The Problem with a Word Like "Resilience"

This post kicks off a multi-part series on the language, perceptions, and practices of resilience in tough fields like mining, science, tech, and executive leadership. Drawing from my experience navigating male-dominated industries and a career grounded in science, communication, and leadership, I want to explore how the concept of resilience shifts depending on who’s talking and who’s listening.

As a scientist (and perhaps why I was drawn to science in the first place) I’m most alive in states of cognitive dissonance. Those who know me have seen me interrupt my own train of thought mid-sentence, just to challenge it from another angle. I don’t share these ideas because they’re polished or perfect. I share them because in the friction of sharing, debating, and refining, better ideas emerge. And maybe, in offering mine, I’ll spark yours.

Part 1 begins with a deceptively simple question: what does 'resilience' actually mean?

The journey we’ll go on together through these and upcoming posts.

Understanding → Awareness → Action

1.     Name It: Defining Resilience – What resilience means, and how the words we use shape our understanding and relationship with it.

2.     Know It: Finding Your Baseline – Develop awareness of where your resilience is strong, where it’s stretched, and what’s in (or out of) your control.

3.     Grow It: Building Resilience – Taking action through everyday practices that strengthen resilience.

Name It: The Problem with a Word Like "Resilience"
Resilience gets thrown around a lot. It’s praised in performance reviews, tossed into corporate handbooks, and celebrated in startup culture. But when we pause to ask, “What does resilience actually mean?” the answers vary wildly.

Some equate it with mental toughness. Others with bouncing back. For some, it’s about enduring silently. For others, it’s about evolving visibly. That variability matters, because how we define resilience shapes who gets recognized for it and what strategies we use to build it.

And in tough fields like mining, science, tech, or executive leadership, this isn’t just a philosophical concern. It’s operational.

How Mining Taught Me to Listen Differently
Being understood has been a core driver in my life, and for that, words matter.

I've spent over 20 years as a scientist working on honing my skills and knowledge in the realm of scientific communication. I’ve also managed people for over 25 years and spent 15 years as an entrepreneur building companies in the mining and water treatment technology sector. It has become clear to me that whether it’s science or business, the first step to understanding one another is to speak the same language.

Over a four-year period in my 30s, I worked on a mining project that required travel in and out of Kyrgyzstan (before translation apps were mainstream). People often commented on how quickly I was picking up Russian, but it wasn’t about language aptitude. A close colleague put it plainly: "You don't know Monique. She can't stand not being able to communicate with people."

That moment crystallized something for me. It’s not just about language, it’s about access. Understanding what people mean (whether they’re Kyrgyz airport security, field engineers, or executives) has always been a non-negotiable for me. I’m not satisfied with surface-level definitions. I want to know what people are really saying, and whether they even mean the same things I do.

That experience in Kyrgyzstan sharpened my ear. Over time, it turned into a kind of radar for misalignment, when people use the same language but mean entirely different things. That radar is part of how I’ve come to view resilience, not just as a personal trait, but as a social signal that’s context-dependent and culturally loaded. I’m going to dive into that here.

Words Shape Perception
This isn’t only about men and women, but gender is a clear and relatable example of how the definition of 'resilience' shifts depending on the audience. I could just as easily compare how scientists and engineers frame words differently (cue the Big Bang Theory stereotypes), but that wouldn't land as widely and would be hard to relate to the core topic of resilience.

So here I go, into a touchy subject I’ve spent much of my life observing, and often actively avoiding, and of course never dissecting publicly: the intersection of language and gender. If we are using the same word to mean different things, confusion will ensue. I want to be very clear here.  

I wanted to make sure I wasn’t simply being impacted by observer bias. So I asked ChatGPT to generate word clouds based on how resilience is described in online content targeted toward men versus women. The results were stark.

The AI word clouds showed some interesting things (I checked it with 3 different AI’s and 5 different prompts each):

• Male-targeted language around resilience concentrated on “grit,” “strength,” “discipline,” and “stoicism.”
• Female-targeted content around resilience leaned into “flexibility,” “empathy,” “balance,” and “emotional intelligence.”

(See what I did there? Hint: Concentrated, Leaned)

ChatGPT generated word cloud on words associated with resilience in literature and media targeted towards women.

ChatGPT generated word cloud on words associated with resilience in literature and media targeted towards men.

I claim no ownership of this concept that language matters in gender, but it has lived rent-free in my mind for many years, ruminating. I explored and experimented with this concept in the male-dominated environments I work in. I listened, questioned, and tested. And it has generally worked well for me – like speaking a foreign language in a different country (yes, I wrote with dashes and em-dashes before AI did and I will continue to use them where it is grammatically appropriate). This kind of linguistic divergence has been explored for many decades.

In other environments, resilience is synonymous with stoicism – maintaining emotional control and acting decisively despite hardship. I even had two AIs suggest to me that Ryan Holiday argues this in The Obstacle Is the Way, that stoicism and resilience are synonymous. But I have read the book and disagree with those AIs. I believe he is arguing that the two are intrinsically related and often confounded, which I will also explore in my next posts, showing how stoicism is a precursor to resilience rather than being synonymous.

Use of the word resilience and associated words over time. Produced using google ngraph dataset.

Official Definitions Fall Short
Looking up definitions for the word resilience doesn't help much more. The US Department of State defines it as such:

"Resilience refers to the ability to successfully adapt to stressors, maintaining psychological well-being in the face of adversity. It's the ability to 'bounce back' from difficult experiences. Resilience is not a trait that people either have or don't have."

It's a great definition, and based on this, all the above terms are valid halo words. This got me thinking, perhaps the language used is more about whether an internal or external locus of control is assumed. Angela Duckworth’s research in Grit ties closely to the internal locus perspective, where persistence and long-term goal orientation are seen as the core of resilience. Conversely, authors like Brené Brown, in Rising Strong, frame resilience through vulnerability and relational context, suggesting a more external or socially adaptive lens. Empathy, for instance, aligns more with this external orientation, where understanding and responding to the emotional environment of others plays a central role. Depending on which locus is culturally emphasized, the behaviours seen as 'resilient' will differ.

There’s a large body of research (both academic and mainstream) suggesting gender-based patterns in locus of control. Men often internalize success and externalize failure, while women tend to do the reverse. This shapes how traits like grit or empathy are perceived and rewarded. I’ll return to this in a future post. Let me know if you are interested in a deeper dive into the background literature on this.

Are We Speaking the Same Language?
As a woman who has thrived in male-dominated (aka “tough”) sectors, including science, technology, mining, entrepreneurship, and executive leadership, I've often wondered why I've found success and enjoyment in these areas where others have faced challenges. I think a key difference is I've always paid attention to the words – my early and persistent attention to the language used in these spaces.

Growing up bilingual, I've always been drawn to the definitions, assumptions, and framing beneath the surface of the words. I also always enjoyed writing from an early age. In environments where meanings often go unexamined, being attuned to language has been a quiet advantage (for someone who often talks too much). That curiosity about language and framing started early. As a kid, and then more so as I moved into the entrepreneurial life, I’d compare the books or advice aimed at my three brothers versus me. The differences weren’t just stylistic, they revealed very different assumptions about agency, risk, and emotion. Over the past 20 years of purposefully reading books targeted both to men and women in the business and leadership genre, the differences are stark. As a scientist, I had to ask myself both "why", and "what if".

Reflection: Did this Post Take Resilience to Write?

Did this post take resilience to write? No. Not in my definition of the word. But when I asked a few AIs, they all said yes. To me, it is strength, courage, maybe even grit (because of my persistence of working through these concepts for 20+ years). Or some other word along those lines. Not because it was hard to write this, but because it meant doing the uncomfortable thing – sharing unpolished thoughts in service of a bigger idea. Would that meet your definition of resilience? It doesn’t for me, but that’s me. So, I now contemplate whether writing this post was an act of resilience, and I am missing something in how I came across (or perhaps AI are just AI).

But was it scary for me to post this? Absolutely. Because pushing on language and culture (especially around gender) still risks being misunderstood. It can trigger discomfort, skepticism, or even dismissal. But the whole point of this series is to get more precise, more aware, and more equipped. That takes reflection, and reflection takes courage.

For your Contemplation

And with that, I’ll leave you to reflect on how you define resilience, and who taught you that definition in the first place.