Resilience Is a Muscle. And It’s Time We Keep Training It.
In a world of relentless disruption, geopolitical tremors, AI reshaping industries, and organizations in permanent flux, personal resilience isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s the most important skill none of us was ever formally taught.
When was the last time you felt genuinely steady? Not numb, not just “getting through it,” but grounded, able to absorb a disruption and keep moving? For most of us, that feeling is increasingly rare.
We live in what strategists call a VUCA world, Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, and Ambiguous. Never more appropriate than today. Tariffs materialize overnight, AI rewrites job descriptions before the ink dries on the last restructuring, and in the middle of all that, we are expected to show up clear-eyed, capable, and human.
Science tells us something quietly radical: resilience is trainable. Not a fixed trait. Not a personality quirk for the lucky few. A muscle. And like any muscle, it grows when you work it, deliberately, consistently, especially on the hard days.
Strategists now speak of “VUCA Max”, where all four dimensions are at peak intensity simultaneously. Geopolitical fractures, AI accelerating beyond our capacity to adapt, and leadership teams planning on shifting ground.
But what gets missed in executive strategy discussions is this:
“Organizations don’t feel uncertainty. People do.”
Dr. Maya Shankar makes this point in her HBR on Leadership podcast and her New York Times bestselling book ‘The Other Side of Change’. Every person in a company meeting change with personal resilience ripples outward. The organizational health of tomorrow is built on the inner resilience of individuals today.
The Science of Uncertainty
Research shows we are more stressed by a 50% chance of a bad outcome than a 100% certainty of one. In a VUCA world, the uncertainty itself, not just the change, is the source of our anxiety.
Then AI turned the volume up higher
AI is not just a technological tool. It is an identity disruptor. When a role is automated, when a skill you spent years mastering becomes commoditized, when you wonder what in your career is still yours to own, that is not merely a professional problem. It is a deeply human one.
“Anchoring your identity too strongly to any given thing carries risks: when change threatens that very thing, it can be destabilizing.” — Maya Shankar
A more expansive, flexible sense of identity, one not fused to a single title or chapter, is one of the greatest sources of resilience we can build. This is trainable. And it starts with the reps below:
Rep1: Widen your identity
Cultivate a self-concept built on values, relationships, and curiosity, things that survive disruption intact. Practice introducing yourself without your job title.
Rep2: Allow the grief
Change involves loss. Name what you are losing. That honest acknowledgement is the first step to moving through it with integrity rather than around it.
Rep3: Reframe uncertainty
Event + Response = Outcome. You can’t always control the Event, but you can shape your Response. Sit with not-knowing without forcing premature resolution.
Rep4: Resist the “end of history” illusion
We assume we’re basically done changing. We’re not. Future-you will be wiser and more adapted, possibly grateful for this difficult season.
Rep5: Treat denial as grace, not strategy
Short-term denial can be a protective lifeline. The key is knowing when to move from protection into active rebuilding. Grace yourself a little. Then move.
The other side is real….and reachable
The word “apocalypse” doesn’t mean destruction. It comes from the Greek apokalypsis, revelation. When the world as we knew it is dismantled, something beneath the familiar structure becomes visible. Shankar’s subjects, a woman communicating through blinks after a brainstem stroke, someone rebuilding after imprisonment, didn’t just survive unbroken. They discovered capacities that only emerged because the previous architecture came down.
Change isn’t something to endure. Met with the right inner posture, it can make you someone you never expected to become, in the best possible way.
A closing thought
You did not sign up for a VUCA world. And yet here we all are, inside this particular chapter of history, trying to do meaningful work and remain recognizably ourselves. Resilience is not reserved for the naturally tough. It is built in the small daily choices: to stay curious over fearful, to grieve without losing yourself, to hold your identity lightly enough that change doesn’t shatter it.
The muscle grows when you use it. Start where you are. And know that the other side of this change holds a version of you who is wiser, more adaptive, and more alive than the one who walked into it.
Begin today. One rep at a time.
INSPIRED BY & DRAWN FROM
Maya Shankar — The Other Side of Change (Penguin Random House, 2026)
HBR On Leadership Podcast — “Build Your Resilience in the Face of Tough Change”, Dr. Maya Shankar (April 2026)
Chief Learning Officer — “Thriving in a VUCA World: Balancing Tech Transformation with Soft Skills”
Harvard Business Impact — “Thriving in the Most VUCA of VUCA Environments” (2025)
