Individual Resilience, or “Grit”

You won’t find many articles on psychsafety.com about individual resilience. Organisational resilience, certainly, but rarely the individual kind. We tend not to find it an especially useful, or often fair, way to frame things.

This sometimes means we come up against ideas that are both popular and persuasive, and that we quietly, or not so quietly, disagree with.When I began teacher training in 2009, “resilience” was very much in vogue. The core idea seemed to be that teaching is hard, schools are tough places to work and it’s hard to change that, so instead we need teachers who can withstand the pressure and “bounce back.” 

And this idea really took hold. I remember attending what was in fact an excellent leadership training in 2013, except that its entire framework revolved around “mental toughness.” They even handed out scores: I got 7 out of 10 for “overall mental toughness” – not too shabby for someone who apparently only had 5 out of 10 for “confidence in abilities” and a mortifying 4 out of 10 for “emotional control.” At the time, I laughed off the absurd scoring, but looking back, I can also see how neatly it reinforced the idea that success in school leadership was a matter of inner fortitude – that if you couldn’t cope, you simply weren’t tough enough. 

The rise of grit

This narrative continued. Angela Duckworth’s book Grit, first published in 2016, made waves in leadership development, military training and education systems worldwide. Grit, the applied cousin of resilience, captured hearts and minds through its promise that if we all just try harder and keep going, we’ll achieve and perform. Where resilience is about how we recover from setbacks, Duckworth argued grit is about sustained effort and passion toward long-term goals – perseverance stretched across time. It took the idea of “bouncing back” and turned it into “keep pushing, no matter what.”

Duckworth’s early studies, albeit in very specific contexts, suggested grit was a better predictor of success than either IQ or talent. Since its publication, grit has been adopted into schools in the US, the UK and beyond, as a key “non-cognitive skill” (whatever that means), and added to competency frameworks, character education curricula and leadership training. 

But time and research have brought perspective. The apparent predictive power of “grit” shrinks a little on closer examination, and likely doesn’t tell the whole story. Perhaps more importantly, many have since questioned the ethics of focusing so heavily on individual grit and resilience at the expense of recognising wider structural inequalities – factors like privilege, discrimination and access to support, which all shape who gets to persevere and who gets worn down.

Of course, there’s nothing wrong with being resilient or “gritty” in itself. At a personal level, it can be a powerful thing – to help us through adversity and to hold focus when challenges arise. Many of us wouldn’t make it through our careers or personal lives without some of that energy. The problem is when the conversation jumps straight to “let’s make people more resilient,” rather than asking why the environment is so relentlessly demanding in the first place.

As Katriona O’Sullivan put it beautifully in a recent newsletter,

“I didn’t get here because I’m resilient. I got here because I had access — to brilliant people, supportive policies, and inclusive practices that caught me when I was falling.”

It’s such an important reframe. Because resilience is often presented as a moral virtue, when it’s really a relational and contextual phenomenon. The question isn’t “who is resilient?” –  it’s “who has the conditions that make resilience possible?”

And yet, in many workplaces we see what you might call resilience theatre – the quiet competition over who’s coping best, who’s busiest, who’s pushing through exhaustion. Long hours and visible overwork become badges of honour, an unspoken performance that confuses endurance with value and glorifies unhealthy self-sacrifice. We start to mistake burnout for dedication.

When systems shift the burden

This is where parallels appear across sectors. In the NHS, for example, staff have been offered resilience training or mindfulness sessions to help them “cope” with impossible workloads, chronic understaffing and even traumatic events. It might be well-intentioned, but it risks deflecting attention away from unsafe working conditions and the organisational changes that could genuinely support wellbeing. When systems don’t change, the call for individual resilience becomes a kind of gaslighting.

We see similar patterns in corporate settings too, where “personal resilience and wellbeing” workshops and “thrive under pressure” programmes promise to help people cope with relentless pace and pressure, while their workloads, targets and job insecurity remain unchanged. Many of the people procuring and facilitating these trainings have great intentions, but again, but when it’s the environment that’s grinding people down, we’re trying to fix the wrong thing. 

There’s a reason ideas like grit and resilience appeal – they give us simple answers to complex questions. Systems are unwieldy and tricky to shift; it’s far easier to target individuals – to tell them the issue is their character or their coping skills. And as an added bonus, it gives us a nice clear place to point the finger of blame if things go wrong. 

Thankfully, perspectives are beginning to change. Increasingly, we’re recognising that it’s often those with financial stability, supportive networks and fewer systemic barriers who can afford to be gritty and who therefore appear more resilient.

Resilience and psychological safety

In our work on psychological safety too, we sometimes come across a particular flavour of resilience deflection, which is:

 “Maybe I don’t need to manage my response better, maybe they just need to be more resilient.” 

But as with most “change the other person” narratives, that rarely helps. How resilient someone feels often depends as much on what they’re navigating outside of work and how supported they feel in it as on any inner mindset. We’ve probably all experienced how this can vary – on some days, we can brush off a negative comment or someone grimacing when we say something; other times it cuts deeper. No one was ever shamed into becoming more resilient. 

So if we’re going to think about individual resilience (and there are some quite compelling arguments that maybe we should resist the concept altogether!) then let’s at least focus our energy on building resilient communities and organisations, not simply telling individuals to “suck it up.” Because when we try to engineer resilient people working in unsafe systems, it’s going to backfire.

And as a final reflection: wouldn’t it be great if instead of trying to toughen people up, we created the conditions where people don’t need to be tough just to get through the work day?

Further Reading:

• Mark Neocleous (2013). Resisting Resilience 
• Datu, J. A. (2020). Beyond Passion and Perseverance: Review and Future Research on the Science of Grit. Frontiers in Psychology
• Julian Reid & Brad Evans, “Dangerously Exposed: The Life and Death of the Resilient Subject,” Resilience: International Policies, Practices and Discourses (2013). DOI:10.1080/21693293.2013.770703
• Webster, D. and Rivers, N., 2019. Resisting resilience: disrupting discourses of self-efficacy. Pedagogy, Culture & Society, 27(4), pp.523-535.
• Brianna Suslovic & Elle Lett, Resilience is an Adverse Event: A Critical Discussion of Resilience Theory in Health Services Research and Public Health, Health Services Research & Policy (2023).
• Graham B. Slater, Terms of Endurance: Resilience, Grit, and the Cultural Politics of Neoliberal Education, Critical Education 13(1), 2022.
• Jesse Singal (2021). The Weak Case for Grit
• Burnout and Psychological Safety
• Psychological Safety and Wellbeing