Strategic Resilience: A High Performer's Sur-thrival Strategy

Beloveds, I’ve been talking to you on Tik Tok for about a year about the concept of STRATEGIC RESILIENCE as your superpower or the magic elixir to ensure you

sur-thrive long-term, debilitating, racist-based workplace trauma. You ARE going to sur-thrive the workplace micro/macroaggressions, the unfair punishment for your unicorn-like, high-performing Black Excellence because YOU CAN. In this article, I explain how resilience works, what behaviors to STOP, and what behaviors to START. Now let’s get to work. 

My culturally informed FAFO approach to your workplace trauma recovery is designed to teach you how to first acknowledge and then build on what we have already inherited…the foundational power of our ancestral survivorship, i.e., our “generational resilience”, and combine that with the latest in resilience psychology, creating a strategic approach for the equivalent of an intelligent, well-played game of chess instead of the childhood checkers you’ve been playing. This chess-like long game sends a “we shall NOT BE MOVED/REMOVED “checkmate” message to our traumatizing workplace racist abusers. Understanding how Strategic Resilience works allows you to not only sustain your workplace high-performing unicorn brilliance, but also to sprinkle it with a little “Not today, Satan”. 

Generational Resilience: Our African American generational resilience is a powerful capacity for survival and adaptation, built through centuries of systemic oppression, violence, and disadvantage. It is a collective strength passed down to US through our families and communities, encompassing survival strategies, cultural expression, and the intentional creation of joy in the face of persistent injustice. Your RESILIENCE is an owed response to your ancestors’ survival of historical trauma as well as a dedicated effort to navigate the unpleasant reemergence of racism and inequity in your workplaces. 

You are building on the following ancestral RESILIENCE:

• Strong Kinship Bonds: Extended family networks have been central to the survival of Black families, providing economic, social, and emotional support.

• Cultural Identity and Pride: The development of a strong cultural identity/expression is a critical component of resilience.

• Spirituality and Religion: Faith-based institutions and spiritual practices like prayer have long been a source of strength and hope.

• Work and Achievement Orientation: Black families have historically held a strong commitment to work and achievement. This “high performing drive” is often passed down as a necessity for success. 

• Role Adaptability: Black families have demonstrated a profound ability to adapt family roles and structures in response to stress and instability, often assuming caregiving duties to support the entire family unit.

Your individual Resilience is defined as the ability to bounce back, adapt to challenging situations, and recover from the adversity of traumatizing circumstances. The 4 main types of resilience are physical, emotional, mental (or cognitive), and social resilience. These pillars represent your body's ability to recover from physical challenges and your capacity to manage emotions during stress. Resilience involves a complex interplay between the presence of protective factors and the absence or mitigation of risk factors. Cultivating these areas helps you cope with and recover from adversity. Increasing your resilience requires two things: building your Protective Factors and reducing your Risk Factors:

Protective factors are the resources and conditions that support resilience, including strong relationships, emotional regulation, effective coping skills, adequate rest, stress reduction, and practiced self-care strategies. 

Risk factors are challenges, such as inadequate rest, overworking, people-pleasing or fawning responses to workplace threats, and the absence of firm workplace boundaries, that all increase the likelihood of negative outcomes.

Protective Factors that Promote Your Resilience as a High-Performing Black Woman:

START USING THESE BEHAVIORS!

• Adapting to stress: Effectively managing and adjusting to stressful events or trauma, rather than being overwhelmed by them. 

• Recovering quickly: Returning to a sense of balance/well-being after a crisis. 

• Flexibility: Adjusting your approach to find new solutions when things don't go as planned.

• Positive mindset: Maintaining a positive outlook to view challenges as opportunities for growth vs. defeat. 

• Utilizing resources: Reaching out for support from others, developing healthy coping strategies. mentorship and a tribe offering a strong sense of high performance and cultural identity.

Risk Factors that Reduce Your Resilience as a High-Performing Black Woman:

STOP THESE BEHAVIORS! 

• Believing the Strong Black Woman Trope: The expectation put upon us by both society and ourselves to be resilient and persevere through hardships. This stereotype exacts a heavy toll on health and relationships, leaving us in a constant state of "fight, flight, freeze or fawn". Studies confirm that the pressure of this stereotype is linked to higher rates of stress-related health conditions, such as hypertension, cardiovascular disease, and adverse birth outcomes.

• Minimize Suffering/Suffering in Silence: Unwilling or unable to acknowledge work-related trauma as rage, heartbreak, grief, while suppressing our feelings and pretending we're okay when we're not. 

• Toxic positivity/people pleasing: Being unrealistically positive or excessively agreeable all of the time instead of acknowledging difficult emotions while working to overcome them. 

• Expecting to Just Get Over It: Our parents and grandparents required the toughness of moving on without feeling pain, with no recognition of a need to heal and move forward healthily. This is how unresolved trauma is born.

• Victim Defeatist/Thinking: Feeling unfairly treated or targeted, leading to learned helplessness, which favors a desire to simply suffer through, versus getting the help you need to heal and learn new coping skills.

How Does a High Performer Maintain Strategic Resilience?

It’s important to understand that we all experience trauma differently, and also that differing traumatic events produce different levels of trauma depending on both your levels of “innate” resilience, combined with what’s referred to as your regulatory or behavioral flexibility.  Regulatory or behavioral flexibility is your ability to quickly identify a traumatizing event, combined with your willingness to learn/adopt effective coping mechanisms. This explains why you may not experience any initial or lingering effects of the same trauma that your sister or coworker experiences, but they suffer from debilitating PTSD. 

• Become Self-Compassionate: Giving yourself the same grace and kindness that you extend to others is vital for your mental and emotional health.

• Create Intentional Joy and Rest: Resisting always staying busy and begin instead to actively prioritize radical rest and activities that bring joy and happiness, without guilt.

• Learn Emotional Regulation and Validation: Stop suppressing your emotions. A healthy approach to resilience involves managing feelings without judgment and recognizing them as signals of trauma rather than weaknesses.

• Set Unapologetic Boundaries: Set firm limits in both your personal and professional life as an act of self-preservation. Put YOU first.  Resilience is not just about pushing through but also about knowing when to say NO. 

• Build Community and Support: Lean on or create a strong support system, including coaches, mentors, and other high-performing confidants. 

• Begin a Self-love Journey: Commit to a self-love journey, a powerful path to FINALLY healing your childhood trauma, which is often linked to your workplace trauma. Protect, nurture, and celebrate your emotional, physical, spiritual, and mental health. 

• Enhance Your Resilience: Build your protective factors, which act as buffers, strengthening your ability to adapt and recover from stress and trauma. 

• Promote Your Overall Well-being: Maintain your physical, emotional, and social well-being, fostering personal growth in the face of workplace adversity. 

• Take a Holistic Approach: Building resilience is a multidimensional process that requires considering psychological, social, and environmental influences. 

• Find the Courage to ASK FOR HELP: 

  Find someone to talk to. When building your Resilience, you must confront your acquired "allergy" to asking for help. I realize it’s against your nature now to reach out and tell someone you're drowning or to ask for help because while you have been supportive to everyone else, no one offers you support, checks on you, or shows up when you need them. Vowing to "never ask again" while assuming a hyper independent stance of….. “I don’t need anyone”, is your protective coping response to your previous trauma of being let down by others time and time again. While it may have seemed a healthy coping mechanism to adopt at the time, it is not an emotionally healthy or strategically intelligent long-term response, and in fact is a Risk Factor. Learning to be vulnerable without fear of hurt, betrayal, or disappointment takes courage you may have to develop, but its rewards include not only embracing your authenticity (your obligation to be true to yourself) but may also be the gateway to getting the help you need to survive at work. Don't let your pride (or previous trauma) cost you your mental health. I promise you, it’s a cost you will regret having paid.