Building Your Resilience Plan - with Dr. Marie-Hélène Pelletier

Written By Sue Firth

My guest this week on Episode 220 of The Executive Edge is Dr. Marie-Hélène Pelletier, a Workplace Mental Health Expert, Psychologist, and Speaker

If you're a busy executive, I suspect can spot yourself in this scenario: demands are increasing, deadlines are looming, and your natural response is to lean in harder, work longer hours, and push through with the same tools that have got you here.

In this conversation, I sit down with Dr. Marie-Hélène Pelletier to unpack why this instinct — whilst understandable — is precisely what leads high-performing professionals straight to burnout. And more importantly, we explore what you might do instead.

The Dangerous Pattern Every Executive Should Recognise

Here's an uncomfortable truth that Marie-Hélène lays out with refreshing clarity: successful professionals are fabulous at what they do, and that's precisely why they're at risk. You've built your career on handling demanding hours, exceeding expectations, and pushing through challenges. But here's what's happening behind the scenes that you might not realise.

When demands increase, we systematically make two critical errors in judgement. First, we underestimate the size and depth of those demands. That project you think will take half an hour? Three hours later, you're still at it. We minimise the scope, underestimate the likelihood that other demands will pile on simultaneously, and fundamentally misjudge what's ahead.

Second, and this is where it gets really interesting, we overestimate our supply. We overestimate how much energy we have, how much time is available, and how much capacity we're working with. Put these two biases together—underestimating demand while overestimating supply—and of course you're going to put your head down and just power through. In your mind, you can handle it. But the math doesn't work out that way in reality.

The One-Minute Solution You Can Start Today

Marie-Hélène offers a practical starting point that bypasses the usual resistance executives have to "stepping back." She knows what you're thinking: "I haven't got time to step back for half an hour and think about this strategically. I need to get it done now."

So here's her challenge: take one minute. Literally, set a timer on your phone for 60 seconds and allow yourself to step back. What often happens in that single minute is you realize, "Oh, I actually should step back for five minutes, and now I understand why it's worth making that time." That brief pause gives you enough visibility to see the benefit of proper planning, and suddenly the investment makes sense.

Think about it this way: you'd never tell someone to handle a major work situation with only 10% visibility. You'd demand full information before making decisions. Yet when it comes to your own workload and capacity, you're operating on minimal visibility, making assumptions, and hoping it works out. It's time to dial up that visibility from a one out of ten to a ten out of ten.

Why You Keep Doing It Yourself (And Why That Needs to Change)

There's another pattern Marie-Hélène and I identify that hits close to home for many executives. You love action. You take quick ownership. You have genuine accountability. And you've spent years building deep expertise that makes you incredibly capable.

But here's the catch: doing it yourself was the premise behind how you got to where you are. In your earlier career, your success was built on personal execution, on being the one who could handle it all. As you've moved into leadership, that instinct hasn't fully shifted. So when something needs to be done, your first thought is still, "I'll just do it myself. It'll be faster, better, done right."

This isn't stupidity—it's a skill that hasn't evolved with your role. And while you know intellectually that you should be delegating and empowering your team, in the moment, when pressure hits, you default to what you know: doing it yourself.

Marie-Hélène points out that this creates a rather interesting paradox. As a leader, you know it's not good leadership to take everything on yourself. But your brain is protecting you because it sees the consequence of delegation: it takes time to explain, to teach, to hand over, and to manage the risk that it might not be done as well. In high-pressure moments, your brain calculates that doing it yourself is the lower-risk option. Understanding this mechanism is the first step to changing it.

The Project Manager Mindset: A Useful Reframe

Here's a practical reframe that can transform how you approach overwhelming workloads. Put on your project manager hat. Most executives have worked with project managers and, as Marie-Hélène says, "Thank God for project managers!" They're the ones keeping everyone on track.

What would a project manager do if you brought them this "simple half-hour task" you're about to dive into? They'd sit you down and say, "Wait a second. Let's actually map this out. This component will take a full day. This part requires this specific resource for three hours. This depends on input from two other departments who are in back-to-back meetings this week."

Suddenly, your half-hour task has turned into something far more substantial. And yes, you'll probably hate this process at first because you're thinking, "I don't have time to plan—I need to just do it!" But that's exactly the point. Without that planning, you're setting yourself up for exhaustion and suboptimal outcomes.

The Hard Truth About Putting Yourself on the List

I share a story from my own practice in this episode: a senior leader once pushed back on the idea of putting himself at the top of his priority list, calling it "dishonest." This reveals something critical about how executives think about self-care and personal wellbeing.

There's often a fundamental struggle with making decisions that prioritise your own needs. The investment in yourself—whether that's rest, exercise, time with family, or simply stepping away to recharge—feels somehow less legitimate than the urgent demands of work. But here's what Marie-Hélène and I both emphasise: if you're depleted, overtired, and running on empty, your decision-making suffers. Your effectiveness plummets. You're not actually serving anyone well, including your organisation.

Marie-Hélène goes on to introduce a concept from her book that's particularly helpful here: the DNA model of personal and professional life. She uses the visual of a double helix, where the two strands represent your personal side and your work side, with rungs connecting them throughout. The point? Our lives don't have lanes. There isn't a "personal lane" separate from a "work lane." Emotions don't have lanes. Your energy doesn't have lanes.

If what allows you to maintain a fresh brain and do your best work is going for a walk in the middle of the day, then that's what needs to happen. As a leader, this might be the strongest message you can send to your team—that investing in yourself is not only acceptable but essential for sustained high performance.

The "Guilt Over Burnout" Approach

And if you're feeling guilty about prioritising yourself? Marie-Hélène has a refreshingly direct response: "Too bad. Feel guilty if you need to. That's actually easier to treat than burnout. Burnout takes a bit longer to recover from."

This has become something of a mantra for the teams she works with. When someone can't make a meeting because they're taking care of themselves, they simply say, "Guilt over burnout—I'm going skiing." It's a shorthand that acknowledges the discomfort whilst reinforcing the greater truth: protecting yourself from burnout is worth the temporary guilt.

This is especially important for senior leaders who set the culture for their organisations. If you want your team to feel psychologically safe, if you want them to be honest about their capacity and their needs, you have to model it yourself. The strongest message isn't what you say in meetings—it's what you actually do with your own time and boundaries.

Staying Curious: The Gateway to Better Decisions

Marie-Hélène offers one final piece of guidance that ties everything together: stay curious. If all you do is become more curious about the demands you're facing—not trying to fix everything, not implementing a whole new system—just increasing your visibility on what's actually in front of you, that alone will unlock better decisions.

The comparison is striking: you would never approach a significant business challenge and say, "I only want about 10% visibility on this situation. Don't give me any useful information." That would be absurd. Yet when it comes to your own workload, your capacity, and the demands on your time and energy, that's often exactly the level of visibility you're operating with.

Turn up the dial. Get curious about what's really required. Stop making assumptions about how long things will take or how much energy you have available. This increased visibility naturally leads to better planning, better delegation, and better decisions about where to invest your limited resources.

About Dr. Marie-Hélène Pelletier

Dr. Marie-Hélène (MH) Pelletier is one of the rare workplace mental health experts who holds both a PhD in Psychology and an MBA, both from the University of British Columbia. She brings a unique combination of psychological research and business strategy that she's developed over 20 years in leadership roles—from managing call centers to serving as a chief officer in both private and public sectors.

For nearly a decade, she's focused on keynote speaking, executive coaching, and maintaining a psychology practice working with professionals and leaders. Her approach is distinguished by how she bridges two worlds: what we know from research in psychology and the strategic principles we use in business. The result is a practical, strategic approach to resilience that executives can actually implement.

Get The Resilience Plan Book

The Resilience Plan: A Strategic Approach to Optimizing Your Work Performance and Mental Health is Dr. Pelletier's award-winning book that puts information and power directly in your hands as a professional or leader.

The book provides a framework combining business strategy, psychology, and workplace psychological health. By the end, you'll have a custom individual resilience plan that gives you the edge you need both at work and at home.

Where to Get It:

  • Support your local bookstore: Ask them to order it if they don't have it in stock

  • Major online retailers: Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop.org, Indigo, Books-A-Million

  • Audiobook: Available on Audible (narrated by Dr. Pelletier herself, accent and all!)

Book Website: https://drmarie-helene.com/the-resilience-plan/

Bonus: When you purchase the book, you can access free resilience planner worksheets and accompanying video to help you start building your plan immediately.

Connect with Marie-Hélène Pelletier

Free Resources: Marie-Hélène offers free worksheets from her book that are self-explanatory and can be used independently or alongside the book. These are available for yourself, your team, or even to share with family members.

Key Takeaways for Busy Executives

The Core Problem: When demands increase, we underestimate the depth of those demands whilst overestimating our capacity to handle them. This mismatch leads straight to burnout.

The One-Minute Solution: Haven't got time to plan? Start with just 60 seconds. Set a timer. That brief pause often reveals why five minutes of planning is worth the investment.

The Delegation Challenge: Your instinct to "just do it yourself" served you well earlier in your career, but it's holding you back now. Recognising that your brain is trying to protect you helps, but the real risk is not delegating.

The Project Manager Mindset: Map out what really needs to happen before diving in. What feels like a 30-minute task is often a multi-day project once you properly assess it.

The Guilt Question: Guilt over taking care of yourself is easier to manage than burnout. Feel guilty if you need to, but still do what you need to do.

The Visibility Imperative: You'd never operate with 10% visibility on a major business issue. Stop doing it with your own workload and capacity.

The Cultural Impact: As a leader, your behaviour sets the standard. Modelling self-investment creates psychological safety for your entire team.

I encourage you to listen to this episode more than once. Share it with your leadership team if you think it might be helpful. And perhaps most importantly, take that first one-minute pause to assess what's really on your plate.

 

The Executive Edge is a podcast I host as a business psychologist dedicated to providing practical skills that help you achieve and maintain success in both life and business.

Sue Firth
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