I suffered a severe concussion 12 years ago when I fainted during a stand-up X-ray, smashing my head off the concrete floor of a medical facility.

My symptoms of headaches (made increasingly worse with any sort of noise, movement around me, or thinking), blurry vision that was extremely sensitive to light with a bunch of floaters (black squiggly lines) in my line of vision, physical fatigue, dizziness, short term memory issues (I could remember things from years ago but couldn’t remember the conversation I’d just have with my husband), and a really challenging time multitasking

My continued healing journey has been a long one. But, I have moved mountains in terms of where I am now compared to where I was. My experience has taught me:

am noticing a trend in the Executive Coaching work I do where leaders who are normally intensely focused on the next thing and always striving for more, have hit a lull.

There is nothing wrong with them. Their performance isn’t suffering, yet they aren’t feeling particularly inspired to go guns ablazing onto the next project or career move. And, this lack of goal-setting and intense desire to strive is feeling very weird for them. It is hard to put a finger on what’s ‘wrong,’ except they report just feeling “okay.” What has caused this feeling amongst many leaders?

At the end of July, COVID-19 finally caught up with my household. I felt like we had been playing Dodgeball with it for over two years and it got my daughters and me at the same time. It ended up hitting me hard.

As I lay in bed with a brutal headache, I thought about the journey I had been on over the past 10 years since my brain injury. It has been a wild ride. And, I have remained resilient throughout it all. But, I was tired of being resilient. I was feeling Resilience Fatigue.

I have never heard of the term Resilience Fatigue before. It is something I just coined in a moment of pain lying in bed. But, I think it is a very real thing and it is something I believe many of us are feeling right now.

If you are feeling Resilience Fatigue and it is impacting your life and work, what do you do about it?

Last week, I attended my first silent retreat at Loretto Maryholme along the beautiful shores of Lake Simcoe, Ontario. I am a big fan of meditation and building periods of silence and stillness into my life. I think we are faced with so many demands each day that sometimes we need to just say stop and get off the hamster wheel for a while to re-connect/or connect with ourselves at a deeper level.

What is important about connecting to yourself at a deeper level?