The Missing Piece in Every Resilience Strategy

Why Understanding Your Brain Is the Difference Between Knowing and Doing

I’ve been circling this idea for a while now. You may have seen pieces of it in earlier blogs or heard me touch on it during trainings. But it’s time to be a little more direct. Because this one MATTERS!

And please don’t get it twisted, this is not about throwing strategies under the bus.

If you know me, you know I love a good strategy. I teach them. I use them. I believe in them. And if they come in the form of a good acronym, I love them!

But we have all had that moment when a strategy didn’t work. And even a great strategy is not very helpful if you can’t use it when you need it.

Does this situation sound familiar?

You’re heading into a conversation you’ve been thinking about all day. You’ve already walked yourself through it. You tell yourself, “Stay calm. Take a breath. Don’t rush it. You’ve done this before. You’ve even coached other people through the same thing.”

Then during the conversation, something catches you off guard. Maybe it was a look, a word, or a tone. And the stress doesn’t sneak in, it kicks the door down.

Suddenly you are living out Mike Tyson’s famous quote that everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face.

The strategy that felt so clear yesterday is nowhere to be found.

The trauma informed movement gave us an important piece of this. We learned that when stress enters the picture, the brain changes. Both the chemistry and priorities shift. And the brain starts asking a different question.

Not, “What’s the best response here?” But, “What do I need to do to get through this?”

That shift is critical to understand. Because when the brain starts expecting things to get harder or more demanding, it shifts into protection mode.

We often think about protection mode as the defensive behaviors that protect us from external harm. However, we don’t often think about the mechanisms that protect the fuel levels of the body. Those mechanisms that keep us from running out of energy. When the brain predicts that these are low, it looks more like conservation than defensiveness.

The very systems we rely on to use our strategies start to get limited. Breathing gets too shallow for breathing strategies to work well. Movement gets restricted, so physical strategies are harder to use. And attention narrows, which makes it tough to access thinking strategies.

So it’s not just that we forget the strategy. It’s that the brain can no longer use it.

We treat strategies like they should always be available. Like tools in a toolbox. But the brain doesn’t work like a toolbox. It works more like a battery. And when the battery is low, things change.

Even really good strategies can become metabolically expensive. And the brain starts cutting costs.

That’s why you can watch someone do something fabulous one day and then completely fall apart the next.

The person doesn’t change. The strategy doesn’t change. The energy changes.

This is where we have to shift how we think about helping. Because if we don’t understand what the brain is doing in those moments, we end up working against the brain. We keep asking for more effort when the system is already running on fumes. We keep offering strategies that require fuel the brain doesn’t have. We keep reading behavior as choice when it might be capacity.

So the first step for leaders, educators, and practitioners isn’t more strategies.

It’s understanding the conditions those strategies depend on.

We learn to ask questions like: What is the brain predicting right now? How much energy does it have available? Is this a moment for skill or a moment for support?

You’ll be surprised on how helpful that can be.

Because we have all had the thought, “Why didn’t I just do what I know works?” And now we know the answer. It is what I call Neuro Resilience.

And it’s an understanding that I think will transform human-centered practice.

If you want to go deeper into this idea and learn how to apply it in real time, attend a Neuro Resilience Training (NRT) course.

NRT is the next generation in resilience training. It doesn’t replace traditional strategies. It helps you understand the conditions those strategies depend on. Using the Neuro Informed approach, we focus on what the brain is predicting, how energy is being managed, and why skills are available in some moments and not others.

Because once you understand that, you start working with how the brain functions, especially during hard times.

I’ll be conducting the first live webinar of NRT this summer. I’m keeping this one small on purpose. I want it to be interactive, practical, and personal.

So if you want to reserve a spot, send me an email to Rick@Neuro-LA.com.

And if you’re interested in bringing NRT to your organization as a private group training, feel free to reach out as well.

Because I want your whole organization to know that the missing piece isn’t another strategy. It’s understanding the brain that’s using that strategy.