I’ve been thinking a lot about resilience lately because I saw it in my lounge room last Sunday.
Our 25-year-old daughter, Ebony, is currently navigating the bureaucratic maze that is potential NDIS support after both an ADHD and then ASD diagnosis. If you’ve ever been near that process, you’ll know it’s not exactly designed for efficiency or emotional comfort. It involves forms, assessments and – in our case – a Carer Impact Statement written by her parents.
That’s a confronting document to write.
You quickly realise the version that “works” is the one that highlights the deficits. The executive functioning gaps. The social complexities. The challenges that have shaped your family for years. You don’t secure support by describing how delightful someone is at Christmas lunch.
The very worst part is that the person you’re writing about reads it.
Anthea and I sat at the kitchen table choosing our words carefully. We weren’t exaggerating and we certainly weren’t inventing anything, but we were consciously compiling a report that catalogued our daughter’s hardest stuff. At moments, it felt like we were dobbing her in for her own good.
Before handing it over, we reminded Ebony of the statement’s purpose. This isn’t a character judgement. It’s a functional one. I watched her read it. She chuckled once or twice. There was an audible gulp in the middle.
Then she slipped it into her bag and said, “No offence taken.”
And she drove home.
I sat there thinking that a fair percentage of adults – not just students – wouldn’t have handled that anywhere near as well.
I mentally noted that there isn’t a resilience program in the country that could have prepared Ebony for that moment. No poster about grit. No wellbeing week. No carefully laminated value statement.
She managed it because she’s been practising resilience for years. She’s navigated misunderstanding, overload, anxiety, social misreads and the exhausting business of living in systems not built with her in mind. She’s had to get over shit – constantly.
Resilience isn’t installed in a lesson. It’s rehearsed in real life.
And this is where I think schools might be missing something obvious. We often frame our neurodiverse students as the ones who most need to “build resilience”. Of course they need support. But many of them have already been developing a level of adaptive strength their peers have never had to.
They know what it feels like to try again tomorrow after today went sideways. They know how to recover from social friction. They know how to keep showing up in rooms that don’t always understand them. That’s not fragility. That’s forged capacity.
If leaders genuinely want more resilient students and staff, the answer might not be another program. It might be creating cultures where challenge is normal, recovery is modelled and hard truths aren’t avoided.
Ebony didn’t need shielding from that document. She needed context, honesty and belief. And she walked out of our house steady, not smaller.
Schools talk a lot about building resilience.
Maybe we should spend more time noticing where it already lives — and letting those who’ve been rehearsing it their whole lives show us how it’s actually done.
Keep fighting that good fight,
P.S. I’m about to hit the road to present at a couple of conferences in Queensland and then India(!), and it always reminds me how much I enjoy being in a room with people who care deeply about schools.
If you’re involved in organising a conference or leadership event and you think this kind of thinking would be valuable for your audience, feel free to reach out. I’m always up for a good conversation about where schools are heading and how we can make them stronger together.
There’s a bit more info about keynotes here.
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