I dropped my daughter off at college recently. If you have ever done this, you know move-in day is a lot. There are boxes to unpack. People to meet. Names to remember. Directions to figure out. Questions coming in from every direction.

And underneath all of that is the emotion of realizing that something in your life is changing.

At one point, we sat down to have lunch. My daughter, who had been talking and moving all morning, suddenly got very quiet. I looked at her and asked, “Are you feeling overstimulated?”

Her one-word answer was, “Yes.”

It wasn’t any one particular thing. It was simply too much at once.

And as I was getting ready to leave campus, I found myself giving her one final piece of parental advice. Where I told her, “You have to learn to recognize this feeling. And then you have to learn to tell people when you are there.”

I’ve been thinking about that conversation ever since. Because I wonder how many of us know when we are there.

One of the questions people often ask me is what I am hearing in my coaching conversations.

There are several recurring themes, but the one that stands out across industries, generations, etc., is that people are tired.

But when I listen more closely, I hear something underneath the tiredness. It sounds something like this: people are trying to do more with less. We have fewer people, fewer financial resources, and less time. In some organizations, people who were hired to do one job are now effectively doing two or three while still receiving one paycheck.

And the pressure to do more is happening alongside something else… a growing sense of uncertainty about what comes next.

Managers are trying to support their teams while managing their own workloads and questions. Leaders are navigating financial uncertainty, shifting priorities, and decisions they may not have answers to yet. Across roles, I keep hearing some version of the same thing, I’m trying to keep moving, but I’m not entirely sure what I’m moving toward.

And sitting right in the middle of all this uncertainty is AI. 

I am fascinated by what AI makes possible, and I am also paying attention to what this moment is asking of people. We are asking employees to learn new tools and figure out how they apply to their jobs, often while keeping up with everything they were already responsible for.

And for some people, there is a complicated question beneath all that learning: Am I being asked to master the very technology that could eventually work me out of a job?

I don’t think we should underestimate what it takes to hold that kind of possibility and uncertainty at the same time.

And perhaps that is what I am noticing most right now. It is not any one thing. It is the sheer volume of what people are being asked to absorb. AI, how we work, and the world around us all keep changing. Information comes at us faster than we can make sense of it, and before we have fully processed one thing, something else arrives.

There is very little space between taking something in and being expected to respond to it.

Yet we want our people to show up calm and focused. With the ability to adapt on the fly and be resilient regardless of what is thrown our way.

Which is why I keep coming back to a question I think we need to spend more time on: What exactly are we asking people to be resilient against?

When is resilience the answer?

I want to be careful here because I do believe resilience matters.

There will always be things we cannot control or change. We will all experience loss, uncertainty, disappointment, and moments that ask more of us than we expected. Resilience ultimately helps us move through those moments. It helps us recover, adjust, and find our footing again.

But I wonder if we have become so accustomed to talking about resilience that we sometimes forget to ask another question.

Is this something we need to build our capacity to navigate, or is this something we have the power to change?

Those are not always easy to distinguish. Sometimes the answer really is to take a breath, regroup, and find a way forward. The answer might mean setting a boundary or asking for help.

Or less focused on is the notion that sometimes it means the conditions themselves need to change.

Which brings me back to my daughter sitting across from me at lunch.

It was not within my power to make college feel less new to her.

I couldn’t remove the uncertainty that comes with leaving home, finding her people, learning a new environment, or even figuring out who she is going to become in this next chapter.

Most of that is hers to navigate.

What I could do was help her notice what was happening inside of her before she became completely overwhelmed. The ability to name, “This is what overstimulation feels like for me.”

That awareness gives her somewhere to begin. And maybe there is something in that for the rest of us.

Before we rush to become better at handling everything coming our way, perhaps we need to pause long enough to notice what all of this is doing to us.

What is this moment signaling to me? What’s in my control? What do I need to navigate? What change is this dynamic calling for?

Because even though resilience can help us navigate what we cannot control, it should not keep us from becoming curious about what we can change.