Resilience isn’t just about “toughing it out.” It’s not about the stiff upper lip, nor is it about playing the victim. True resilience is a dynamic process—one that requires vulnerability, recovery, and intentional action.

In this Leadership Unscripted episode of Unleash Your Impact, Unlock Others, Dave and Rich explore:

✔️ Why resilience isn’t just about surviving—it’s about thriving

✔️ The role of vulnerability in true resilience

✔️ Eustress vs. distress: How to harness positive stress and avoid burnout

✔️ How mindfulness and intentional recovery build long-term resilience

✔️ Practical strategies leaders can use to develop personal and team resilience

In a world that glorifies busyness, leaders need to rethink resilience. It’s not about doing more—it’s about balancing challenge and recovery to sustain optimal performance.

Welcome to Unleash youh Impact Unlock Others, a podcast about inspiring leadership. We hope to bring you grounded wisdom, stories from real leaders, and leave you feeling inspired. Let's dive in.

So welcome to Unleash youh Impact Unlock Others. I'm Dave Morris. I'm here today with Rich Horton. Hi, Rich.

Hi, Dave.

And today's topic for discussion is resilience, the secrets of thriving under pressure.

Rich, another topic that I'm really interested in talking to you about now, resilience sometimes is badged as toughing it out, that whole stiff upper lip thing. And we want to talk about that. Isn't resilience today?

No, but there's another extreme where maybe we are almost playing the victim and we're staying in a state where we are feeling sorry for ourself and we get a lot of sympathy and validation and we want to stay there. And that's not being resilient either.

No.

There's a happy medium somewhere in between all of this. And that's what real resilience is about.

Yes.

And you've talked to me about it before as being. It's a bit of a dynamic process for resilience.

It's about, yes, you need to be vulnerable, but you also need to find some intentional recovery from the thing that's caused you pain or suffering or distress.

Yeah.

Because if we've got issues, you know, whatever they might be, we don't want to be stuck in the place where our mental health is not in a good place, our physical health is not in a good place, that stuckness is unhealthy. So we're not judging people for the position that they find themselves in.

But it's about finding an intentional, balanced way forward where you acknowledge the challenges that you have and see a healthy, positive, intentional way forward in terms of getting you out of that place.

And ultimately, resilience isn't just about surviving, it's about thriving, isn't it?

Yes, absolutely. Yeah.

So there's some topics I want to sort of talk to you about today. First of all, we'll talk about vulnerability, what that means, and seeing vulnerability as a strength, not a weakness.

Because I still think sometimes in society, people see vulnerability as a weakness.

Yes, agreed.

The difference between eustress and distress.

Yes.

Using things like mindfulness to navigate the discomfort. We talked about in podcast, too. There's a lot of discomfort out there for people at the moment and for many reasons.

How can we find our way through that discomfort? I think, and actually sometimes sit with the discomfort.

Yes. It's creating A healthy relationship with discomfort.

Yeah, absolutely. And then the last thing maybe we can explore is the very important role of rest and recovery.

Yes.

It's almost like this badge of, like, look at me, I'm so busy, as if I'm proud of it. Well, that often isn't always a good thing either, is it?

Yeah. It's the opposite of burning the candle at both ends.

Yeah. So let's start with vulnerability. What's your view on vulnerability and why it's seen as a weakness?

So I'd like to go back just briefly to the previous podcast.

Yeah.

So I'm not going to go into detail in explaining this, but we talked about humility there. Do you remember?

Yes, we did.

And we talked about the Aristotle concept of the golden mean.

Yeah.

So in other words, when he was talking about human virtues, the golden mean was a good way to express that. So you have two extremes that are unhealthy, extremes of that human virtue. And in the center, you have this sweet spot.

Yeah.

So I see. Vulnerability is the golden mean between, at one extreme, what I would call a victim mentality, poor me mentality.

At the other extreme is the stiff upper lip mentality. I'm just going to tough this out, or it might come out as your response or reaction to people going through difficult times where you just want to.

You believe the approach is to give them a good slap around the head and just say, get on with it. So vulnerability is the sweet spot between those two extremes.

It's having a healthy relationship with the challenges and issues that you're facing, a healthy acknowledgement of those issues, and a willingness to own up to those, to own those, and to recognize that you have agency to move forward.

But actually, coming clean about when you're feeling vulnerable is not an easiest thing to do, let's be honest.

No, it's not. No, no, no.

So let me share a personal example. And I know you sort of went on this journey with me, so you'll understand this, but it'll help for the listeners bring some of these points to Life.

And I remember that second time she was in hospital, being with her overnight and thinking, oh, my God, what happens if this doesn't go well? It's seriously scary.

Now, as we got over this quite tragic and difficult few days, I had to be quite strong because my wife wasn't in the position to do that. We'd had a significant death in the family, particularly causing her grief. I've got my children to look after. I've got a business to run.

So there was an element, actually, rightly or wrongly, that I've got to tough this out to a certain extent because life has still got to go on, even though I'm in a pretty difficult place and my wife's even in a more of a difficult place. And I've got to support her, I've got my children to support, I've got you to work with. Our business has still got to carry on.

It's quite hard, isn't it, when you're in that kind of situation, to not just say, let's have it out.

Yeah. And in some ways, that shock response that we have can sometimes take us through some of those difficult moments.

It's almost like a protection mechanism. I think the danger is the aftermath. So that was a traumatic experience for you and your family. You know, the shock response took you through that.

But then I guess you're talking about the aftermath of that and, you know, once the shock of that was over and then life settled back down, the impact of you personally.

Yeah.

And I think I understood even at the time that being vulnerable is okay, but it's the situation you find yourself in as to when you actually start to talk about that or even admit it to yourself that you are feeling vulnerable, maybe you haven't even got time to feel that because you're just in the moment. So people have to go through a process here, don't they, of being vulnerable?

Yes.

And often unconsciously, what happens after, you know, significant events like that, or even not so significant events, the aftermath starts to drive a stress response that sometimes it's difficult to recognize in us. And if you remember, we were having a conversation before we started recording this about the stressful time that we went through as a business.

There are stress was causing challenges in our relationship, wasn't it?

Yeah, I think it probably was. There's a point here about resilience. Begins with acknowledging the struggles that you're going through, not suppressing them.

Yes, exactly.

I'm not saying I suppressed it at the time, but actually there was a period of time because I had to just get on with the day to day before I could really sit and reflect on that.

And there was a sense in which you needed the healing and the recovery and the rest time for you to recover from that.

And I didn't get that straight away.

Yes, exactly.

For whatever reason. Yeah, there's a point here. Resilience begins with acknowledging struggles, not suppressing them.

And that's a really important thing, isn't it, in practice? How do we go about doing that?

So there's two aspects to this, because what you want to be able to do as a leader is to model vulnerability to your team. And modeling vulnerability can show itself in a number of ways.

Your willingness to admit your weaknesses, your failures, your mistakes in front of your team. And there's time and a place for that.

So modeling healthy vulnerability to your team creates the permission and the environment for your team then to be vulnerable. And then when your team members express their vulnerability, how then you respond to those expressions of vulnerability is really important.

And also, we've talked about micro behaviours and microaggressions before.

Some of the little ways in which we respond to when people acknowledge their weaknesses, their mistakes, their stresses, their failures can have a real impact on whether they're likely to want to do it again, depending on how you've responded.

And this is an interesting point about this. So again, thinking back to that example that happened, sometimes we're quite good at being vulnerable in the family environment.

I remember talking to my daughter saying, it's okay to be upset. There's a lot going on here. But we don't do that as much in the work environment.

We're sometimes less willing to be vulnerable in the work environment. We naturally would be at home.

And there is a balance to strike here because sometimes in the midst of all the uncertainty, the complexity and the ambiguity, the stuff that we've talked about before, if your organization or business or team are under serious stress and challenges, sometimes what you don't want is a leader who's running around like a headless chicken.

No, True.

So sometimes there are times for you to demonstrate strength and groundedness to your team in spite of what's going on, in spite of what you might be feeling inside. There are times to do that.

Absolutely.

Yeah, there are times to do that because that creates a center of gravity for your team to sort of coalesce around and feel safe and secure, but at the same time having the wisdom to understand, as a leader, when it's right to express your vulnerability.

I can think of a number of occasions where I worked in a large organization where we were subject to government policy and change impacting the way we operated.

And in the context of that, you know, those team meetings, sometimes what my team wanted from me was some calmness and clarity in terms of directing A sensible way forward and not for me to be demonstrating panic, which what I might have been feeling inside thinking, oh, my word, how are we going to respond to this sort of new challenge? Because it could mean that's the end of this team.

So to be clear, you weren't demonstrating panic.

No, I wasn't demonstrating panic.

What I was trying to demonstrate was clarity and focus and calmness and tracking a sensible way forward and then choosing the moment to then express the challenges that the team faces in a healthy way and to share my own personal emotional response to that and making a judgment about when and where to do that. I think there's no easy right and wrong to that.

Well, no, because what you don't want to do by doing that is validate poor behavior in other people.

Yes, exactly. Yeah.

And the other thing, in terms of vulnerability, I think there's a danger in our society where we've done a huge amount societally in making it okay for people to express their mental health issues.

Yeah. We're far better than we used to be 20, 30 years ago.

And I think that's really good and really healthy. The danger is that we move away from saying it's okay to be vulnerable to actually holding people in a place of a victim mindset.

And it's a subtle but important difference, because actually, you want people to acknowledge the place that they're at, but you don't want to hold them in the place of victimhood.

So, in other words, what you want to do is to encourage the acknowledgement of the challenge and the issue, but also to encourage agency and responsibility for wanting to move forward with intentionality.

And I think that's one of the key messages we've got to get across here, is that resilience is a dynamic process.

Yes.

Vulnerability is part of that process, and it probably needs to come, you know, sooner rather than later. But you've also, at some point, got to put that intentional recovery in and come to a better place, that you're not just surviving, you're thriving.

Yeah, yeah. So vulnerability is not an end in itself. Otherwise it becomes victimhood.

Vulnerability is acknowledgement of where you feel you're at and an intentionality to move forward in a healthy way.

So here's something I'd like you to comment on. Someone showed me a quote the other day. Vulnerability sounds like truth and feels like courage.

Truth and courage aren't always comfortable, but they're never weakness. This is Brene Brown. How do you feel about. And particularly the word courage in context of this conversation? We're having.

What's your thoughts on that?

Yes, it does require courage to acknowledge that actually, you're a bit broken at the moment.

Yeah.

So vulnerability is not saying, actually I'm a complete failure, which is really an healthy mindset. But acknowledging this is the position which I find myself.

The courage to acknowledge that and then the intentionality to move forward, to heal yourself and grow back to a healthy place.

And to take your point about modeling good behavior, we need leaders to have this sense of courage, be courageous. It's not a weakness.

Yes.

If you're struggling, if you need help, if you don't know all the answers.

Yeah.

Actually have the courage to say yeah.

And I think having the courage to express vulnerability, we can have vulnerability in some of the big things in life. That's good as well. But we can also be vulnerable about some of the little things. We can as well.

So in the context of a team meeting, you know, if you've made a bit of a mess up, said the wrong thing, said the wrong thing, it's okay to acknowledge that. And you know that if you acknowledge that, you're not going to get chewed out by your manager or the team.

So how do we find the courage? This is an important point. I think it's quite a difficult thing to do.

Yes. I think this goes back to the humility conversation we had in the previous podcast. So it's worth listeners going back and listening to that.

If you've not heard about that, where we talked about having a healthy sense of self worth, if you have a healthy sense of self worth, that means actually that you don't have a fragile ego. So you have the courage to admit that because it comes from rooted in a healthy sense of self worth.

Yeah.

And if I reflect on the situation that I described about myself and my family, I think what I realized a few months later was my life had been out of balance for a long time. I'd been doing, quite rightly, in my view, stuff for a lot of other people and making sure they were all right.

But I hadn't really spent a lot of time on myself. At some point, you need to come back and find that balance.

So in my case, I needed to do a bit of work on myself and be honest with myself, be courageous to admit to myself that actually maybe I wasn't coping with this quite as well as I thought I was.

Yes, yes, exactly. And you're not going to grow and move forward unless you acknowledge that.

No.

The way I realized that and I, in preparation for this podcast, I actually Went back and read my journals from June, July of that year, where I actually said to myself, I am lacking motivation, I'm tired, I'm jaded.

And I suddenly thought the pattern of thoughts here, where actually, do you know what, maybe you just need to be a bit more courageous here and go, I need a bit of help here. And I remember having a conversation with you.

The result of that conversation is you express your vulnerability to me and we're able to work out together a better way to move forward.

Yeah. And this is what. This is what leadership's all about, isn't it?

Yes.

Yeah. So, Rich, let's move on to the conversation now around this concept of eustress versus distress.

Okay. So not all stress is bad.

No, no.

So if you think about our environment all the time, we have stressors on us.

Yeah. And sometimes they're what we call micro stressors. Lots of quite small things.

Yes. Yeah.

Sometimes they can be quite big stressors and it's usually the way we interpret those stressors is a determinant factor in how we then respond to those.

Do you also think so the example I gave, as you quite rightly said, was quite a traumatic, pretty big stressor. But actually, in most of our lives, it's not something like that which is the issue.

It's lots and lots of these micro stressors, these lots of little things that individually probably aren't majorly a problem, but lots of them together start to cause a problem.

Yes, that's right. Because going back to my point, not all stress is bad. If we have the absence of stress in our life.

So, for example, we've got nobody pushing us, we can become bored and apathetic.

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. No, you're right.

So if you think about the context of education, school and university, the reason why there are tests and exams, it gives people an extrinsic or stressor, which, you know, can be motivating.

If we are bored and apathetic, we're probably also going to be fairly disengaged from whatever we're doing. Are we really going to produce our optimal level of performance?

Probably not.

Are we? So that's definitely. True.

Yeah. And at the other extreme, we have distress where we feel completely overloaded, leading to burnout and we don't want to be in that place.

So the sweet spot in the middle is where we have a healthy relationship with our external stressors, and that sweet spot is the place where we grow and we feel motivated.

Yeah. So how do we recognise them when we are distressed versus in a State of eustress.

Some of it is related to how we interpret the stressors in our environment.

Yeah. Give us an example to bring that to life.

So let's use a sporting analogy.

Okay.

So if you think in the context of F1, certain drivers find themselves in a position where they're leading a race.

Yeah.

So that's a stressor because there'll be expectation from the fans and from the team and from your team principal for you to win the race.

Absolutely.

The top sports people interpret those stressors in a way that's healthy, and they use that as a motivator.

The lesser drivers get overwhelmed by that and interpret that stress as something that's quite negative, and they get burnt out or distracted or whatever.

So in other words, their interpretation of that stressor either leads to them feeling motivated or their interpretation of that stressor, they could see that as a negative thing. So how we frame, sometimes those stressors can lead to how we then respond to it. So framing and reframing is an important aspect.

I was going to say the important message. We're not all elite performers.

No.

Whatever walk of life that we're in, we're not all elite performers. But that's not the point. The point is, it's how we frame or reframe the stressors.

Yes.

Stressors that are around us.

Yes. Yeah.

As to how we then cope with it, how resilient we are or not.

But sometimes there are extreme stressors in our life that can't be reframed necessarily in an easy way. So, you know, there are still ways in which we can reframe those things.

But fundamentally, they're really difficult things to recover from as human beings.

It's acknowledging that there are different levels of stress, but how we interpret those often is a determinant factor in terms of whether we see that is distress or eustress. Eustress is the happy medium.

Yeah. That sweet spot you talked about.

So I'm guessing in everyday life, some of the sort of very practical things we can do, we can prioritize our tasks and our time management effectively because that will help take away stresses. We can set ourselves realistic goals that challenge us, but without overwhelming us.

Because I think if we set goals where we're never going to achieve, that's going to be a stressor in itself, isn't it? So we set realistic goals that challenge us, but don't overburden us. We prioritize our workload. We prioritize how we use our time.

And it's a topic for another podcast we prioritize how we look after our energy levels.

Yes, yes.

That's some of the very practical stuff.

That we can do for ourselves and for our team.

Yes.

So if you remember, if a team are not given stretch goals and not stretched, they're not challenged. They'll become bored and apathetic.

If you set them goals that are beyond their ability to achieve, which we see a lot in organizations, that's going to lead to overload and burnout.

So choosing that sweet spot between setting goals so people, they have those extrinsic motivators because they're important, but they're set in a way that challenges people in a way that's related to their talents and their abilities.

So here's a question for you, because everybody's different. So what you might consider to be productive pressure might be different to what I.

Exactly.

So how do people differentiate between productive pressure and harmful stress in their own lives?

Well, again, I think that gets down to having a coaching conversation with your people being very clear what is what it is you need to achieve as a leader and a manager.

And then when you have a delegation coaching conversation with somebody as explore with them, you know, what resources, capability and time do they have, what's a sensible stretch goal that is appropriate to them, so it's tailored to them.

So in other words, you are performance managing people on an individual basis and recognizing actually that your drivers are different to their drivers.

Absolutely.

So what might be a stressor to you might be a distress, or it might lead somebody to boredom and apathy. So it's about understanding their perspective.

So can I pick up this concept with you? I love the thing about reframing and almost like changing the narrative in your head.

We also talked at the beginning of this podcast about sitting with discomfort because sometimes in life we have to sit with stuff that's uncomfortable. And obviously mindfulness is a way in which we can do that.

So would you want to just talk about how mindfulness can help leaders reframe discomfort and see it as an opportunity for growth rather than a problem to wallow around in, if you like.

So in previous podcasts we've talked about mindfulness as a discipline, fundamentally changes your relationship with your thoughts and your feelings.

So rather than us being subject to our thoughts and our feelings and our emotions, we have the ability to look at them objectively, see them as they arise and let them go.

So we need to make some time for this because we've got to make some conscious choices here, haven't we?

Yes, but it's about fundamentally changing our relationship with our emotional stuff. So, in other words, when we feel discomfort, sometimes a human instinctive response is to feel overwhelmed by that discomfort.

And that emotion, if you like, becomes our dominant lens through which we see the world and see a particular situation.

So give us a practical tip then. If someone's recognizing. Yeah. What Richard's just described. I feel that. I feel that regularly. What can we do about that?

So what mindfulness helps us to do is to change our relationship with those things. So in other words, we see those emotions as objects that we can observe.

Like a cup on a table in front of us or something like that.

Yes. Yeah. So in other words, we have a healthy sense of detachment from our emotions.

So we can observe them, we can see them, we can see them coming up, and we don't get attached to them, and we can let them go. Susan David, who's written a famous book called Emotional Agility, talked about creating this healthy relationship with our emotions.

In other words, the ability to see them as objects, to see them come up, and to acknowledge actually that all emotions pass.

Sometimes when we become overwhelmed by our emotions, we can feel trapped by them, and we feel that it becomes the dominant narrative that shapes the way we see our current situation. So being able to let that go in a healthy way, to see the emotions come up, to process them, and to let them go.

In other words, we're not suppressing the discomfort. We are allowing ourselves to acknowledge it and then to let it go.

And I guess not to place too much judgment around it either.

Yes, exactly.

So practically, because it moves towards what we were talking about at the beginning, about ultimately we have to find balance and recover. What can they do? Practically, yes.

So what we're trying to do here is to essentially rebalance our parasympathetic nervous systems. What happens when we get taken with an emotion like discomfort, and we get locked into that? It triggers our sympathetic nervous system.

The fight, flight, freeze. And the danger then is we get locked into that state.

And I guess that can drive unhelpful narratives, it can drive unhelpful beliefs, all sorts of things.

All sorts of stuff. And in other words, our body, physiologically, we become out of balance.

Yeah.

So things like journaling is a helpful way for us to process that and to start to rebalance our parasympathetic nervous system. Mindfulness as a practice is a really good way to rebalance.

You can also do some very simple breathing exercises that helps to rebalance our physiology. So sometimes is it Ranjan Chatterjee talks About square breathing.

A lot of other people talk about the concept of square breathing, where you just take a few moments to just control your breathing in a very structured way.

So, in other words, why don't we do that now? Should we just explain to us in very practical terms how that works? Go on.

So what I would get you to do is just to sit up straight, just to take just a few minutes. And what I'm going to do is just talk you through some square breathing, where I'm going to get you to inhale for a count of four.

So in other words, you inhale for the count of four, then you hold your breath for four counts, then you exhale for four, and then you hold your breath again for four. And what that does, when we hold our breath, it triggers a parasympathetic nervous system which rebalances our physiology.

So our physiology is directly tied in to our breathing.

This breathing, is it best done through your mouth or through your nose?

Probably through your nose.

Okay.

Okay. There's lots of research out there that suggests that breathing through the nose is much more beneficial than mouth breathing.

So what I'll do is I'll just talk you through two rounds.

Let's try it. Let's do it.

Two rounds of square breathing.

Okay, let's do it.

Okay, so sit up straight, breathe through your nose. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to count you through two rounds. Okay? So inhale for four. 1, 2, 3, 4. Hold for four. 2, 3, 4. Exhale, 2, 3, 4.

Hold, 2, 3, 4. Inhale, 2, 3, four. Hold, 2, 3, four. Exhale, 2, 3, 4. Hold, 2, 3, 4. And I would suggest you do that for about a minute, maybe two minutes.

I don't know how you feel now.

It's interesting. You'd think, oh, it's only a couple of rounds of it. Can you really get any benefit straight away? Do you maybe need to do three or four rounds?

What I was experiencing then was already I felt calm coming across my butt. It's a weird scratch, almost like a calm coming across my body. Not that I'm particularly stressed in this. Talking to you was a lovely experience.

I'm not stressed about it. Thank you very much. But actually, there was still a sense of like.

Actually, I can feel my body just, like, relaxing and calming, and it is quite a nice feeling.

Yeah, yeah.

They teach this sort of breathing in yogic practice, but the principle behind it is when we hold our breath and when we exhale, when we do it in a very controlled way. Essentially, it slows the heart rate down.

So what you experience then, if we were to track you on your Apple watch, you would have seen that your heart rate's slowly coming down as you did each successive round of square breathing. So it's a very quick and easy way of building rest and recovery.

So, for example, before I have a coaching session, if I'm feeling a little bit stressed or anxious, I'll engage in a couple of rounds of square breathing just to ground me, just to bring me back to a relaxed, good place where I can then engage with my person. I'm coaching from a good place. You could use this in meetings. You could use it before meetings.

You could use it before going into a sales conversation with somebody. It's a very almost like invisible tool that you can use a lot and it just helps us to rebalance our physiology.

Yeah. And because it's so simple, I guess you can even use it in the moment, even if you haven't got five minutes of prep time.

You can even do it in the moment, can't you? It doesn't take a long time.

Yeah, yeah.

So let's sort of finish off this podcast with really talking about this role of rest and recovery and resilience, because I think this is really, really important and it's not something that gets talked about enough. And I guess in the modern world where we're all so busy all of the time, that's not really helping our sense of resilience, is it, really?

No. So this is countercultural. We have an always on mentality in our society and in business.

It's very easy these days, isn't it?

Yeah. And that's going to lead to burnout, you know, going back to the distress, eustress and apathy and boredom that we were talking about earlier.

So we are advocating that you consciously build in rest and recovery time into your day.

So stop seeing rest as a luxury.

Yes.

So the danger is leaders and managers, you know, they can be trapped in end to end teams meetings with little or no rest and recovery time between meetings. And it's no surprise that's going to feel knackering and that's going to lead to stress and burnout.

So simply putting into your diary rest and recovery times, whether you label it as that or whatever you want to label it as, because there are ways to stick stuff in the diary to give you those recovery times, but to put those in without feeling guilty.

People are always going to do stuff if there's something in it for them.

Yes.

What's the science behind this and what's the benefits that we're going to gain by doing it?

So the science behind it is really strong because if you think about the way performance and sports psychologists work with the very top performing sports athletes, one of the things they will get them to do, as well as engaging in training and all the stuff that they need to do to get strong and flexible for the sport they're particularly involved with is they will work with them around how they build rest and recovery time into their days and into their weeks. So if we train, if we exert ourselves, we need rest and recovery time. So the research is very clear.

Rest and recovery time is an important thing that we have to build into our day to stop us from getting burnout.

Well, I guess at the elite level, you've got to keep these people fit and optimal performance as often as you can. So there's a real benefit. But for most of us, we're not going to have all the monitors and all the.

No, no.

So how do we do this in a more practical way?

So blocking time in our diary is important.

Focusing on having good night's sleep, good nutrition, exercise, all those things, building timing for these things, even just a small amount of time. So the danger is to see that the always on thing that we're performing at our best and getting more done.

Well, that might be true short term, but it's at the cost of you potentially burning out.

I'm guessing if you're in a role, because there are roles, let's be honest about it, let's be realistic. There are roles out there where people cannot take a lunch break a whole hour.

But I'm guessing if that's the case, even if you can just get five minutes here, five minutes there, that's better than nothing, isn't it? Having some kind of break is better than nothing.

Yeah.

We're not here to tell people how many hours to work and what's appropriate in terms of the number of hours for me to work as to some of our listeners is going to be completely different. So we all have different tolerance levels. But know yourself and plan your day, your weeks around what your body, what your mind is able to take.

And also I think give yourself permission.

And one of the things I've learned over the last few years is actually it's okay sometimes to take a break when other people might think you shouldn't.

Yes.

But give yourself that permission because if you know that that's going to allow you to perform more optimally in the longer run, why Wouldn't you do it?

And if we have a healthy sense of self worth going back to that self worth thing again, if we value ourselves, we're going to build in time where it's okay to look after ourselves.

So again, being realistic. You know, you talked about this very easy to have this always on mentality at the moment in the modern world that we live in.

We do need to build this recovery time into our daily routines. But actually changing habits is difficult, isn't it?

So we need to start with very small steps here and try and build up a habit that ultimately we can get to the place we want to be in. So if someone who's listening to this thinks, I am quite often overwhelmed, I don't build enough recovery time into my day.

What's the small steps that they can take right now to start to move them in the right direction?

Well, I'd pick one of those things that we've talked about, either blocking time out in your nidari, getting a good night's sleep, nutrition, exercise, breathing, breathing. Just take one of those things and just plan some time in your day to do that small steps.

And then when you've got that as a habit established, then go on to do some other things. Don't try and do everything at once.

Okay, so let's recap the conversations and just end with some takeaways and some practical actions. So just recap some of the key ideas we've talked about. Rich.

Vulnerability builds resilience through connection with others and connection with self and building a trusted environment around you. We need to recognize and harness when we're in that good place of eustress and when we're in a place of distress, we've got to manage it better.

Mindfulness creates space for some very thoughtful, deliberate, conscious action. And rest and recovery are critical for sustained performance and optimal performance.

So those I think some of the key messages to take from what we said today. So actionable tips. Anything you want to say before we finish?

So we talked about just taking small steps.

I'd also just take this concept of being comfortable with discomfort and just take some time to notice when you feel discomfort and notice the emotion and notice that it will pass.

And I think for me that square breathing, I think is great.

I mean, if somebody could just do a minute of square breathing every day, no matter when you do, it could be morning, evening, middle of the day, doesn't matter. Actually just do that once a day.

And then I guess the other thing is, from what you just said is at some point in your day, schedule some intentional recovery time. Doesn't have to be a long time. It could be five minutes, it could be 10 minutes. So basically, resilience isn't about failing, is it?

It's not about falling down, it's about rising up.

Yes.

So share this episode with anybody you think could benefit. There's loads of people out there who could probably benefit from understanding more about resilience. So share this with them.

Start some conversations with people around it and learn to be a bit more vulnerable. That's probably not a bad.

No, indeed.

So next time, Rich, we'll talk about something completely different. Until then. All right, thank you very much.

Thanks, Dave.