Toxic Resilience: Work, Worth, And The Fear Of Slowing Down

You've made success look effortless for so long that no one, including you, ever stops to account for its cost. Colleagues marvel at how you hold everything together. Your calendar has become a map of everyone else's emergencies. You're the person everyone calls when the supplier pulls out or the board pack needs to be perfect by morning. Projects stall without your constant involvement. Your competence has turned into gravity, work orbits around you. You never say no, never drop the ball, and you never let the strain show.

The success, trust, and respect you've earned are real. But exhaustion has stopped being temporary and has become your operating system. Time is now the thing you never have enough of. The resilience that got you here, that ability to push through anything, has quietly turned toxic.

This is the book for high achievers whose competence has trapped them in unsustainable patterns. Written by a leader who spent 25 years running teams of 10,000+ people and recovering from severe burnout, Toxic Resilience reveals how "pushing through" becomes dangerous when it becomes untethered from your human limits. It's what happens when "resilient" becomes code for "will work until I collapse," when your body sends signals to slow down, constant fatigue, shallow sleep, brain fog, and you've trained yourself to override every one of them.

Drawing from her experience, Zertashia Awan dismantles the myth that suffering is the prerequisite for success. She exposes the "cockroach stories" we tell ourselves, where we turn hardship into the architect of our achievements. She shows what's really driving burnout: sometimes a genuinely toxic workplace, sometimes our own wiring, patterns formed years ago that once made sense but now work against us. Often, it's both.

In Toxic Resilience, you will discover:

- Part 1: You - How work, worth, and burnout intertwine; the belief systems that fuel Toxic Resilience; early warning signs of burnout; and the mindset shifts and tools that help you stop pushing past what's sustainable.

- Part 2: Toxic Workplaces - How cultures disguise dysfunction as excellence, and how leadership patterns can either heal or harm.

Together, these sections give you language to name what's happening, frameworks to understand why, and tools to navigate both your inner patterns and external workplace realities. The final chapter outlines five systems for redesigning how you structure your workday, protect your focus, use your calendar, build recovery into your day, delegate with context, and create the mental space required for exceptional work. An accompanying PDF toolkit of protocols and frameworks helps you implement these systems.

What makes this book unique is that it refuses to oversimplify burnout. It doesn't blame everything on toxic workplaces, and it doesn't tell you it's all your fault for not having better boundaries. Instead, it shows how workplace culture and personal psychology reinforce each other in a loop that feels impossible to break, and gives you the language and systems to dismantle both sides of that dynamic.