I have sat across the table from enough senior leaders in crisis to know one thing: the ones who navigate it best are not the most positive. They are the most clear-eyed.
Courage, as someone once put it, is not the absence of fear—it is the overcoming of it. Resilience works the same way. It is not irrational optimism, but the disciplined, almost clinical act of deciding what to do with the obstacles in front of you. In 2026, the obstacles are real.
Jobs are being reshaped faster than organisations can adapt. Conflicts are fracturing supply chains and weakening economies. Faith in both political and business leadership has eroded significantly. The World Economic Forum’s Global Risks Report 2026 identifies social fractures as among the most pressing threats to economies globally. HBR recently reported that the five highest measurements of global economic policy uncertainty since the 1980s have all come in the past five years, and 87% of public earnings statements in early 2025 mentioned the word “uncertainty.” Mentions of it in Glassdoor reviews were up 80% year over year.
And yet, the Fortune/Deloitte CEO Survey from late 2025 showed optimism toward the global economy doubling to 28% since just six months earlier. JPMorgan Chase’s 2026 Business Leaders Outlook found that 73% of leaders held a neutral to pessimistic view of the global economy, while simultaneously 73% of midsize business owners expected to grow revenues.
Leaders are not waiting for certainty, but deciding in the absence of it. Resilience in practice.
Marcus Aurelius wrote in his private journals that the impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way. Epictetus, who was born a slave, went further: distinguish what is in your power from what is not, and act accordingly.
These are decision-making frameworks that translate directly into how I coach leaders through disruption.
When you are facing a challenge, whether personal, professional, or organisational, ask three questions:
Can I change it? If yes, stop analysing and move to action. Formulate a plan, then execute it. Bias towards doing.
Does it affect me? If the answer is no, or not materially, limit your exposure. Not every geopolitical crisis, every competitor’s press release, every anxious news cycle deserves your cognitive bandwidth.
Is it permanent? Very little is. The truth is, 99% of what leaders lose sleep over will pass. That does not mean passivity; if you can act, act. But it does mean that perspective is a strategic asset. Catastrophising is a productivity leak.
If you cannot change something and it is not going away, acceptance is efficiency. You are reallocating mental energy to where it can actually move something.
The Stoics built empires and survived exile using this framework. We can use it to run better organisations.
Most conversations about emotional regulation in leadership focus on the obvious ones: fear, anger, grief. Leaders are coached to manage those.
But here is a less comfortable observation: joy needs managing too.
When things are going well, when the quarter is strong, when your team is firing on all cylinders, there is a human tendency to assume it will hold. It will not. Joy is not a permanent condition. Neither is success, momentum, or market position.
The Stoics called this memento mori – the deliberate awareness of impermanence.
The leader who enjoys the upswing fully, without mistaking it for the new normal, is far better positioned when conditions shift. And conditions always shift. Emotions can cloud judgement if we allow them to become our forecast.
Feel them. Do not build your strategy on them.
Here is where I push back hardest on the conventional framing.
Resilience is not a personal virtue your employees either have or lack. It is a leadership obligation you either fulfil or neglect.
A 2025 meta-analysis covering nearly 300 studies and more than 430,000 employees found that personal resilience directly improves wellbeing and performance, and the World Economic Forum, in presenting those findings, named resilience a boardroom agenda item, not an HR one. Separately, TriNet and Wellhub reported that 90% of employees experienced burnout symptoms in the past year. Gen Z employees saw a 34% year-over-year drop in job readiness confidence.
The most effective lever remains straightforward: employees who perceive genuine care from their employer are 56% more engaged. The kind that is visible, consistent, and comes from leadership, not a wellness app.
As business leaders, we carry a doubled responsibility. We are applying the three-question framework to our own challenges while simultaneously creating the conditions in which our people can do the same. That means being honest about difficulty without amplifying panic. It means making decisions visibly and explaining the reasoning. It means modelling regulated, clear-headed behaviour under pressure, because what you do in a crisis is what your team learns to do.
To me, the most useful thing a leader can do right now is to stop treating resilience as a character trait (something people are born with or not) and start treating it as a skill that can be practised and an environment that can be built.
Applying the triage framework to your own decision-making, visibly and consistently, so your team internalises the logic rather than just the outcome.
Creating psychological permission for people to say “this doesn’t affect us” and disengage from noise. Not every macro trend requires a task force.
Addressing permanent changes honestly. The role that AI has absorbed, the market that has shifted, the model that no longer works. Acceptance, communicated clearly, is a far more resilient response than performative optimism.
We live in a genuinely turbulent, often irrational, frequently unpredictable world. So I will ask you this: When was the last time you consciously applied the “can I change it” question to something that is consuming your attention right now, and if the answer was no, did you actually give yourself permission to let it go?