than thriving
• We're meant to grow, adapt, and expand—not brace ourselves with an armored exterior unable to soften or ask for help
• Burnout often comes from being tired of putting on a front, keeping your guard up, and overextending yourself
• Agility means feeling our feelings, softening when needed, taking breaks, and being honest in communication
• Building capacity to navigate life's challenges means learning to move through emotions without collapsing or repressing them
• Shame around weakness keeps us in loops—affecting our vulnerability, communication, and ability to receive help
• When you lack emotional and cognitive agility, you get stuck in identity, old behaviors, and limiting stories
• True strength isn't about enduring more but about building clarity, self-trust, and flexibility in thinking and feeling
• The "strong one" identity may have gotten you far, but it often costs you in intimacy, freedom, passion, and energy for life
• Sometimes the biggest risk is simply being yourself—softening, accepting support, and letting go of handling everything alone
DM me at thecompletioncoach on Instagram. Forward this to someone who might need to hear it, leave a review, or pop me an email.
If you've enjoyed this episode, please leave me a review and subscribe! And if you want to learn more from me, come and say hello on Instagram @thecompletioncoach or via email at wendy@thecompletioncoach.co.uk or find out more about working with me on my website, thecompletioncoach.co.uk.
welcome to and what else? The podcast with me, wendy o'burn, also known as the completion coach, and I'm coming back to talk once again about my dislike for the word resilience and why I use the term agility instead. And I know I've banged on about this in many a newsletter, several podcasts, in different ways, but this episode is entirely around this problem I have with the word resilience. Most people I know who describe themselves as resilient mean they will be strong. That strong is their identity. It generally means that they will take anything that is thrown at them, that they will brace, that they will hold, that they will stay in place, regardless of whether they're thriving or even barely holding it together. It's that kind of energy that I hear the word resilient around it's I will survive any storm, I will weather it, I will stand braced for anything that is thrown at me. But I'm expecting the ship and that's great.
Speaker 1:If you're on the battlefield and you need to be resilient to survive, you need to be resilient to survive. But for most people who are not looking to live in a battlefield, that is not a life strategy and that's not a great word because it's been built around such energy of toughen up. Get on with it, stop complaining, get through it, survive through it. Survive. And to be super clear, I'm not against strength. I'm not against strength, but I am against the idea that the goal is to withstand suffering, that the more you endure, the more that you weather these storms, the more that you can put up with and get through things. I don't think that's how we're supposed to be. I don't think that's how we're supposed to be. We are here to grow, to adapt, to expand, to move through, not to brace ourselves and toughen up and have this really armored exterior and be unable to soften, unable to say no, unable to ask for help, unable to say I don't have anything left in the tank for this. And so when people are talking about being burned out, they're often talking about being tired of putting on such a front consistently, never, never being themselves, having to keep their guard up. They are tired of being emotionally drained, both by overextending themselves, being the nice person, the good person no-transcript.
Speaker 1:When I think about people that use the word resilient with me, they are usually people saying I'm stuck. I'm stuck in a cycle of something that I actually want to move. I want to shift something inside of me and I want to stop gripping so hard, gripping so hard to everything where everything feels like force. And when I'm talking about agility, I'm talking about actually feeling our feelings, about softening, about taking a break when we are absolutely in need of and before. I'm talking about being more honest in our communication, allowing vulnerability rather than just pure strength and thinking that strength is bottling everything up.
Speaker 1:Strength is everything that's thrown at you. Strength is holding it all together all of the time, for everybody. It's about knowing when it's time to release, to let go to hand somebody else the reins back to their own chaos. It's about building the capacity to navigate your life, not being defined by the circumstances you're in, but really stepping back, zooming out and looking to see what's yours's, not yours, what you've picked up by accident. Where you need to make different decisions, where you need to feel some of the emotions that you have repressed. How you need to build this capacity to move through all of the emotions so you don't get stuck or afraid of any of them. How you can move away from continuously surviving the impact of things and instead building this agility to move through things around, things differently. About keeping things in motion, about having something that you have less rigidity around and you can see how every single topic on this podcast leads into the same thing on repeat.
Speaker 1:You know, agility says I can move through these emotions without collapsing underneath them or having to shove them down for later. I can redirect my energy, I can change things even in advance of them getting to the point I've always let them get to in the past. I can deal with my shame, because avoiding our shame is often the thing that keeps us going in loops, and if we have a shame or a fear around the idea of weakness, then we have so much shame and fear around so many other things our vulnerability, our truth, our communication, our ability to ask for help, our ability to receive from other people, our ability to soften to ourselves. Because you will have expectations that are so, so high and it will all feel, all feel completely pointless, worthless and as if it's not working. It will feel like failure all of the time when your expectations are so high, so guarded and so fueled by you trying to avoid the idea of shame.
Speaker 1:Shame and guilt. Shame and guilt are very heavily linked, I find, and it also links to the level of loneliness that you will feel, because when you don't have emotional or mental agility, cognitive agility then what I find is people are so stuck in their ways, stuck in an identity, stuck in old behaviors that are really causing them problems them problems but they're refusing to change because they can't go through the rest of their emotions, feelings, thoughts, beliefs, stories that they have attached to so many things. So I never want to build resilience with a client. I want to build their capacity to have more agility, their capacity to move through everything and never just sit in it or avoid it. Capacity to really lead themselves differently, rather than going into old grooves and doing what they've always done and sticking to really old narratives and stories about themselves.
Speaker 1:Because we don't need you to be able to endure more. We don't. We need you to build, and in building we're building clarity, we're building self-trust, we're building the idea of your identity, we're building your cognitive agility, the way that you think flexibly. We're building your emotional agility, so there is more flexibility there, you have more range into what you can do, mastering that internal environment, mastering it to such a degree that you won't get stuck in your own storm, but instead you will have the ability and the capacity to handle the challenges and the problems that life inevitably will throw at you, but you won't be braced for them. You will have an air of confidence and self-trust in your ability to navigate them, in your ability to handle them, in your ability to grow through the right challenges and also to close down and hand back the challenges that you no longer want to get yourself stuck in.
Speaker 1:And this is because I want there to be less praise for the people who have this ability to handle it all, do it all, because I don't want that to be the thing that you believe is your worth how much you can handle, how much you can do, how much you can take on. I don't want you to tie that to your self-worth and resilience might have been the thing that got you here, and actually a lot of what you have and a lot of what you've done may well be good, may well be great, but may well be great, but in reality, the things that the idea of the resilience, the idea of being the strong one, the idea of being the one that can handle it all, do it all, give it to them. That's also costing you a great deal within your identity, your communication, your intimacy, your freedom, your passion, your desires, your actual energy for life. And so I'm going to ask you to really think about your relationship with the word resilient, your relationship to being the strong one. Resilient, your relationship to being the strong one, your relationship to being the person who can handle it all. And I really want you to think about your energy, your desires, your passions and how much space they have within all of that.
Speaker 1:Because when we build agility, when we can feel all of our emotions and process them, we have emotional flexibility. We are not afraid of any of them. When we have cognitive agility, we can get out of the stories we have created about who we are and who we're not, where we belong and where we don't, what we can do, what we can't do. We we stop being so limited, so limited by the stories we have created about ourselves. And if you think you haven't created stories about yourself, I would love to talk to you. I would love to talk to you because it's such a big part of who we are, and we've called them limiting beliefs because they are, but they're limiting stories, and I'd love you to just remember that anything we believe is linked to a story, and those stories are something that we're willing to accept, and what I do know is the stories that we're willing to accept really easily tend to be the ones that have a negative bias about ourselves, and the stories that we struggle to accept will often have some of our deepest desires, passions and wants underneath them, and, as all of my clients will know that they are well known for being strong, are well known for having an ability to handle it all and feel as if not many people know them truly because they've had to build such armor over time to protect themselves.
Speaker 1:Then I want you to know that you have agility in you, you have capacity in you and you have a passion underneath all of that armor that absolutely deserves its freedom, as do you, and this identity can change. These stories can change. Your trust in yourself can change Not to I trust myself to get on with it, but I can trust myself to also put shit down. I can trust myself to be really different. I can trust myself to be really original. I can trust myself to be uncommon.
Speaker 1:You know that course that I did last year Be Uncommon was about that Building the trust and agility within yourself, rather than to fit into the boxes and the molds that have been socially rewarded, have defined your career to date or have in some way just enabled you to get through in life, or have in some way just enabled you to get through in life. And what I love uncovering with people is more of who their true self is, more of who they are in the depths of that armor, and allowing them to get to the point where they feel free enough, bold enough and have the courage to really start to play with their passions in life again, really start to play with their self-expression again and take what feels like risks sometimes they're not huge risks. You may recall that my word of the year this year is risk. Sometimes the biggest risk we have is being ourselves, making a decision for ourselves, putting ourselves first, putting our voice out there, putting our ideas out there.
Speaker 1:All of that can feel like a massive risk, and what I want you to really sit with today is how much of a risk does it feel to soften, to allow yourself to be supported, to allow yourself not to be the person that has to handle it all, who is prepared for things to be really negative all the time? How can we move beyond that to really not expecting that of ourselves, not expecting ourselves to be that person anymore, and start to see ourselves as so much more than the capable one that can do it all. Sending you lots of love, as always, you can DM me at thecompletioncoach on Instagram. Forward this to someone who might need to hear it, leave a review or pop me an email.