How to stay resilient when everything's changing (and everyone's busy)
What I learned running resilience workshops across three continents
It’s that time of year again.
I spent a decade running an agency and still work with a lot of media and advertising businesses. Q4 has a special meaning in this world - much as it does in other sectors like retail and hospitality. In short, everyone’s going to be bloody busy. It’s going to be stressful. And there’s not really much you can do about it.
But, as I’ve been discussing frequently over the past month, that’s no reason to push yourself to breaking point.
Now, while I’m quite happy talking about the importance of resilience, I’m very careful to frame it constructively. It’s not about grinding yourself into the ground. In fact, if you approach it in the right way, it can be the making of you and your team.
So, today, I thought I’d share some of the ideas I presented this past Tuesday in what was a first for me - three workshops on resilience, across four continents in one day. I hope you find it useful.
Collective resilience - stronger together
In 2018, twelve boys and their football coach were trapped nearly four kilometres inside a flooded cave in northern Thailand.
When rescuers finally reached them, the scale of the challenge was clear. The tunnels were narrow, pitch-black, and flooded - even elite Thai Navy SEALs couldn’t navigate them safely.
That’s when they called for two middle-aged hobbyist cave divers from England - Rick Stanton and John Volanthen. An engineer and an IT consultant who spent their weekends exploring caves for fun.
And the SEALs did something extraordinary - they handed the rescue over to them.
From that moment on, hundreds of people - Thai, British, Australian, American - came together. Engineers, medics, farmers, meteorologists. Each contributed one piece of the puzzle. Every day they regrouped, tested ideas, adapted, learned.
No one person played the hero - it was just a team of people working collectively, listening deeply, and staying focused on the mission.
That’s what real resilience looks like. In Bruce Daisley’s excellent book Fortitude, he quotes social psychologist Alex Haslam:
“Resilience is something that when you look at it in the world, it isn’t a manifestation of individuals as individuals. It’s a manifestation of groups and of individuals as group members. Resilience is something that only occurs in and to groups.”
In other words, it’s built through trust and open conversations. And collective rituals that build connection.
Here are a few I like:
At Pixar, they use the Braintrust - regular feedback sessions where directors present work-in-progress to a small group of peers.
The rule is simple: no hierarchy, no defensiveness. Anyone can challenge an idea or point out what isn’t working. The goal isn’t to criticise - it’s to make the story stronger. This kind of candid, but meaningful feedback builds trust because people know the conversation is about the work, not about them.
In Sweden, they have Fika - a cultural ritual where colleagues take a break together, usually with coffee and something sweet.
When I was running my agency, we created our own version. Mid-afternoon, every laptop closed, we’d sit together for 15 or 20 minutes - a cup of tea, a bit of cake, a proper chat. Not about KPIs or deadlines - about life, family, what we were cooking for dinner. It cut through that mid-day fatigue and reminded people they were humans first, colleagues second. And when people feel genuinely connected, they handle pressure better and support each other more naturally when things get tough.
In your team, it could be as simple as a no-meeting morning - just a few hours of collective breathing space to think and focus on getting your head down.
Because resilience isn’t just what you do when things go wrong. It’s what you design into the system so you don’t reach breaking point in the first place.
Personal resilience: the power of agency
Teams that work together handle pressure better. But there’s also a personal dimension - feeling like you’re in control of your own situation.
And that starts with personal agency.
Agency is the sense that your actions matter. That even when everything feels chaotic, you can still decide what to do next.
Few people embody that mindset better than Sara Blakely, founder of Spanx.
She started with an idea - tights that didn’t show a visible panty line under her clothes. “This is something other women need,” she thought. But the problem was, she was selling fax machines in Florida at the time. She had no experience, no funding, no connections.
But here’s what she did have - total belief that she could figure it out.
So despite spending two years hearing “no”, every rejection became a learning experience. Every failure gave her fresh insight. She didn’t wait for permission - she experimented her way forward.
She taught herself patent law and filed her own patent.
She drove repeatedly to North Carolina to find a factory that would make a prototype.
She was rejected by every male-run mill until one called back because his daughters loved the idea.
She cold-called department stores and convinced a buyer to give her ten minutes. During the meeting, she even took her own trousers off to demo the product.
She eventually sent a sample to Oprah with a handwritten note. Oprah loved the product and featured it on air. The rest is history.
That’s agency. Not pretending you can control every outcome, but taking ownership of actions.
When you’re overwhelmed, agency is what pulls you out of paralysis. So here’s a simple framework to shift from reaction to action - the 3-2-1 rule.
When everything feels urgent, ask yourself three questions:
What has the biggest impact?
Preparing for an upsell conversation with a key client, not sending 20 generic outreach emails. Talking to five users about their real problem, not another internal prioritisation meeting. What’s the one thing that moves other things forward?
What’s urgent vs important?
That inbound email feels urgent - but finishing tomorrow’s client presentation is more important. The Slack ping about a minor issue feels urgent - but preparing for your strategy session matters more.
The rule: urgent and important → do it now. Urgent but low value → respond quickly, keep it light. Important but not urgent → block calendar time. Neither → drop it.
What can I drop or delegate?
That meeting where you’re one of twelve people - can someone else cover it? Formatting the internal presentation deck - can you hand it off? Dropping and delegating isn’t shirking. It’s protecting time for higher-value work.
Focus your effort where it counts.
Bouncebackability: the ultimate reset skill
The third layer is bouncebackability - the ability to reset quickly and go again.
Not my words. The words of Iain Dowie, former footballer and manager.
In what was one of the earliest internet memes, he managed to inadvertently articulate the secret to resilience (and coin a phrase that’s ended up in the Oxford English Dictionary) Because resilience isn’t about never falling - it’s about how fast you can recover.
Two great examples: Michael Jordan and Lin-Manuel Miranda.
After a loss, Jordan wouldn’t sulk or lash out. He’d go straight to the gym. His reset ritual was physical - action over rumination. He channelled frustration into focus.
For Miranda, the creator of Hamilton, it’s more emotional. He keeps a “Good Job File” - a folder full of messages, notes, and tweets from people who’ve been touched by his work. Whenever he faces criticism or creative fatigue, he reads through it to regain perspective.
Different rituals, same outcome - a deliberate reset. You don’t wait for energy to return - you create it.
Here are four types of Reset Rituals you can experiment with in your team:
Physical reset - stand up, stretch, take a short walk, some deep exhales.
Perspective reset - write down what’s in vs out of your control.
Story reset - share the lesson learned with a teammate.
Symbolic reset - change environment, close your laptop, swap tasks.
Pick one. Try it out. Tell the rest of your team how it goes.
Crucially, make having a Reset Ritual a normal thing to do! Because it works.
We talk a lot about performance at work, but not enough about recovery. And yet, the most successful teams and individuals - in sport, in business, in creative work - are the ones who design for both.
They connect. They take agency. They nurture bouncebackability.
Good luck for Q4.
Ollie
If your team’s heading into Q4 and feeling the pressure, I’m running “Resilience Through the Grind” workshops - practical, energising sessions designed to help teams protect focus, recover faster, and adapt smarter…