Brain Food for Pioneering Spirits: Is resilience really just “toughness” — or is that definition getting it backwards? Dr. Yasemin Yazan, Jürgen and Marc reframe resilience as elasticity, the windsurf-mast quality of bending under stress and springing back rather than simply resisting it, then push the concept further: is there a resilience of thinking too, not just of action? Marc makes the case that we watch what we eat but never what we think, Jürgen adds behavior as resilience’s missing fourth pillar alongside the mental, physical and emotional, and together they land on an uncomfortable truth about company culture: you can train yourself to be resilient and still lose, if your workplace won’t let you show it.
Note: This session was recorded live in German as part of the Deep Talk Club, so the video above is German-language audio only. What follows is an English translation of the conversation, lightly edited for readability — the back-and-forth between the moderator and participants is preserved, but the original timestamps and speaker names have been left out.
Yasemin opened with today’s topic: Action and Resilience. The question they wanted to explore: what role does resilience play in relation to action? She noted they’d touched on resilience in other rooms before, and had briefly touched on health the day before in the context of resources, so today would revisit some of those earlier threads on health and resilience specifically, before connecting them back to action. She reminded everyone the room was recorded and would be published, and that joining as a speaker implied consent.
Jürgen opened, admitting things had gone a bit sideways for him too that morning — he’d tried to signal wanting to speak with the emoji hand-raise, only to notice it hadn’t appeared until a minute later, so he’d ended up triggering his speaking request via the microphone instead. Yasemin guessed this was likely because the hand-raise emoji only becomes visible once a speaker has already been accepted onto the stage — a small platform quirk to note. Jürgen thanked her, then, since Marc (who usually claims the honor of being first on stage) had joined too, offered to go first on Marc’s behalf. He picked up Marc’s earlier framing connecting today’s room to the previous day’s health discussion, and added two more connections he saw to recent rooms: Self-Management, and Action and Goals. He offered these as things he’d love to explore further if it fit Yasemin’s agenda. He also recalled that in past rooms discussing resilience, his consistent position had been that resilience is typically defined as the strength to recover from stressful situations and setbacks — and he’d always advocated adding “and to learn from them,” tying resilience back to learning. His open question: is resilience simply innate — some people clearly seem more resilient than others, so is it a kind of talent? Or is it an acquired competence, tying it back to learning? With that, he opened the floor, looking forward to the discussion.
Yasemin thanked him, and briefly recapped the self-management competencies they’d been working through — self-knowledge, goal management, time and resource management — all part of the broader model, with health and stress management next on the agenda, giving them a chance to deepen it further and connect it to the other areas: action and goals, the connection to learning, and so on. She also wanted to revisit a definition they’d established before regarding resilience specifically, since resilience is often understood simply as “resistance” or “toughness,” but neuroscience frames it somewhat differently: resilience actually means elasticity — the ability to return to one’s original state. This isn’t the same as resistance/toughness. If we only had resilience/elasticity, we’d be in constant motion; that’s why we also need “hardiness” as robustness. Resilience, in other words, is elasticity — the sibling concept to robustness/hardiness — and ideally we cultivate both: robustness and elasticity, both important for health.
Jürgen thanked her for the reminder, saying the image that came to mind was a windsurfing mast — something he’d had plenty of experience with: when stress (wind) bends the mast, once the stress passes, the mast’s defining quality is returning to its original shape, essentially recovering. That, for him, was the conceptual link to “hardiness.” He also shared a health-related input: he recalled a recent piece discussing exactly this — some people seem to have this quality, others don’t — passing along what he called a “scientific finding” (in quotes, since he couldn’t verify it himself, though it came from a credible source): apparently, people differ in how much cortisol their bodies release under stress, and those releasing less cortisol tend to be more stress-resilient, reacting more calmly to stressful situations. Interestingly, the study found a strong correlation between these lower-cortisol, more resilient individuals and having strong social bonds — family, friend groups, colleague circles where they feel genuinely held and supported. For him, this connects a biochemical process laid down by nature with our ability to influence it — specifically by cultivating social connections — shaping the nature and extent of our resilience.
Yasemin thanked him, noting there are many connections worth exploring here, especially around these biochemical processes: it’s not just important to recognize that some of this is disposition (biochemistry, how individually our bodies are wired), but also that these biochemical processes can be influenced from outside — knowing that certain neurotransmitters break down faster or slower, and how we can favorably steer them externally (through exercise, healthy eating, and so on), gives us real leverage to bring even an innate disposition into a state of self-efficacy through active steering. She also wanted to revisit the question of what health actually is, something they’d discussed before: three common definitional perspectives. First, health as an ideal state — the WHO definition, framing health not merely as the absence of illness but complete wellbeing across biological (physical), psychological (measurable/objectifiable, e.g. depression, addiction, trauma), and social (participation in social life) dimensions — notably a broader framing than many expect. Second, health as a normal state — the attempt to operationalize and measure health, which raises the question of who decides what counts as healthy; this brings in diagnostics, the classic medical approach, where a norm is set and deviation from that norm is classified as illness. But this needs closer scrutiny too: looking at how norms like blood pressure thresholds have shifted downward over the decades, someone who wouldn’t have been classified as ill by yesterday’s standards might well be today — illness, or health, isn’t a fixed thing, but heavily tied to the measurement parameters medicine defines and redefines over time. Third, health as an individual state — the subjective dimension: how do I feel? This can be shaped by entirely different factors, even cognitive decisions one has made. She cited research on people who become paraplegic through some tragic event, and how differently they cope: simply labeling the inability to walk as “illness” produces very different outcomes than choosing to accept it, deciding to keep living, and adapting one’s life and environment accordingly — research shows this choice, this return to self-efficacy, has a massively positive effect on subjective wellbeing, health as an individual state.
She invited Jürgen to add anything further. Jürgen said he remembered this well, and it triggered another thought: it’s strange that, state-mandated, we have health insurance but not really a “wellness insurance” — a side note, he admitted. More importantly, he wanted to highlight something Yasemin had mentioned earlier almost in passing, with a kind of nonchalance, that he considers crucial to resilience: having knowledge and insight. If we approach resilience with some structure and ask not just what resilience is or its opposite, but what the preconditions for resilience actually are, we inevitably arrive at needing knowledge — knowledge about knowledge itself, in a sense — in order, in his personal view, to actually form and acquire resilience. Even if psychosomatic processes govern our resilience to some degree, he believes the essential aspect of our resilience status is fundamentally an acquired function — a learned ability and skill.
Yasemin thanked him and wanted to draw the connection back to today’s core question: what role does resilience play in relation to action? She invited Jürgen to start, welcoming other listeners to join in too with examples and further additions.
Jürgen picked this up eagerly, saying this was exactly the trigger that keeps nagging at him on this topic: if resilience exists in action, does it also exist in thinking? If we start from conscious action, that action is necessarily preceded by a thinking process — itself one of the key outputs of their overarching Thinking theme. So if we’ve just defined resilience so thoroughly in relation to action, he wanted to posit — without fully thinking it through yet — a resilience of thinking too. His reasoning: if we don’t bring resilience from thinking into action, resilience only ever emerges from action itself. But as they’d just established, resilience is a competence, an acquired ability and skill. So, to keep it brief: yes, there is a resilience of thinking too — namely, our capacity to process negative thoughts and emotions constructively, our ongoing struggle with cognitive bias and heuristics, to counter them, potentially to recover from the failures caused by unconscious bias and learn from them. He closed by noting this makes the whole topic a wonderful subject for self-reflection too.
Yasemin thanked him, finding it important to actually play with the terminology here: “resilience of thinking” might initially feel awkward to place, but if we substitute their earlier reframing of resilience as elasticity, and speak instead of “elasticity of thinking,” the concept clicks into place much more intuitively — a useful wordplay to make the connection stick mentally, since otherwise it can initially cause confusion.
She welcomed Marc, confirming she’d correctly interpreted his hand-wave as wanting to speak. Marc confirmed, joking he hadn’t found the persistent hand-raise button and had simply waved instead. He wanted to bring a further perspective shift to the concept of elasticity, repeating one of his favorite quotes that often helps him reframe his life: we’re all very health-conscious — we watch our bodies, our diet — but, as Jürgen had just said regarding knowledge, we watch what we eat, but not what we think. For him, that’s an essential missing piece: knowledge, and awareness of what we think, has a huge influence on our health. He then brought in a third element: emotion. We’re constantly interacting with other people in various situations, and knowing that we’re fundamentally emotional beings — emotions significantly determining our actions — means that staying resilient requires recognizing when others weaponize this, deliberately triggering us emotionally to make us act in ways we’d never choose from a calm, clear, “helicopter-view” perspective. He predicted this would become especially relevant once they got to the Action and Communication room, since sometimes, especially visible in politics, communication itself matters more than actual policy action — opposition parties, for instance, can succeed purely through effective communication, without needing concrete solutions, simply by putting people into a particular emotional state. Understanding these dynamics, he said, thanking Yasemin specifically for this insight, means understanding that we get to decide what we think. In principle, we can decide in advance which situations make us sad, which make us happy, how we evaluate them. Of course, we’re still genuinely sad in situations that touch us deeply — losing a loved one, a tragic family event — we can’t simply declare ourselves no longer sad; emotions still apply there too. But with everyday professional and personal circumstances, we can handle things far more resiliently once we know that we’re capable of reevaluating things. He thanked Yasemin for these rooms specifically, since this kind of knowledge isn’t found in typical textbooks or medical guides, which mostly offer advice on staying physically healthy — while sometimes staying healthy, and remaining healthy (Jürgen’s favorite topic), actually starts with self-management, something only we ourselves are responsible for.
Yasemin thanked him, appreciating that he’d brought emotion into the mix, and reflected on how to integrate it into the elasticity-of-thinking-and-action framing — proposing, on the spot, three dimensions: mental, physical, and emotional elasticity, offering it to the room to see whether that felt complete or whether further aspects were missing. She invited Jürgen and Marc to weigh in.
Jürgen asked her to repeat the three positions — mental, physical, and emotional elasticity/resilience — wanting a moment to think it through. Yasemin recapped: they had thinking and action as core components, then health, which brings in body and mind (hence mental and physical), and then emotion, which Marc had just added — hence her proposed three-part framing, curious what everyone thought.
Marc responded that, for him personally, mental and emotional feel deeply intertwined, almost impossible to fully separate — the emotional, in his view, arises from the mental, which is exactly what his earlier point was getting at: we watch what we eat but not what we think, and emotional states (like happiness, as their resident biologist had mentioned) follow from that. Happiness, he noted, isn’t something that just happens to us randomly, coming purely from outside circumstances — we can choose to be happy, just as we can emotionally choose to be sad, or happy and lighthearted, even if it doesn’t always work, since some situations hit us like an avalanche where reason simply switches off. He referenced a list Jürgen had shared with him in a follow-up discussion after an earlier room, which had clarified a lot for him around self-determination: that we, as humans, always have both a rational and an emotional register, sometimes switching between the two in mere milliseconds — but knowing this means recognizing that once we’re in that purely emotional register, no longer able to steer ourselves rationally, we’re essentially not fully ourselves anymore, acting in ways we wouldn’t under a cool, clear head — itself a real danger, tying directly to their theme of action, since we might say or do things under emotional hijacking that we’d never do with a clear mind. Knowing this about ourselves, about our own action, ties right back to education too, he noted, before asking Jürgen to help summarize: essentially, action operates on both a rational level and a mental/emotional level.
Jürgen thanked Marc for the connection, admitting this whole territory around “self” has become something of a personal obsession lately, thanks to all the terms Yasemin has introduced them to and encouraged them to keep questioning — what actually is the “self”? Building on Yasemin’s three points, he wanted to add a fourth component: behavior. He fully agreed the circle nearly closes with emotional, physical, and mental (cognitive/logical) dimensions — but he considers these the “internal system,” the resilience we build in terms of physical resistance, mental resilience, and emotional resilience. The missing link, in his view, is precisely behavior — the fact that this acquired resilience, this internal status, has to actually show up in our behavior; resilience has to be reflected in our action. So he asked permission to expand their trio into a quartet, adding behavior as the fourth component.
Yasemin thanked him and invited Marc’s response. Marc admitted he needed a moment to process, since they’d be revisiting this again in the upcoming Action and Communication room, and he wanted to make sure he was using terms exactly the way Jürgen intended — the concepts were clear to him, but he needed to re-anchor himself in their established terminology before responding properly. He thanked Jürgen for the contribution regardless.
Yasemin suggested this might already amount to a partial answer to today’s core question — what role does resilience play in relation to action? If, on one hand, I build elasticity or resilience across these various internal system levels, as Jürgen just laid out, the next necessary component is that it actually becomes visible in action or behavior — what others actually see. If it’s understood cognitively but doesn’t show up in behavior, then it’s nice that I’ve theoretically grasped how it should work, but if I don’t actually apply it… She offered this as a thesis, curious what everyone thought.
Marc responded enthusiastically: this brought knowledge back into play, and something Yasemin often repeats — knowledge alone is essentially useless. He’d just had a realization: we’re cautious with exact percentages, as she often reminds them, but we absorb far more knowledge than we ever consciously retain — even what we’ve learned today, we might forget tomorrow, the day after, or next week. Given how many companies struggle with sick leave, especially in education and teaching professions and countless others, where people become ill not from catching a cold but from the stress level itself becoming physically and mentally unbearable, this knowledge needs constant repetition — and he wasn’t even sure a single repetition is enough. He said he was grateful people like Yasemin exist, working in adult education, since he sees this as a genuinely massive market — every HR manager can tell you the sick-leave numbers, and even among people who show up despite not feeling well, many won’t deliver full performance, since they know they’ve already used several sick days and feel they can’t afford more. Simply transmitting this knowledge once isn’t enough — people need concrete guidance, maybe reference materials, but above all constant repetition, since once we’ve heard something, we assume we “know” it — but knowledge alone changes nothing without constant application. That constant application, that routine, is what eventually produces real behavioral change — exactly what Jürgen had pointed to — and behavioral change only comes from continuous application, never from knowledge alone.
Yasemin thanked him warmly, and invited Jürgen to continue. Jürgen thanked her for such a fitting summary, always managing to distill these things so precisely, and picked up on this essential component — behavior and active implementation, which Marc had just illustrated so clearly. He wanted to add one more angle on behavior specifically relevant to resilience in a professional context: our behavior isn’t just something we can objectify, understand, and potentially change ourselves — it’s ultimately also subject to evaluation by others. How I’m perceived by colleagues as a resilient personality, for instance, doesn’t necessarily match the quality of resilience I attribute to myself internally. This, for him, confirmed that this fourth component — behavior, application, actually doing and implementing — is genuinely essential; he’d even go so far as to say: I can be as resilient as I like, but it doesn’t help me much if others don’t perceive it the same way — admittedly a somewhat provocative point, but one he wanted to share.
Yasemin thanked him and wanted to add to this evaluation component: it’s not just about others not seeing it the same way, but sometimes about them not permitting it either. I might well have acquired the ability and skill to be resilient, trained myself to actually apply it — but if I work for an employer who reacts badly, in whatever form, to the idea that staying home with a minor cold is acceptable (just one example many of us will recognize), that creates pressure through expectation (itself a form of evaluation) that leads people to show up at work anyway, potentially infecting colleagues, even though staying home briefly to recover would be far more logical. She drew an interesting parallel to Covid: for roughly three years, the cultural response flipped entirely — previously, people dragged themselves to work with a cold; suddenly, given the uncertainty of whether symptoms meant a simple cold or something more serious, employers actively wanted, even required, people to stay home as a precaution until cleared to return. This shows very clearly how much evaluation and expectation from one’s environment matters, since ignoring it can carry real consequences. If an employer’s culture doesn’t support certain behaviors — and this applies far beyond just colds, to countless other contexts, like feeling unable to signal being overloaded and needing to say no to new tasks — then applying what you’ve learned becomes genuinely difficult, since you risk real consequences: termination if it happens too often, or being evaluated negatively in ways that affect promotion prospects. One could, of course, ask whether it’s worth working for such an employer at all and whether alternatives should be explored — a valid discussion in itself — but the point here was simply to bring this environmental dimension into sharper focus.
Marc picked this up with a current example: he sees real danger for a company when a supervisor themselves lacks resilience. He often hears, among acquaintances facing upcoming decisions, people saying “I’ve only got two more years here, three more years” — translated: I have zero interest in engaging with decisions that need making now, it’s too exhausting, I’ll just coast through my remaining years and won’t initiate any change processes. But those change processes might be exactly what’s needed to secure jobs for the next generation, to ensure the company’s survival. And when the person making that call isn’t just a colleague or team member but an actual supervisor deciding to do nothing simply because they’ll be gone in two or three years, a company might miss a critical market shift it never recovers from, with all the consequences that implies. So really, every incoming supervisor should keep revisiting this — going back to Jürgen’s terminology — does this person still have the ability and skill, physically and psychologically, to keep making important decisions affecting the whole team and workforce over their remaining tenure? Almost like a driver’s license renewal test, he joked, half-seriously suggesting some periodic check on whether someone’s still fit for their position, without wishing anyone ill — but the team, for him, always matters more than any single individual.
Yasemin noted Jürgen wanted to continue, and reminded him he’d mentioned earlier wanting to connect back to self-management, action and goals, and learning — inviting him to do so now, with time running short, to check whether these components had gotten sufficient space and whether the connections had been made, or whether there was still a bridge he wanted to build.
Jürgen, half-jokingly stepping briefly into a moderator role himself, summarized that Yasemin’s and Marc’s last two contributions had really been the practical demonstration of the distinction between resilience in action and resilience in thinking. Regarding the connection to self-efficacy specifically, but also self-image as an essential precondition, and self-confidence as the resulting output, he felt they’d repeatedly, more or less consciously, touched on certain key positions throughout. He believes three “self-positions” form the essential foundation for resilience, in strict sequential order: first, self-image — becoming clear, simply put, about who/what I am. Second, self-efficacy — the result of a reflection process about how what I am affects myself and, especially, my environment. And third, the resulting output: self-confidence. This self-confidence, for him, essentially stands in for resilience conceptually — since it lets me approach future challenges with a certain positive outlook, seeing them as opportunities, tying beautifully (as Yasemin had already framed) into hardiness and elasticity. And, had they more time, this connects directly to Action and Goals too: it’s on the basis of this self-confidence, and its quality, that I define my goals. Even with the right methodological toolkit, knowing goals must be realistic and achievable — how can I even define goals properly if I haven’t clarified my own self-image, what I am, and how my actions affect others? He didn’t want to expand further, but said this was, for him, the larger circle they kept touching different points of throughout these rooms.
Yasemin thanked him, saying this made his point beautifully clear, and added the concept of experience into the mix: viewing all of this as a process, a learning process, means the more experience one has accumulated across different contexts — precisely the points Jürgen had listed — the better one can align that with, say, goal-setting, better assessing what a given goal actually requires and whether it’s realistically achievable by a certain point in time. So accumulated experience plays a genuinely important role here too. She felt this brought today’s room to a nice, rounded conclusion, and moved into the closing round, previewing tomorrow’s topic first, then inviting any final thoughts and closing remarks — starting with Marc, since she saw his hand-raise signal.
Marc said his closing thought would also serve as his follow-up: he’d attended another room that morning discussing the idea that success simply requires doing what you love and persisting at it. The moderator there had pushed back, saying that’s not quite true — and Marc wanted to underline that himself: it’s not enough to just do what you love and expect success eventually; you need the methodological toolkit too. Without that toolkit — understanding how you come across, what you’re actually doing, and everything surrounding it — simply following your passion isn’t sufficient. He thanked Yasemin for a wonderful start to the day and for the room itself, closing with a playful rhyme: today isn’t the only day — we’ll talk again, no doubt about it.
Yasemin thanked him, agreeing wholeheartedly, and handed things to Jürgen. Jürgen said he didn’t want to add too much more — he’d simply found this, once again, an extraordinarily fruitful room, and admitted he particularly loves it — if he might be permitted a lighthearted remark — when a contribution, especially one shaped by the moderator, smoothly transitions into other contributions. Today, for him, had been a model example of exactly that, Yasemin and Marc both, and it would stay with him for that reason. He thanked everyone and wished them a wonderful day.
Yasemin thanked him and closed by previewing the next day’s topic: Action and Relationships, looking at relationship management, again under the umbrella of self-management competence. Tomorrow’s question: what influence does relationship management have on action? She left everyone with a specific thought to let simmer beforehand: how relationships might also connect to morality and ethics — something they might touch on at the margins tomorrow too. She said she was genuinely curious which direction that room would take, and invited everyone warmly to join again the next morning at 8am. With that, she wished everyone well. Until tomorrow. Ciao.
