Beyond Resilience: How Lived Experience Can Create Stronger Workplaces

01/9/2026

Lived Experience Blog

By Linea Johnson, Author & One Mind Lived Experience Council Member

When resilience stops feeling supportive

“I have a problem with the word ‘resilience’.”

I had just started as a change management program manager at a new company and was in an all-hands meeting. A Black woman, who had been with the company for years, spoke up in response to leadership’s word choice. I sensed she was sharing not just her own feelings, but those of others as well.

It was 2021, and the world was hoping we had finally reached the end of COVID and its impact on our lives and workplaces. Companies and leaders worked hard to help us keep moving forward. The Great Resignation was in full swing, and many people couldn’t care less about their day jobs when they were still too frightened to leave their homes or take their kids to school.

While leaders were doing their best to rally their teams and inspire us to come together, language like ‘resilience’ began to feel empty. Though I do not understand this woman’s experiences of building resilience, I immediately felt the exhaustion with which she shared her insight.

The Oxford dictionary defines resilience as “the capacity to withstand or to recover quickly from difficulties; toughness.” This misses a key fact. Resilience is built and strengthened through difficult experiences. It is frequently gained through pain, struggle, and suffering.

And while many people built resilience during the COVID years, the casual use of it in a business meeting felt empty, especially to individuals forced to build more resilience than they perhaps even wanted to.

My own resilience, built through years of unwanted suffering from my mental illness, helped me understand the problem and solution in this moment. My lived experience and role helped me support leadership to create more inclusive and meaningful language for everyone.

Lived Experience is complex, and so is our value

In developing a new initiative called “Flourish@Work”, One Mind aims to understand the workplace experiences of individuals with lived mental illness experience. Deepening the Flourish@Work team’s insights, workplace mental health thought leader Morra Aarons-Mele has shared the results of her groundbreaking “Neurostrengths Survey”. Morra polled individuals who identified as “neurodivergent” regarding their workplace experiences. In the survey, 60% of respondents reported that their brain differences due to mental illness were not purely positive or negative, but complex. Our strengths can often cause difficulties, and vice versa. This is true about any brain.

This complexity shows up in the conversation about disability and the idea of ‘superpowers.’ While 90% of people in the survey said their unique brains gave them abilities that help in their careers, for many, these abilities have come at a cost. These strengths are not magical, but shaped by the constraints we live with every day.

For those with the lived experience, we regularly face fluctuating capacity as we juggle our health, personal, and work lives.  We have to manage our energy and often our safety while simultaneously self-monitoring our behaviors because we are navigating the minefield of stigma. 

No one should have to suffer to be valuable. Still, the reality is that the barriers society has forced us to navigate have given us skills, insights, and strengths that make us great employees. Our value is not in our inspirational stories of overcoming, but in how we have learned to work within these limitations.

Skills built from barriers

In the survey, 75% shared that the benefits of their brain differences included exceptional strengths such as:

In myself, I have honed the following skills:

The complexity of disclosure

If people with mental illness bring so many strengths, why don’t we see more of us in the workplace?

We are everywhere.You just might not know it. The real question is why more people aren’t disclosing their diagnoses. This answer is simple: stigma.

While we have seen improvement in stigma, it has not gone away. In Brandon Staglin’s article, Turning Glass Houses into Lighthouses: Overcoming Workplace Stigma, he shares the obstacles to career advancement identified in One Mind’s research: struggles with workplace accommodations, fear of disclosure due to colleagues’ disrespect, and stunting of career growth due to underestimates of their abilities.

According to the survey, only 10% of respondents have disclosed.

While there are many impacts of a lack of disclosure, ranging from failing to receive accommodations under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) to being unable to connect with colleagues on your full identity, the lack of disclosure is a valid response. And this response is not one lacking courage, but rather risk analysis.

 When support and connection depend on disclosure, people end up being left out.

Support without explanation

We know the value of the worker with lived experience. We understand the validity of non-disclosure. How then, do we help workers thrive, excel, and grow meaningful careers?

Here are some insights pulled from the survey:

Ultimately, the most effective supports don’t require us to explain our needs, and similar to the curbcut effect, many other employees will benefit as well.

From Endurance to Influence

We often hear that resilience is something to strive for, as if becoming tougher is the goal. But real resilience is a response to hardship. While resilience can build strength and insight, no one should have to experience hardship to be valued at work.

For those of us with lived experience, this creates a paradox. Many of the skills that make us effective were built through personal struggle. Recognizing these strengths should not ask people to keep surviving tough environments. It should help us create better ones.

The One Mind Flourish@Work Initiative uses hard-earned insight so that fewer people have to spend energy masking, self-monitoring, or pushing through environments that were not made for them. By understanding how people with lived experience adapt and contribute, we can design workplaces that are safer, more flexible, and more human for everyone.

This change should not depend on individual employees repeatedly explaining themselves, disclosing before they are ready, or using up their own energy educating managers. The research of One Mind and its collaborators helps move the work to where it belongs: shared data, collective insight, and system-level change. It gives employers what they need to act, without draining the people they want to support.

People with lived experience are uniquely positioned to help lead this change. Not because we are endlessly resilient, but because we know what makes environments sustainable, inclusive, and functional. When workplaces improve, everyone benefits. People spend less energy surviving and more energy contributing. Disclosure becomes safer. Skills can be used more fully. And future workers will face fewer of the barriers that shaped us.

How you can help:

Now, One Mind is offering people with lived experience of serious mental illness the opportunity to contribute to a new survey to understand their career goals, challenges, and ideas to improve workplaces from their unique perspective. If you have this lived experience, taking the Flourish@Work survey can help us shape the future of work without you having to carry that burden alone.

If you are an employer or leader, this data offers a roadmap for building workplaces where people with lived experience can truly thrive.

Resilience may explain how many of us got here. But it is our collective influence that will shape where we go next.

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