Marketers, we’ve got resilience all wrong

What’s the first word that pops into your head when you think about the word resilience?

Go on. Indulge me. Write it down.

When I ask this question in workshops, the responses are remarkably consistent. Strength. Toughness. Endurance. Bouncing back.

Did yours match that list, or fit in in some way?

We’ve been sold a specific story about resilience. Toughing it out. Being strong. Not showing weakness. The language is relentlessly grim: weathering storms, pushing through rough patches. It’s all about enduring rather than thriving. Suffering well rather than preventing suffering in the first place.

I know this because I lived it. Over a decade ago, life served me some curveballs that ended up being wrecking balls. As I was coming out of the rough patch my boss said to me: “You are the most resilient person I know”. He meant it as a compliment, but it felt like he was giving me a grimy tarnished medal that said: “Ok I’ve survived some awful shit and I’m still here clinging on.”

Looking at the 2026 Marketing Week Career & Salary Survey data, I can see marketers clinging on.

When asked if they had experienced a range of negative emotions and states (which included overwhelm, feeling undervalued, emotional exhaustion and a negative attitude), between 47% and 65% of respondents said they had. Overwhelmed and undervalued came out as clear frontrunners on the negative feelings’ scoreboard.

Most marketers feel overwhelmed, undervalued and emotionally exhausted

That in itself is a worrying result, but – paired with the fact 42% of the sample said they did not feel they could tell their manager or the wider business how they are feeling – it shows me there are a lot of people suffering in silence.

Remember those top-of-mind words we started thinking about a moment ago? I missed lone wolf from the list of answers people often give. Lots of us associate resilience with having to tough it out alone, being responsible for yourself, carrying a burden on your own.

I’m not saying that work should always be sunshine and roses, or that there won’t be tough times. And I’m not saying that no one should ever feel overwhelmed (I feel overwhelmed at least once a week at the moment), but this data shows a pattern.

When asked why people couldn’t tell their manager or wider business how they were feeling, the last piece of this jigsaw puzzle slots into place.

Answers ranged from:

“You don’t want to look weak or not in control.”

“Need to be seen as strong especially as a menopausal older female.”

“The pressure to always perform and not show how you’re feeling out of fear it could hinder progression.”

These aren’t people describing resilience. These are people describing performance. The exhausting, unrelenting cycle of pretending you’re fine when you’re not. Of toughing it out because the alternative (admitting you’re struggling) feels career-limiting.

Resilience is being weaponised

But, here’s the paradox: everyone agrees resilience matters.

The World Economic Forum lists resilience as one of the most crucial skills for the future. When I interviewed hiring managers for my own research, resilience came up again and again as the number one criterion for success.

A marketing director I spoke with didn’t hesitate when I asked what matters most when hiring: “A lack of resilience is the number one reason why hires don’t work in my team.”

In a focus group of senior marketers, they (entirely unprompted) had a discussion about how resilience is the number one thing they look for when hiring and agreed it is one of the essential skills for marketers.

‘Absolute crisis’: Are marketers at breaking point?

Perhaps the most striking response in the Career & Salary Survey as to why people felt they couldn’t tell their manager or the wider business how they were feeling was this:

“Fear of judgement based on their bias and behaviour towards previous line reports who have raised concerns and the use of the word resilience.”

Read that again.

Resilience (the quality we value) is being weaponised against people who dare to be honest about their struggles.

This is what happens when we treat resilience as an individual trait that you either have or you don’t, rather than something organisations build. When ‘resilience’ becomes code for ‘You should be able to handle this impossible situation without complaint’, we’ve surely lost the plot entirely.

I see this weaponisation everywhere in my work. People tell me they feel there’s something wrong with them, because they’re struggling. They don’t want to admit they need support, because it’s seen as a sign of weakness. The onus falls on them to fix situations that are fundamentally broken.

And the bit that makes absolutely no sense at all is that we’re asking people to build resilience whilst they’re already depleted.

When you’re already exhausted and overwhelmed, asking you to think about building resilience is literally like trying to learn to deadlift whilst you’re running a marathon. At that point, it’s about burnout prevention, not building resilience. And they are not one and the same.

Enter positive resilience

We know resilience is an important skill, so how do you build that skill? How do you develop it? How do you practice it?

When I asked that question in the focus group, I got a range of blank looks, screwed up faces and a lot of “Well…err….umm” answers. Managers say they want resilient individuals and resilient teams, but have no idea how to get there.

There’s a weird unspoken understanding that we have to wait for the shit to hit the fan in order to become more resilient. We just have to hope that when the shit does hit the fan we can get through it, survive and somehow put another notch on our resilience belt to show we’re strong.

After that wrecking ball period I talked about earlier, I spent over a decade researching, teaching and coaching resilience. This work led me to develop the idea of positive resilience: building strength proactively so we’re better equipped when life inevitably throws us curveballs.

I’d like to share three of my positive resilience principles that will help to shift your thinking on this.

1. Resilience is a process not an outcome

We say ‘I need to be resilient’ as if it’s a fixed state you achieve, like getting a certificate or reaching the end of a course. But resilience isn’t something you are. It’s something you’re building. Always.

I like to think of it as a lamp on a dimmer switch, not an on/off button. You need to give the lamp electricity, meaning you can turn it up when you need light and back down again. If the light is our resilience, then we need to think about what the electricity source is and how to keep that flowing.

2. Resilience is a team sport

One of the most mind-blowing moments in my research was discovering that when people described resilience, they used terms associated with independence and self-reliance. It’s that lone wolf idea again.

If we’re constantly trying to be resilient all by ourselves, it’s like trying to play football alone. You can kick the ball around, but you’re missing out on all those brilliant passing opportunities. Just like any team sport, resilience works better when we’re conscious about it, when we talk about it and when we celebrate it.

This is more than having a support network for when things go wrong. It’s actively building resilience together, like a team training for the big game. It could be as simple as being patient with someone who’s learning, throwing out genuine compliments when you spot something great, or taking the time to really listen. Not just waiting for your turn to talk, but proper, engaged listening where you’re genuinely curious about the answer.

In parenting, people often refer to the saying ‘It takes a village to raise a child’. There is something very powerful in understanding the concepts of village, team and community, and applying them to how we can build resilient teams and cultures of resilience.

3. It’s proactive, not reactive

This is the big one. The shift that changes everything.

We’ve been conditioned to think resilience is what you call on when things go wrong. It’s your emergency reserve for when the crisis hits.

This isn’t helpful, because it means you only think about your resilience when a curve ball heads your way.

Resilience is what you build during the good times. Would you rather build a shelter during a hurricane or on a calm, sunny day? Yet we persistently try to develop resilience precisely when we have the least capacity to do so.

Positive resilience is about building strength that energises rather than depletes. Creating foundations before you need them, not scrambling to survive when everything’s on fire. It’s also making resilience-building enjoyable rather than gruelling.

This is why ‘bouncing back’ is the wrong analogy. If life has chucked a curve ball your way, then something has changed. You can’t bounce back to where you were before. But, bouncing forward feels to me like just ploughing on with unrelenting momentum. Its why I called my book Brilliantly Bouncy, because I think we should all find our individual and unique way of bouncing that works for each of us.

The idea of constantly bouncing back, being strong, toughing it out is an exhausting, unrelenting cycle. It doesn’t have to be this way.

That word you wrote down at the beginning. Look at it now. Could resilience be something different for you?

Laura Chamberlain is an award-winning professor at Warwick Business School, a marketer, career strategist and coach. She is also founder of self-development consultancy Think Talk Thrive.