Here’s something that keeps me up at night, and I hope it resonates with you: We know our people need to be resilient, yet some of us are burning out ourselves. There’s something fundamentally wrong with this picture, and it’s not what you think.
I’ve stopped trying to teach/coach better techniques or create more engaging content to help people feel better, be more resilient, or get their wellness on. It’s deeper than that. I’m now thinking that resilience isn’t something people have but something they are in relationship with.
Think about it for a moment: What’s your relationship with resilience?
The Fundamental Misunderstanding
For decades, learning and development (L&D) as a “department” has inherited a mechanistic worldview that sounds logical on paper: Train the individual, and you’ll improve the organization. Teach someone stress management, emotional regulation, and mental toughness, and they’ll bounce back from anything.
But here’s what we’ve missed: Humans are relational beings. We don’t exist in isolation. We exist in connection, in relationship, in community. You can’t teach someone to be more resilient in a system that fundamentally disconnects them from what makes them human.
I see this in my own work constantly.
People ask me for productivity coaching not because they don’t know how to get things done, but because they’ve lost connection to why it matters. The same thing is happening with resilience. We’re trying to skill-build our way out of what is essentially an ontological problem—a problem of being, not doing.
Think about it: How many times have you designed a beautiful resilience program, watched people nod enthusiastically, take notes, even comment positively on the techniques…only to see them right back where they started three months later?
That’s not a training failure. That’s a design failure.
What We’re Really Seeing
Over the next week, I challenge us all to talk with 20 people we’ve worked with over the past few months…see if you can notice the “surrounded yet alone” phenomenon. Conference rooms full of people who are physically present but emotionally somewhere else. Colleagues who collaborate efficiently but don’t actually know each other. High performers who check every resilience box but still feel like they’re slowly dying inside.
This isn’t happening because people lack skills. It’s happening because they’re disconnected—from meaning, from purpose, from each other, from themselves. They’re not being fully human at work; they’re being productive units.
And here’s the uncomfortable truth for those of us in L&D: We’ve often become efficiency optimization specialists when what people desperately need are human development professionals. We’ve been asking, “How do we make them more resilient?” when the real question is, “How do we create space for their natural resilience to emerge?”
Because resilience isn’t about bouncing back. It’s about staying connected to what matters, even when everything else is falling apart.
The Ontological Shift
What if we stopped trying to teach resilience skills and started creating conditions for human flourishing? What if we focused on designing experiences where people can be fully human?
This means shifting from skills-based training to connection-based development. Instead of teaching techniques, we create space for people to reconnect with themselves, their purpose, and each other. We become architects of being, not just facilitators of doing.
In my work, I’ve found that when people reconnect with their authentic values, when they rediscover the meaning in their daily work, when they build genuine relationships with their colleagues—resilience emerges naturally. It’s not something you have to manufacture. It’s something you get to uncover.
The Seven Connections framework I’ve been developing addresses this: connection to self, to mission, to one another, to context, to heritage, to partners, and to the future.
These aren’t skills to be learned; they’re ways of being to be cultivated.
The L&D Leader as Architect of Being
Here’s what I want you to consider: You’re not in the business of simply training people. You’re in the business of designing experiences and workplaces where people can be authentic, purposeful, and connected. When that happens, resilience isn’t something you have to teach—it’s something that naturally emerges.
During your next program design session, ask yourself this: “Am I trying to change what people do, or am I creating space for who they get to be?”
That question changes everything.
