Everyone’s fine. Nobody’s fine.

Last week while travelling, I sat down with two different friends in business. We discussed pressure, resilience, and what’s happening in today’s business world.

One works in marketing. The other in sales leadership.

Different roles and pressures, which created a variety of perspectives. But I noticed one clear and consistent similarity: pressure. Regardless of the role, level, or task list, there’s an enormous amount of pressure out there, and not enough people are talking about it.

We might talk about it privately with our partners, perhaps even trusted colleagues. But at work we’re less inclined to. And the reason is that we want to be able to demonstrate that we’re strong, competent people, who can be trusted with important work. That might mean we become quite good at pretending everything is fine.

One of my friends opened up about how difficult it can be to admit feeling overwhelmed because it might prohibit future growth. If we’re looking for bigger roles with more responsibility, perhaps our leaders won’t consider us if we admit we're struggling with the pressure today.

And pressure is everywhere right now.

Salespeople are constantly dealing with it because there’s always another target coming next month. Even if we crush our targets, the expectation is to surpass them next month, quarter or year. In marketing, it looks like shrinking budgets, changing expectations, AI, fewer resources and an endless demand to do more.

These are just two roles, but the story applies across business. Entrepreneurs, nurses, HR leaders, accountants, executives… it’s all adding up. Yet we still announce how “thrilled” we are on LinkedIn and post the good times everywhere else.

Perhaps one of the biggest problems in business is that everyone is under pressure, but nobody wants to be the person who admits it.

Toughen up?

One comment that stuck with me from these recent conversations was that people think you’re weak if you have some anxiety.

I think that gets to the heart of the problem, and perhaps one of the biggest misconceptions about resilience: people confuse it with toughness. They think the expectation is that we will be able to suck it up and keep going, no matter what happens. And, sadly, many leaders think like this too.

We’ve all encountered leaders like this. They are the ones who know that we’re sick, but are more interested in when we’re going to come back to work. Here’s a perfect example from a conversation I recently had at one of our People Leader Lab events in Vancouver.

One of the attendees had been dealing with severe burnout. Long hours and an endless task list. But she kept showing up to work because the projects were looming. When she finally acknowledged it with her boss, the response was: “burnout aside, do you think you can still hit the deadline?”

The problem is that we can’t just put ‘burnout aside’!

Burnout, anxiety, pressure, stress and other emotional maladies don’t show up in clear physical form, so they tend to get dismissed. It would be much easier if you showed up to work with a cast on your arm or a huge bandage on your head to get sympathy and understanding from your colleagues and boss. But there are no obvious casts or bandages that come with burnout…. or if they do, it’s usually way too late.

This pressure is often invisible, so we carry it without others noticing. Which means we need to get better at making it visible.

Make it visible.

Instead of toughness, the opposite can be the solution. And great leaders know this. Many of the attendees of my workshops and presentations come up to me afterwards simply because they loved the fact that we were finally talking about this stuff. It is rare for leaders to invite these conversations into the workplace, but we need more of them to do so. That is where the real growth can happen.

As soon as leaders acknowledge that health and wellbeing are priorities in the workplace, it invites vulnerability and conversation from people who have likely been dealing with these challenges.

One of the most important resilience tools available to us is simply the ability to be able to acknowledge that we’re struggling or that we don’t know how to solve a problem.

To do this, we can name the pressure before trying to solve it. We’re trying to flag that our workload is starting to feel unsustainable and we need to be clear with it. Something like: “I've got X, Y and Z competing for my attention and I'm concerned that something is going to suffer. Can we talk about what should take priority?"

That's useful information to a good leader. It moves the conversation away from "I can't cope" towards "here's what I'm experiencing and let's work out what to do about it." Then it becomes something we can tackle as a unit.

Of course, not every leader is a good leader. If we hit a road block, it’s important to find someone we trust who will listen and help us work through the options. The important thing is that we don't keep carrying it alone.

There's a lot of pressure in business right now. My suggestion is that we need to become a little more honest about it.

Let’s start the conversation, allow for vulnerability, provide the support, and help each other find the way forward. That is resilience: our ability to keep moving forward. Sometimes it requires a pause, sometimes it takes a detour, sometimes it even does require a bit of toughness, but it’s really about having the tools to know the right way to go about it.

Until next time friends, stay resilient.

Carré at Resilient Minds

PS - If your team is feeling the pressure right now, this is exactly the kind of stuff we talk about in my resilience workshops. We create space for honest conversations about stress, burnout and pressure, but more importantly, give people practical tools to navigate them. If your workplace could use a little more of that, just reply to this email or contact me here.