When Pushing Harder Stops Working: Rethinking Resilience

What it took to stop forcing recovery—and learn how to work with the system instead.

At the beginning of this year, I stepped away from everything. Not as a reset, not as a break—but because my system could no longer function. What I thought would be a relatively contained medical moment turned into something far more complex: surgery, complications, and a recovery that hasn’t followed any predictable timeline. What has unfolded over the last few months hasn’t just been physical healing—it has been a complete reorientation of how I understand resilience, capacity, and what it actually means for a system to come back online.

Conditions Over Force

I used to believe resilience meant pushing through—staying consistent, showing up, and holding everything together no matter what, i.e. just enduring. But I’ve had to confront a different truth: when a system requires constant effort to function, it’s not resilient. It’s compensating. Real resilience isn’t built through force. It’s built through conditions—through how we respond to signals, how we create space for recovery, and how willing we are to adapt when the system changes.

It is easy to confuse effort for strength, and to believe that if something isn’t working, the answer is to push harder, stay consistent, and keep going. But living systems don’t respond that way. They respond to conditions, and when those conditions aren’t there, no amount of effort can replace them. 

I’ve been living inside that distinction for the past few months in a way I couldn’t bypass or think my way around. It has required me to slow down enough to see what was actually happening rather than what I expected to happen. 

Entering Uncertainty

After signing off at the beginning of this year, I had planned to return in mid-March, believing I understood what I was preparing for as I approached excision surgery for endometriosis—something that had been assumed based on symptoms and family history, but not yet confirmed. There was a quiet, underlying hope that they might find something definitive, something that could finally account for the level of dysfunction I had been living inside. At the same time, there was just as much uncertainty. I didn’t know if what I was experiencing would translate into anything visible, anything measurable, or anything that could explain why my body had become so difficult to function within.

That ambiguity carried its own weight. I had spent years trying to make sense of symptoms that did not neatly resolve—navigating fatigue, cognitive disruption, hormonal instability, and a level of physical limitation that at times made even basic functioning feel out of reach. There were stretches where I questioned whether I was missing something obvious, whether I had failed to implement the right changes, and whether there was still a version of this that could be solved through discipline, lifestyle, or a better understanding of the system.

Lived Experience

I wasn’t unfamiliar with complexity. In the years leading up to this, I had already been living inside a series of disruptions that never fully resolved—chronic pain from a back injury that reshaped how I moved through daily life, a relationship that slowly pulled me away from my own sense of self and required a deliberate process of returning, and a traumatic brain injury that altered how I processed information, how I spoke, and how I perceived the world—eventually making it difficult to think clearly, communicate effectively, or participate in the work that had once anchored my identity and connected me globally.

Alongside that, I had navigated mercury toxicity across layered medical systems and detoxification, and a series of additional accidents and physiological stressors that required me to learn how to work with a body that didn’t follow predictable rules. I studied biomimicry for years—not just in design and infrastructure, but as a way of living—learning from ecosystems, reconnecting to the natural world, and understanding that healing is inherently relational. These experiences shaped how I understood adaptation, resilience, and repair, both in theory and in practice.

These experiences, alongside the work I was doing with clients navigating their own complex conditions, directly shaped how I wrote The Resilient Living Systems Playbook, where I translated principles from nature into frameworks for resilience, regulation, and repair. But even in that process, I began to see the limits of what could be generalized. The more clinical the guardrails became, the more they risked missing the lived reality of people whose systems were already too overwhelmed to follow structured pathways. 

Where Systems Break Down

As I continued working inside that complexity, I began to notice where even well-grounded frameworks started to strain. What could be mapped conceptually didn’t always translate cleanly in lived experience; because while lifestyle shifts and systems thinking can support healing, there are moments when medical intervention is necessary. And yet, the medical system itself is not built to hold complexity well. Care is often fragmented across specialties, with each provider focused on one part of the body without a clear understanding of how it all connects. Surgery addresses what can be seen and removed, but rarely accounts for the full context of the organism it exists within—the physical, neurological, and psychological conditions that shape recovery.

What I was stepping into was not just a procedure, but a system that carries both precision and limitation. The expectations reflected that mismatch. At one point, I was told I could be driving within a week. Later, I was told recovery could take four months to a year. Both statements existed within the same process, and neither fully accounted for the individual variability of what I was already navigating. That gap between expectation and lived reality can be destabilizing in its own way, especially when you are already questioning your body’s capacity to respond predictably.

So when I signed off, I did so holding all of it—the hope that something would finally make sense, the uncertainty that it might not, and the quiet recognition that whatever came next would likely require more from me than I yet understood. 

System Signals

There were symptoms that persisted without clear resolution—cognitive fatigue, difficulty tracking conversations, moments where language would disappear mid-thought, digestive instability, hormonal disruption, and a baseline exhaustion that discipline alone couldn’t override. These weren’t isolated issues. They were signals from a system operating under conditions it could no longer sustain.

When I went into surgery, I knew something was wrong. I just didn’t yet understand the scale. In the Playbook, I wrote about this moment—about moving forward without full clarity, but with a growing awareness that something in the system was out of alignment. I didn’t yet understand how much my body had been compensating.

Endometriosis, especially in its more advanced forms, is often not contained to one location. It changes the environment of the body over time. Tissue grows where it shouldn’t, inflammation accumulates, chemistry changes, structures begin to shift out of relationship with each other, and the system absorbs the cost quietly until it no longer can. In my case, that had been happening for years.

What they found during surgery wasn’t just a diagnosis. It was a system that had been adapting for a long time—scar tissue, active lesions, restricted movement between organs, and an internal chemical environment that was putting strain on everything. My body had been working to maintain function under conditions that were steadily becoming less functional.

Suddenly, things that had felt disconnected began to make sense: the neurological instability layered on top of the brain injury, the anemia, the fatigue that never fully reset, the never-ending nausea and vertigo… None of it was a failure of effort. It was the outcome of a system carrying more than it could sustainably hold.

Acute Collapse

And then, as I was beginning to process that, everything shifted again. A post-operative infection escalated quickly into sepsis. The margin between stability and crisis narrowed in a way that was impossible to ignore. In that moment, resilience wasn’t individual. It was relational. My sister was there, steady and responsive, and it became very clear that no system recovers in isolation.

From there, the timeline I had imagined for healing no longer applied. This is the part of resilience that is rarely discussed. Not the moment of disruption, but what happens after, when the plan dissolves and the system doesn’t follow a predictable path back to baseline. 

There were many moments where the instinct to push returned. To move faster, to get back to where I had been, to override what I was feeling in order to regain momentum. But the system didn’t respond to that approach anymore. So the shift wasn’t just behavioral. It was relational.

Rebuilding Differently

Instead of asking how to get back some previous version of myself, I had to begin asking what the system needed now to rebuild. The answers were not dramatic. They were small and often counterintuitive. Shorter cycles of focus. Longer windows of recovery. Paying closer attention to signals instead of trying to override them. Letting rest be part of the process rather than something earned afterward.

Some days that looked like progress. Other days it felt like nothing was changing at all. That is where the deeper layer of this work revealed itself. When you are inside a system that is healing slowly, time doesn’t move in the way you expect it to. Progress isn’t always visible, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t happening. In living systems, there are phases where what matters most isn’t growth—it’s preservation, repair, and quiet reorganization. A wintering organism isn’t failing to grow. It’s operating exactly as it needs to for that season. Part of what I had to learn was to stop resisting that season, and start working with it.

In living systems, a lot of what allows recovery is happening before it becomes visible. Beneath the surface, the system is reorganizing, redistributing resources, and recalibrating its capacity. Part of the work was learning to trust that process without needing immediate confirmation.

Resilience, in this context, is not endurance. It is not how much you can push through. It is whether the system has what it needs to repair, reorganize, and return to function over time. That is not something you can force. It is something you create through conditions.

What Remains

There’s also been grief—layered, complex, and not always easy to name. Grief for the versions of myself that haven’t returned in the way I expected. Grief for timelines that dissolved. And more recently, the loss of my sister’s dog, Remi—this small, deeply present being who was with me through so many of the hard moments of recovery. He wasn’t just a companion; he was a steady, grounding presence when my world had narrowed, when my body felt uncertain, and when so much was in flux. Losing him, unexpectedly and so soon after everything else, opened another layer of heartbreak. And at the same time, it brought me back to something essential—how willing we are to love, even knowing the cost, and how belonging doesn’t come from avoiding pain, but from allowing connection anyway. 

That kind of resilience isn’t individual. It’s relational. It’s my sister showing up in the moments that mattered most. It’s my dad and my mom supporting in the ways they know how. It’s friends holding me from afar, reminding me I’m not doing this alone. And it’s the quiet truth that even in loss, even in disruption, the capacity to love—to stay open—is still intact.

Returning

This experience didn’t just change how I relate to my own life. It deepened the work I do with others. Everything I teach around signal, capacity, recovery, and adaptation comes from understanding what allows a system to sustain function, and what causes it to break down. That understanding is not theoretical. It is something I have had to apply directly.

As I begin to come back online, I am doing so differently. Not all at once, and not at full capacity, but in a way that is aligned with what the system can actually support.

Over the next couple of months, I will be opening space for a small number of clients, continuing work with the individuals and teams I’m already supporting, and expanding conversations with organizations around resilience, human performance, and systems thinking.

If this perspective resonates—whether through your own experience, your work, or the systems you’re part of—you’re welcome to reach out.

And if nothing else, pay attention to what your system is asking for. Not what you think it should be able to do, but what it actually needs to function, to recover, and to adapt. Because resilience doesn’t begin with effort. It begins with telling the truth about the conditions you’re actually operating within.