Resilience is a word the world has borrowed from Israel for generations. Year after year, against a backdrop of hardship, uncertainty, and loss, the people of the country have continued to show up for each other, for their communities, and for their livelihoods. Tania Friedlander, executive coach and founder of HigherWork, sees this as a masterclass in collective human endurance, one that the rest of the world can benefit from learning.
The numbers, she notes, reflect something worth pausing on. Despite active conflict, Israel's GDP still grew by 1% in 2024, surpassing the Bank of Israel’s own forecast of 0.6%. Consumer spending rose by 3.9%. To Friedlander, this is evidence of people who have refused to stop moving.
Yet resilience, as powerful as it is, does not arrive with a manual. The long-term psychological toll of sustained conflict, of raising families under threat, of professional lives disrupted by duty and grief that doesn’t fully lift, is real, layered, and rarely spoken about in boardrooms. “We can’t pretend that’s not happening,” Friedlander says. “Instead, we need to be there for our teams, if not more so than ever. The real question becomes: how do we regulate our own emotions, our own lives, in a world this turbulent?”
It is a question Friedlander does not ask from the sidelines. As a long-term caregiver for her husband, who lives with Parkinson’s, a neurodegenerative disease that progresses over time, she knows intimately what it means to keep leading while carrying a life that can feel tumultuous itself. That personal reality is what sharpens her lens and what makes her framework embedded in life experiences.
Friedlander’s approach centres on emotional regulation, and it begins with something she sees playing out in every high-pressure environment: the mind’s tendency to wander into futures that haven’t arrived yet. She identifies this as anticipatory stress. “Our thoughts create the panic, the burnout,” she explains. “If you’re afraid of what has yet to happen, your body already feels that stress, and that reduces your productivity, your efficiency, your performance. And then you’re not just dealing with the difficulty in front of you. You’re also creating a negative future as a result of it.”
“It’s in these moments, moments where the situation: the pain, the tension, the trauma, that we risk losing ourselves. We must ask ourselves, ‘Will we allow our circumstances to define us, or will we reclaim ourselves?’ And by reclaiming yourself in the most difficult times, a new version of yourself can emerge.”
The practice she returns to, for herself and for the leaders she works with, is presence. “Be where your feet are,” she says. Returning to what is actually true in this moment, she believes, is the mechanism by which people can separate facts from emotional projections. In her view, it doesn’t minimize hardship. It redirects cognitive energy from an imagined crisis to the task that is genuinely in front of them.
There is a second dimension to this that Friedlander considers just as urgent, particularly for those living through prolonged instability. She argues that humans are, fundamentally, growth-oriented beings, and that the sensation of standing still is psychologically corrosive in ways that go well beyond stress.
“For people living through this kind of conflict, it can feel like life is frozen,” she says. “There are so many things they simply can't do. And as humans, we have a fundamental need to grow. If your life is on hold, that need becomes even more important to meet.’’
Her own work, she notes, is what gives her a sense of forward motion. “It gives me purpose. It gives me a sense of momentum, a feeling of moving forward, and that matters more than people realize.”
This is where, in Friedlander’s view, leadership responsibility becomes something far more human than a management conversation. If employees’ personal lives are dysregulated, disrupted by the relentless weight of ongoing uncertainty, she believes leaders have a genuine obligation to ensure the professional environment does not deepen that disorientation. Structure, purpose, and a visible path forward are not extras. In conditions like these, she emphasizes, they are anchors.
Practically, she points to regular goal-reconnection meetings, individualized check-ins, and one question she believes more leaders should be asking their teams directly: “How can I best support you right now?” The reason the question matters, she explains, is that support does not look the same for every person.
“One team member may need a resource or a tool. Another may just need 15 minutes to speak honestly about how they're feeling. Some may benefit from access to external support. What is universal is the need to move forward. But how that happens looks different for each individual, and identifying that and understanding what they need can go very, very far,” she says.
She is equally direct about the boundaries of leadership itself. Staying within one’s lane, understanding the line between empathetic leadership and professional therapy, is not, in her view, a limitation. It is a form of integrity. Leaders are not equipped to fulfill every role, and attempting to do so, she notes, serves no one.
She says, “Those lines can get blurry, but staying in your lane is very important. Know what is yours to carry, and then carry it fully.”
Through HigherWork, Friedlander works with organizations to embed these principles into the way teams actually operate, drawing on emotional intelligence frameworks, executive coaching, and the kind of insight that only comes from navigating professional demands while managing a deeply personal reality at the same time. The work, she adds, is not separate from her life. It is, quite literally, how she keeps going.
People already fluent in resilience deserve leaders who understand it too, not only as survival, but as strategy. Friedlander believes that for those willing to have harder conversations with their teams, the tools already exist. The question, as she sees it, is simple: are they actually willing to ask?
This article was written in cooperation with Tom White