Re-imagining resilience

October 31, 2025

What image comes to mind when you hear the word ‘resilience’?

For the longest time, I thought of resilience as something that I had to build and keep strong. Which meant that when I didn’t feel strong, that felt like failure. Resilience was something fragile, that could be knocked down. So that meant trying to avoid things that might knock it down. It didn’t feel great. I felt like I was not a resilient person.

What changed?

More recently, I’ve started thinking about resilience as something that I can nurture and grow. Resilience for me has become about flexibility, adaptability and creativity. I have those qualities! And I’ve managed to bring them to very challenging situations. Well, that feels a whole lot more relaxed.

This shift in mindset came about from conversations with my coach, Nina, and a session by Dr. Jemma Bawden Harris on the Animas Coaching and Mental Health Certificate I did this year. As I watched Jemma share a visual of safety as a green zone that can grow or shrink relative to threat (orange zone) and collapse (red zone), I started to realise there was a different way to think about resilience that opened up a whole new set of possibilities for me.

What does this mean in practice?

Building on the ideas of Tracey Stackhouse Jemma went on to share ideas about what puts us in the green zone (i.e. helps us feel safe). For me that means things like walking in nature, connecting with people who value me, getting enough time to be quiet. Thinking about it this way, I can be intentional in what and who I pay attention to and direct my energy towards.

It helped me understand the impact of trauma in a different way, in terms of how trauma loops (Jan Winhall) shrink the green zone as the orange and/or red zone expands. It also linked the concept of stretching my window of tolerance (Dan Siegal) to the idea of cultivating a green zone. My window of tolerance was something I’d worked on coming back to work after a period of burnout. I found it really useful as a way to challenge myself to expand what I could do again. And to do this gently and gradually, being kind to myself if the window shrank, knowing that it could expand again.

The gamechanger for me was the flexibility and fluidity this offers. Resilience is something I can cultivate. I can gently take care of it, rather than struggle to shore it up.