Resilience Recap

Pressure can sharpen us or break us what separates the two is a leader’s system of resilience. We bring together the most useful lessons from a month of conversations and coaching to show how four pillars work in concert: regulating your nervous system, reconnecting with your purpose, practicing flexible thinking, and building relationships that hold under strain.

We start by drawing a clear line between pressure and stress. You’ll hear how to spot a dysregulated state, why decision quality plummets when your nervous system tips into fight, flight, freeze, or fawn, and the simple regulation practices that restore clarity in minutes: paced breathing, sensory grounding, movement, and sleep hygiene. 

From there, we move into purpose as real fuel, not platitudes. By surfacing your personal why and aligning weekly actions to it, motivation becomes renewable and setbacks feel like tuition instead of failure.

Next, we dig into flexible thinking the difference between high-performing and extraordinary leaders. Learn how the 80% rule beats perfectionism, how to treat ambiguity as signal rather than threat, and how to use premortems, red teaming, and quick after-action reviews to turn experiments into learning. We close by showing why resilience isn’t a solo sport. 

Psychological safety, peer networks, and a personal board of advisors prevent isolation and spread the load, so challenges become shared puzzles rather than private battles.

Walk away with a compact, actionable framework: regulate to think, reconnect to care, act at 80% to learn, and invest in relationships to endure. If this resonated, subscribe, share it with a leader who needs it, and leave a review. 

Want to go deeper? DM me on LinkedIn with the word “resilience” and I’ll send a free resource.

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Chapters

• 0:06 Setting The Stage On Resilience
• 0:45 Pressure Versus Stress Explained
• 2:11 Regulating The Nervous System
• 2:33 Reconnecting With Personal Purpose
• 3:39 Flexible Thinking And The 80% Rule
• 4:48 Relationships As A Resilience System
• 6:30 Four Pillars Recap And Reflections
• 7:18 Closing And Listener Invitation

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:06

Hello and welcome back to Leadership Horizon. I'm Loise Burton and today we're doing something a little different. Over the past month we've explored resilience from multiple angles and I've recently had several listeners reach out asking me to pull together the key threads. So today I want to take you back through some of the most powerful resilience principles we've discussed. Because it's the start of the year and it's a good time to pay attention to your resilience. Because resilience isn't just a nice to have quality, it's the foundation that determines whether leaders merely survive change or actually thrive through it. Let me start with something I see constantly in my coaching work. Leaders often confuse resilience with toughness or the ability to just push through. But that's not what resilience is. True resilience is about bounce back ability. It's about being able to adapt, recover, and actually grow stronger through the challenges rather than just grinding through them. Now, if you've been listening to previous episodes, you'll remember I talked about the stress pressure performance dynamic. This is absolutely foundational. Here's what neuroscience tells us and what I see play out many, many times in my coaching work. Stress and pressure aren't the same thing. Pressure can actually enhance your performance up to a point. It's that sense of I've got an important presentation or this deadline matters. That kind of pressure sharpens focus and can bring out your best work. But stress, stress is what happens when we feel we don't have the resources to meet the demands we're facing. And when your nervous system tips from pressure into stress, everything changes. You move into what we call a dysregulated state, fight, flight, freeze, or form. And here's the critical piece. You cannot make your best leadership decisions from a dysregulated nervous system. You just can't. I've been working with a leader in the financial sector recently who was making increasively, increasingly sorry, reactive decisions. When we explored what was happening, we discovered his nervous system had been in a fight or flight mode for months. The moment we started working on regulation techniques, and I'll come back to this, his decision-making quality transformed. This brings me to the second point on resilience that we've discussed before: inner drive and motivation. One of the questions I ask leaders all the time is this what's your why? Not the company's why, your why. Why did you become a leader in the first place? What originally lit you up about this work? Because here's what happens leaders get so caught up in the day-to-day demands, the endless meetings, the firefighting, that they lose connection with their original purpose. And when you lose that connection, your resilience tanks. You're running on willpower alone, and willpower is a finite resource. So I'd encourage you to do this exercise this week. Take 10 minutes and write down what you cared about when you first stepped into leadership. What difference did you want to make? What excited you? And then ask yourself honestly, when was the last time you felt that spark? Because reconnecting with your purpose isn't self-indulgent, it's essential fuel for your resilience tank. The third point that we've previously explored is flexible thinking. This one is fascinating because it's where I see the biggest gap between high-performing leaders and extraordinary ones. Flexible thinking isn't about being wishy-washy or lacking conviction. It's about being able to hold multiple perspectives simultaneously. It's about being curious rather than certain. In previous episodes, I've also talked about the 80% rule. This principle that action beats perfection, that you move forward when you have 80% of the information rather than waiting for complete certainty. That's flexible thinking in action. It's being comfortable with ambiguity, being willing to adjust your course as new information emerges, and seeing challenges as puzzles to solve rather than threats to defend against. Think about it this way. When your thinking is rigid, every setback feels like a failure. But when your thinking is flexible, setbacks become data points. They become, that didn't work. What can I learn? What do I try next? That mental shift is enormous for your resilience. Now, a final key point is building strong working relationships. Because here's the truth: resilience is not a solo sport. The lone warrior leader who thinks they have to handle everything themselves, that leader burns out every single time. The research is clear on this, and my coaching experience backs it up completely. Leaders who build strong networks of support, who create psychological safety in their teams, who aren't afraid to be vulnerable and ask for help, these are the leaders who weather the storms and come out stronger. I was coaching a director in healthcare who prided herself on never showing weakness, but that approach was costing her. Her team didn't feel safe bringing her problems, which meant issues festered. She wasn't reaching out to her peer network when she was struggling, which meant she was solving problems in isolation that others had already cracked. When we worked on building her relationship network, both in terms of her leadership's team's resilience and her own, everything shifted. So here's what I want you to take away from today. Resilience isn't one thing, it's a system. It's understanding and managing your stress response. It's staying connected to what matters to you. It's keeping your thinking flexible and curious, and it's building relationships that can hold you when things get tough. The leaders I work with who truly excel at resilience don't just have one of these pillars sorted. They're consciously working on all four. They're paying attention to their nervous system, they're protecting their connection to purpose, they're practicing flexible thinking, and they're investing in relationships. So as we wrap up today, I want to leave you with three questions to reflect on this week. First, when did your nervous system last feel truly regulated and calm? If you can't remember, that's your signal to prioritize regulation practices. Secondly, when did you last feel genuinely connected to your purpose? If it's been a while, that's your cue to reconnect with your why. And third, who are the people who strengthen your resilience? Are you investing enough time in those relationships? Remember, the way we led yesterday won't lead us into tomorrow. Building resilience isn't about becoming tougher, it's about becoming more adaptive, more connected, and more sustainably powerful as a leader. Thanks so much for joining me today on Leadership Horizons. If you found this helpful, please share it with another leader who might benefit. And if you want to go deeper on any of the things that I've talked about today, DM me on LinkedIn, hashtag resilience, and I will send you a free resource. Until next time, keep expanding your leadership horizons. Goodbye for now.