Resilience Is Not a Career Strategy
- Sue Singh
- 8 hours ago
- 4 min read
Every August we reach for the same vocabulary. Women are strong. Women are resilient. Women endure. I used that language myself in this space last year, and I meant every word of it. A year on, I want to place something less comfortable beside it: resilience is what you draw on when nothing else is available to you. It is a survival response, not a career strategy and when we celebrate it too readily, we quietly excuse the conditions that made it necessary.
I say this as someone who has needed it more than once. There were years of studying in the hours left over after everyone else’s needs had been met, a long stretch out of action after a serious injury, and a year in which I qualified and was retrenched within months of each other. I offer none of that as a credential. I mention it because it is ordinary most women reading this have their own version of it, and hardly any of us look back on those years as the ones in which we grew. We survived them. That is a different thing.
If you asked me what carried me through, the honest answer is not grit. Grit was the fuel; it was never the vehicle. What I remember with any clarity is not the endurance at all. It is a much smaller set of moments in which somebody else decided to act.
What actually moved me
A manager who handed me a file that was plainly above my grade, let me carry it, and then corrected me privately rather than in front of the room. A colleague who said my name in a meeting I was not in, and kept saying it. Someone who looked at a curriculum vitae with visible interruptions in it and read range where others read risk. A mentor who told me the truth about a piece of work when encouragement would have been kinder and considerably less useful.
None of those people were running a development programme. What they had in common is that each of them absorbed a measure of personal risk on my behalf. That is the distinction that matters, and it is the one we most often blur. Mentorship offers advice; sponsorship spends capital. Advice is generous, and it is cheap. Putting your own credibility behind someone who has not yet proved themselves is neither. Most of the women I know have been mentored generously and sponsored rarely.
Growth is uncomfortable, and it is seldom private
The other thing I have learned about growth is that it almost never happened while I felt ready. It happened when I was given something I did not feel equipped for and had to become equal to it in full view of other people. Every meaningful step in my professional life has been preceded by the private conviction that I was about to be found out.
Women are often told that the answer to this is confidence. I am not persuaded. Hesitation is frequently an accurate reading of the room rather than a personal failing: many of us have learned, correctly, that our mistakes are remembered longer and attributed differently. The remedy is not to instruct women to feel more assured. It is to build conditions in which a woman’s first attempt at something difficult is received the way a man’s first attempt is usually received — as a learning curve rather than a verdict.
What I owe forward
Much of my work centres on the machinery of transformation: strategic plans, changing legislation, policies, and the documents organisations use to show commitment. That work matters, and I would defend it. But no plan has ever promoted anyone. Decisions about who is developed, trusted, and advanced are made by people in ordinary conversations, most of which are never recorded. Policy creates the obligation; people determine the outcome.
That makes the obligation personal and precise. Say a person’s name in the rooms they are not in. Entrust them with the difficult file, not only the safe one. Offer honest correction privately because you believe they can grow from it. Be deliberate about who you back, and notice whether they all resemble you. And be honest that women do not automatically become one another’s advocates: shared experience is not the same as solidarity, and solidarity does not arrive by itself.
I have also learned to accept support without treating it as a debt or a verdict on my competence. That took longer than it should have. Many capable women decline help in order to prove they do not require it, and pay for that in years.
The question worth asking this month
By all means let us celebrate endurance in August. Behind most women’s achievements there is a quieter history of sacrifice and persistence that deserves to be seen. But endurance is not advancement, and admiration is not support. The more searching question is this: whose name did you say this year, at a point when saying it cost you something? Who did you hand the difficult work to? Who did you tell the truth to, because you thought they could take it?
Resilience got me through. Other people got me here. The women coming behind us should need less of the first because they have more of the second — and that is largely within our gift.
This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute legal advice. For specific legal guidance on protected disclosures, employment practices, or compliance obligations, consult a qualified labour law practitioner.
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