Many leaders treat resilience like a spare tire, something they can pull out when the time comes, but is not essential to think about now.
The problem isn’t that leaders don’t value resilience. It’s that they assume it will magically appear when they need it.
They underestimate how stress, uncertainty, and fatigue quietly erode judgment long before a crisis unfolds. As a result, leaders aren’t normally surprised by challenges but by how poorly prepared they feel to respond to them.
For leaders to respond effectively, they must prepare to be resilient long before the crisis or challenge materializes.
Resilience isn’t about enduring through a crisis. It’s about not being surprised by yourself when things get hard.
The best leaders prepare to be resilient.
Resilience requires leaders to pre-decide how they will operate under pressure long before the challenge arrives.
Resilience is a product of the habits formed when the stakes are low, time is available, and choices are deliberate.
Leaders who wait for hard moments to display their resilience are already behind. Under pressure, leaders don’t rise to the occasion. They fall back on how they have trained themselves.
Three training routines matter the most to prepare leaders for resilience under fire.
First, resilient leaders give themselves the margin and space to respond before they need it.
Overloaded leaders are fragile leaders.
Sustainable schedules, protected recovery time, and realistic commitments set leaders up to be resilient. They serve as the resilience infrastructure.
Leaders who are overcommitted in the present are more likely to overreact in the future.
Second, resilient leaders prefer never to be surprised.
They rehearse for disruption, asking, “What would we do if this went wrong?”
Thinking about what can go wrong and planning for it is not pessimism. It’s preparation. By game-planning for the worst-case scenarios of any mission, project, or assignment, leaders prepare themselves to respond rather than react.
Third, resilient leaders practice processing negative emotion without broadcasting it.
In the course of everyday assignments, they work hard to control their emotions and not to vent or unload their frustrations on others.
Internally, they name moments of pressure without dramatizing them. This helps them to normalize stress and keeps them grounded.
Practicing emotional regulation now is the central building block for preparing to respond strategically to a crisis in the future.
Ironically, leaders who appear the most resilient in a crisis are rarely doing anything heroic in the moment. They are simply operating from a well-practiced catalog of routine practices: emotional regulation, clarity of priorities, realistic self-awareness, and disciplined recovery.
To outside observers, their actions look calm. To those resilient leaders, it simply feels familiar.
