You Can’t Out-Resilience a Deteriorating System

One thing we can all be certain of is that we are living in times of unrelenting global and local change. The level of uncertainty we are all navigating is overwhelming.

Some of you will be reeling from the announcements last week by Minister Butler of the most significant structural changes to the NDIS since the scheme began.

Some of you will not be directly impacted by NDIS, but have had your own version of this. Just in the past few weeks, I have heard from a leader whose counselling team in community health was defunded, a leader whose team members are on contracts and face an uncertain future, and a practice owner who fears they are close to closing their practice.

Regarding the NDIS, there has been a great deal of speculation and worry about what the changes mean for both participants and providers.

For participants, the concerns are immediate and personal, about access, plans, and what daily support will look like. For providers, they sit around services, caseloads, and business viability. And if you are working directly with people who rely on the scheme, you are holding all of these issues, alongside your own questions about what this means for your role and your work.

This is a particular kind of load. You are being asked to be the steady one while your own professional ground is moving. The change is arriving in waves, with important details still to be finalised.

Working in Uncertainty Is Its Own Load

The nervous system treats prolonged uncertainty differently from acute stress. Acute stress has a shape. Uncertainty does not. It asks you to stay alert without a clear endpoint, which is more tiring than we tend to give ourselves credit for.

The change is arriving in waves. Some are already in motion, some will land in months, and some are still being designed. If you have been finding decisions harder, or yourself more tired than you would expect from ordinary work, this is part of why.

Caring While Uncertain

Emotional complexity is part of this work. What is different right now is that you may be holding client concerns about the future while also holding your own uncertainty. The emotional labour doubles, and often goes unnamed.

In my book Caring Costs - Addressing the Cost of Caring in Healthcare, I wrote about the toll of absorbing others' distress while tending to our own. This is when that toll compounds. Not because you are doing anything wrong, but because the conditions have changed.

You Cannot Out-Resilience a Deteriorating System

Personal steadiness matters. Self-leadership matters. And no amount of individual resilience will make up for a system that is mid-change. If you are tired, worried, or grieving for what might shift, that is not a failure of mindset. It is a reasonable response to reasonable pressure.

Self-leadership is not about performing calm you do not feel. It is about noticing how pressure is shaping you, early, and responding with care.

Small Signs You Are Drifting

When cognitive and emotional load stay high for long periods, the nervous system shifts toward protection. Thinking narrows. Certainty may replace curiosity. Efficiency can override reflection.

You might notice:

• Feeling internally hurried even when you have time

• Irritation that feels out of proportion

• Feeling emotionally flat with people you usually connect with

Taking on more than is sustainable, to protect your client and the person with whom you work, lead and support.

These are not failings. They are information. They tell you the load is high and worth tending.

Recalibrating

Name the load, with yourself and others

Pressure builds when it stays unspoken. Sometimes the simplest sentence helps most.

• "I'm feeling overwhelmed by what we don't yet know."

• "I'm not sure what to say when clients ask me about the changes."

• "I don't know how to plan for the service when so much is still to come."

• "I don't know what to tell my team when so much detail is still unclear."

• "This is sitting heavily with me."

Naming the load to yourself, a colleague or a supervisor can change what it does to you.

Separate what is yours to carry from what is not

Under strain, we can take on system-level worry as a personal burden. It is worth asking, is this mine to solve, or mine to witness and respond to? You can care deeply about what is happening without carrying every piece of it on your own shoulders.

Protect reflective supervision

When pressure rises, reflective time is often the first thing postponed. Yet it is precisely this space that helps you process complexity, regulate emotion, and stay clear. Supervision is not an indulgence in uncertain times. It is infrastructure.

Watch for over-functioning

Many of you will respond to uncertainty by doing more. More advocacy for participants and families worried about losing access to services. More emotional holding for clients, families, and colleagues who are unsettled. More effort trying to hold a service together while the picture keeps shifting. Some of this is genuinely needed. Some compensate for system gaps in ways that erode you. Ask yourself, can I keep holding this without compromising my well-being?

Stay connected

Isolation makes everything heavier. Reach for a trusted colleague, a professional community, or a supervisor. You do not need to have answers to share the load.

Questions Worth Sitting With

• What supports do I have right now to hold space for me while I hold space for others?

• What one small adjustment would help me lead myself more steadily through the coming days and weeks?

A Final Word

I want to acknowledge how much care is being held right now, by you, for people who are understandably worried. It is reasonable to feel unsettled when the ground is shifting.

Self-leadership in these times is not about having the answers while the details are still being worked out. It is about noticing what the uncertainty is asking of you, naming what is challenging, and pacing yourself for the months ahead rather than the week ahead.

Further Reading

Kelly McGonigal's The Upside of Stress looks at how our response to stress influences performance, connection, and resilience. A reminder that our relationship with stress matters, even when we cannot change its source.

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