In every great story, there’s an invisible force that weakens even the strongest heroes. For Superman, it’s kryptonite. For today’s workforce—especially its leaders—it’s uncertainty. The world is no longer dealing with occasional turbulence. We’re living in a time of persistent volatility: economic upheaval, global instability, rapid technological shifts, and mounting social pressure. For business leaders, this creates an urgent challenge—and a defining opportunity. Gallup’s 2025 Global Workplace Report lays it out plainly: manager burnout is now a systemic risk. The data shows that nearly 6 in 10 managers report being stressed at work, and employee engagement worldwide is 21 percent (as low as during the COVID 19 lockdown). Even more alarming? Most leaders are navigating this reality without the tools to support themselves, let alone the people they lead. This is not a leadership crisis. It’s a nervous system crisis. Stress: The Silent Saboteur of Performance Uncertainty doesn’t just make people uncomfortable—it dysregulates the human nervous system. When employees and leaders are exposed to chronic ambiguity, hypervigilance sets in. Focus narrows, creativity shuts down, and the brain prioritizes survival over strategic thinking. The result? Burnout, disengagement, conflict, and collapse of morale. What does unmanaged stress look like in the workplace? Missed deadlines and sluggish innovation High turnover, absenteeism, and presenteeism Managers emotionally checked out or over-functioning on empty Talent depletion across every level Gallup reports the cost of the fall of global engagement is $438B in lost productivity, and cites the manager engagement drop from 30% to 27% as its primary cause. The Report warns that if leaders don’t address this burnout epidemic, GDP loss on a global scale could be the long-term outcome. This is much more than an HR problem, it’s an economic imperative. Resilience: The Antidote to Kryptonite But here’s the good news: unlike kryptonite, uncertainty isn’t fatal—if we’re prepared. The human body and brain are wired to adapt. What’s necessary, is to build that blueprint potential into a practiced skill of real, embodied, enduring resilience that becomes the bodymind’s enhanced response to stress and uncertainty. Think of resilience as the organizational equivalent of muscle memory. When people learn how to regulate their stress response, recover from setbacks, and stay grounded amid chaos, they don’t just “cope”—they lead. They collaborate better, think more clearly, and act more decisively under pressure. And what happens when that skill is built across entire leadership teams? You get healthy, engaged people, and performance that lasts. Neurosomatic resilience training builds exactly this capacity—through nervous system regulation, stress load reduction, emotional agility, and mental flexibility. It’s about equipping people to thrive in the storm, not wait it out. The Business Case for Resilience The numbers speak for themselves: According to Gallup, highly engaged teams show 23% higher profitability and significantly lower turnover and absenteeism. Organizations that support employee well-being see up to 41% less burnout, higher productivity, and greater customer satisfaction. Cultures that prioritize resilience outperform in adaptability, innovation, and retention—key drivers of competitive advantage in a world of constant change. Resilience isn’t soft. It’s smart strategy. Leading Through, Not Around, Uncertainty We are long past the point of seeing burnout as an individual failure. It is a systems failure that the demands placed on people have outpaced their internal and collective capacity to meet them. As a leader, you have the power to flip the script. Instead of bracing for the next disruption, what if your people were equipped to move through it—calm, creative, and collaborative? Instead of treating well-being as a sideline initiative, what if it became your organization’s strategic foundation? Instead of fighting to sustain yesterday’s momentum, what if you built the nervous system strength required to lead into what’s next? The Path Forward A resilient organization starts with resilient leaders. It starts with the decision to treat people not as resources to be optimized, but as human beings with interdependent systems that require support - mind, body, and spirit. Resilience training is not a luxury. It’s the core infrastructure for future-ready business. It builds the internal capacity your people need to meet the external demands your industry will inevitably face.. Uncertainty isn’t going away. But burnout, disengagement, and stress-related decline don’t have to be your story. Here’s a simple start of 3 basic practices to weave into your day: 1. Regulate Before You React In high-stress moments, take a pause before responding. Use a simple nervous system regulation tool—take 5 deep diaphragmatic breaths to center yourself. This models calmness for your team and improves your decision-making clarity. 2. Create Micro-Moments of Recovery Resilience isn’t built in isolation—it’s built in the flow of the workday. Integrate short, regular recovery practices: a 5-minute walk, hydration breaks, digital detox zones, or brief mindfulness pauses. These reset your energy and help prevent burnout from accumulating. 3. Normalize Conversations About Capacity and Act on the Feedback. Build psychological safety by regularly asking your team, “What’s one thing you need to feel more supported this week?” This opens the door for honest communication and reinforces a culture where human limits are respected—not ignored. Key point: demonstrate positive action on the feedback to walk your talk and make real headway in building trust. Resilience is the superpower. Are you ready to intentionally build it into your organization? ___________ Kathleen Gramzay is the Founder of Kinessage LLC. She is passionate about helping mission-driven leaders reduce burnout and recharge their resilience, to lead and succeed with greater positive ripple impact and reach. Kinessage LLC supports performance, culture, and human-conscious organizations, empowering leaders, managers, and teams to show up more effectively, confidently, and collaboratively through resilience strategy and training. The Kinessage® interactive body/mind training programs teach individuals neurosomatic skills to reduce burnout, build stress resilience, and self-release chronic tension and pain, increasing mental and physical resilience for greater individual and organizational success and sustainability. If you'd like to provide a deeper level of conscious engagement and effective resilience tools for your leaders or organization at your next monthly meeting, quarterly retreat, or conference, contact Kathleen directly Here.  If these articles resonate, I welcome you to comment, subscribe, or share them!

Humanity is at a paradoxical crossroads. We are wired for greatness, but chronic stress has short-circuited our potential. Why is this an issue? Under chronic stress or burnout, greatness isn’t an accessible menu option. What then determines whether we can access our greatness and embrace our collective capacities to solve the significant shared human challenges, or devolve into threat-based, fearful people who believe the only way to survive is to dominate others, take as much as we can get right now, and let everyone not like “us” fend for themselves? - The conditioned state of our nervous system, our awareness of it, and our conscious will to reclaim sovereignty over it. Chronic stress conditions us to respond as threatened prey or predator. Stress resilience conditions us for problem-solving, long-range decisions, and positive action under pressure. Perhaps you’re familiar with this scenario: The leader shows up smiling and in a good mood; everyone breathes a collective sigh of relief and relaxes with a sense it’s going to be a good day. The next day, the leader shows up barking orders and demanding everything NOW. Instantly, each person’s nervous system goes into its individual aspect of survival mode. Communication goes from collegial to cutthroat or no communication at all. Strategic thinking, positive engagement, and creativity are neurologically offline. The collective goal is sacrificed to reactionary individual protection and safety. Like a network of computers, human nervous systems respond relative to those with whom they interact. The fact is, business leaders aren't just managing employees, they're managing human nervous systems. And more critically, they are either regulating or dysregulating them. Our wiring has been burning for a while, fueled by the pandemic, distrust, invasions, and political upheavals that continue to disrupt personal-to-global relationships, supply chains, markets, and the world economy. Consider data from leading industry sources: Senior-leader and manager burnout levels: 50 -70% (SHRM, Gallup, McKinsey) Employee burnout levels: 88% (Forbes/MyPerfectResume) U.S. employee active engagement: 32% (Gallup) The ripple effects of employee disengagement/burnout are exponential: Economic : (American Journal of Preventive Medicine April ‘25) Annual Cost Per Employee $3,999–$20,683 (hourly to executive) Equal to 0.2–2.9 times average health insurance and 3.3–17.1 times employee training costs Human : The mental, emotional, behavioral, and physical health of each person The contagious dysregulating impact on others around them In the leader survival mode example above, the workday is unproductive and the ripple effect continues. Impacted employees unconsciously vent their emotions perhaps by cutting off someone in traffic, being rude to a convenience store clerk, or berating a family member for not doing a task at home, causing more separation and survival mode behavior. We know it’s necessary to care for business operating systems. We spend big budgets maintaining and protecting them. We understand they must be defragged, updated, and rebooted if we expect them to run efficiently and continue working well. Our human operating systems - our consciousness, mental, and physical states of being - are infinitely more powerful, resilient, and expansive. Yet they are less understood, less valued, and less prioritized. Our intellect has brought us far in terms of technology. Yet it’s our human operating system - the state of the body/mind, our mental and physical felt sense of safety, that determines whether we direct that technology to benefit everyone or use it to fuel division, hatred, greed, and chaos. It begs the question: Why are we willing to invest heavily in artificial intelligence yet allocate little budget to stop the deterioration of human intelligence and health at a time when every human’s highest capacity is critically needed to optimize our advancements? To successfully navigate today’s tumultuous world, we must consciously upgrade our human capacity to live and lead through it. How? Prioritize (budget & model) mental and physical restoration to reduce chronic stress and its corrosive effect on humanity and business. Resilience is a leadership necessity, not a luxury. Leverage neurosomatic (body/mind) skills to turn stress into strength activating the innate intelligence that fuels creativity, and connection of our greater Selves. We can defrag our minds, remove the toxic files from our bodies, and reboot our desire to positively engage with each other. Operating through our higher-order thinking minds and hearts we can draw from the collective wisdom of coherence and reason for human success and sustainability. The capacity of these body/minds is regenerative and expansive. By investing in and applying resilience to all aspects of our human intelligence – neurosomatic, emotional, and intellectual, we can regain our sovereignty to individually and collectively move ourselves, our families, communities, businesses, nations, and humanity forward. In future posts, I’ll share practical applications to enhance resilience in yourself and your teams. Follow along as we recharge our collective resilience. If these articles resonate, I invite you to comment, subscribe, or share them.  ___________ Kathleen Gramzay is the Founder of Kinessage LLC. She is passionate about helping leaders of mission-driven organizations reduce burnout, and recharge their resilience, to lead and succeed with greater positive ripple impact and reach. If you'd like to provide a deeper level of conscious engagement and effective resilience tools for your leaders or organization at your next monthly meeting, quarterly retreat, or conference, please contact Kathleen directly Here. Kinessage LLC supports performance, culture, and wellness-conscious organizations, empowering leaders, managers, and teams to show up more effectively, confidently, and collaboratively through resilience strategy and training. The Kinessage® interactive body/mind training programs teach individuals skills to reduce burnout, build stress resilience, and self-release chronic tension and pain, increasing mental and physical resilience for greater individual and organizational success and sustainability. You can find out more at www.kathleengramzay.com