Leadership culture has a resilience obsession. We celebrate people who bounce back from anything — and quietly, that celebration has become permission to keep loading the same container that keeps cracking. The problem isn't a lack of resilience. The problem is that resilience without respect for capacity is just endurance with better branding. In this piece, we pull the two concepts apart, look at where leaders specifically come unstuck, and offer three questions that tend to land quietly — and then get very loud around 3am.

I cut my toast “wrong” and realised how many invisible rules I follow about being a ‘good professional’ rules that quietly punish my needs and reward self-abandonment. This is a story about burnout patterns hiding in plain sight, the moment you start waking up to them, and a simple test to choose function over performance.