The Strength to Stay Human

I’ve been thinking lately about how often resilience gets praised in nonprofit life.

Usually, it sounds like a compliment.

“She always finds a way.”“This team has been through so much.”“They just keep going.”

And sometimes that is resilience.

But sometimes it’s just exhaustion with good manners.

That may sound a little too honest — but I think many nonprofit leaders know exactly what I mean.

There is a kind of strength our sector has learned to admire that looks noble from the outside and lonely on the inside. It’s the strength that says yes one more time. Holds one more burden. Absorbs one more disappointment. Smiles through one more hard season because the mission matters and people are counting on us.

And of course the mission does matter.

That’s what makes this so tender.

The very people who care most deeply are often the ones most likely to disappear from themselves in service of the work.

So here’s the reframe I keep coming back to:

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Resilience is not the ability to carry more than is fair. It’s the ability to stay grounded, flexible, and human while carrying what is real.

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That’s a different kind of strength.

It leaves room for honesty.
For support.
For better structure.
For shared leadership.
For the brave sentence, “This can’t keep working this way.”

In nonprofit organizations, we often talk about capacity as if it’s only about staffing charts, budgets, or board engagement. But capacity is also emotional. Relational. Cultural.

It lives in whether people feel safe telling the truth.

It lives in whether a board knows the difference between a devoted executive and an overextended one.

It lives in whether recovery is built into the rhythm of the organization — or treated like a luxury for some distant future no one ever quite reaches.

I don’t think resilience asks us to become harder.

I think it asks us to grow deeper roots.

To create the kind of organization where people do not have to vanish from their own limits in order to serve the mission well.

That feels like the more faithful work to me.
And maybe the more sustainable kind of hope, too.

So here’s the question I’m asking this month:

Where are we calling something resilience when it might actually be overextension?

Not as an accusation.
As an opening.

Because once we can name what’s true, we can begin to build something steadier.

And thank goodness — steadiness can be grown.