This article is a contribution from Next Gen Assembly 2024 Member, Aerielle Rojas.

Throughout our experience as Next Gen Assembly members and as individuals working with sustainability professionals and advocates around the world, one thing is clear. We’re overwhelmed.

This is not without cause – the pressure is high. Simultaneously navigating climate change, unpredictable global landscapes, and organisational goals is a tall order, and it can feel as if we are actively fighting for change. But what do we do when…we run out of fight?

Sustainability requires a set of skills from imagination and empathy, to project management and data analysis. Yet one that is less spoken of is that of personal resilience. It often presents itself in its opposite form, a looming tension, or unspoken acceptance of burnout and frustration as our new normal. And fashion has been telling us this for years, with its infamous reputation for burnout, mental exhaustion, and unequal personal and financial investment throughout the value chain.

Seemingly, these articles can present only the “tip of the iceberg” – there’s a larger gap in our personal resilience, especially that of sustainability employees. Working to better our surroundings is ingrained in many of us, yet we lack a critical ability to maintain emotional persistence, steadfastness, and satisfaction with the parts of our work we can control.

Defining Personal Resilience

Pernille Sejer, founder and consultant of Dressed4Stress, a firm helping individuals and organisations manage stress and build resilience, voices this issue. She writes how teams and individuals “battle internal resistance” with personal ideals of equity and wellbeing, while tasked with “managing corporate guilt” in environmental or social facing roles. This dissonance creates a tension that undermines health, and even hope.

Understanding this unique gap for purpose-driven professionals between the dream and reality creates a dire need for resilience. Despite common thought, however, it is not simply the ability to bounce back or persist in stressful environments. Resilience speaks of a deeper, more dynamic capability to adapt to change, and transform as a result. It is threefold-adjusting our responses to new surroundings, learning to create new habits, and allows us to be at peace with what we can do.

Lauren Hill, co-founder and consultant of Population, puts it this way:

“We can be overwhelmed by the immensity of the work that is in front of us to move toward truly sustainable, equitable, regenerative systems…The reality is we’re probably not going to see the arrival of that system in our lifetime. But that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t be contributing or have hope that humanity can someday get there. You have to find your place in the system, and the role you’re going to play.”

What’s the Play?

So then, how do we address systemic gaps in worker wellbeing and individual capability? On the one hand, some estimate that 80% of the change needs to come from our organisations. And true, systematic training and providing accessible healthcare is far beyond our sole capacity.

Like the Wellbeing Spiral developed by the 2024 Next Gen Assembly, personal resilience is incredibly subjective and requires iterative learning, but it provides a helpful way to approach  identifying what it looks like for you.

The Wellbeing Spiral Playbook emphasises the following exercises:

Unlearning/Relearning

• Word Association: What comes to mind when you think of your job title, industry, or mission
• Empathy Mapping: Putting you at the centre, how do you think and feel, say and do, see, and hear currently in your role?

Ideating

• Reverse Problem Solving: What would make your current work-day, role, or tasks worse, and what opportunities here challenge your existing way of working?

Shifting

• Unlikely Alliances: Who can you partner with, or what voices are left out here, that can help to implement and spread this change outside your role, and into other parts of your life.

Download the Wellbeing Spiral here to read more on how you can use these exercises

In the context of our work, personal resilience is a completely different way of operating. In response to and throughout global uncertainty, it is acting from a place of knowing who we are, what role we play, and separating ourselves from the results at the end of the day.

Fashion is a human industry, dependent on those celebrating, sharing, educating, and working in it. If we’re resilient, then and only then, can fashion be.