The short version: we keep trying to make first responders more resilient. It's the wrong goal, and it quietly does harm, because resilience training hands a systemic load to the individual and then blames them when they can't carry it.
Resilience training starts from an assumption: the load is fixed, so the person has to get tougher to carry it. Learn the breathing. Build the mindset. Bounce back faster. Some of it helps at the edges, and I'm not here to dismiss the people who teach it in good faith.
Look at what the assumption says
It says the problem is your capacity, not the load. It says if you're coming apart, you didn't train hard enough at being okay. It takes a systemic injury and hands the entire bill to the individual, then calls it empowerment.
I've watched what that does to people. The best firefighter I knew spent years being told to be more resilient while a load nobody was measuring kept climbing. When he finally broke, the same word that was supposed to save him became the thing he beat himself with. He wasn't resilient enough. That was the story. It was a lie, and a cruel one.
The reframe I'd offer any chief
The goal isn't a more resilient firefighter carrying an unmeasured, ever-growing load. The goal is to see the load, manage it before it compounds, and stop asking people to be superhuman inside a system that was never designed around what a human body can actually take.
That's not soft. It's the opposite. It's the same discipline you bring to every other risk on the job. Read the conditions, then act. Until recently we simply didn't have a way to read this particular condition, so "be more resilient" was the only lever we had.
Once you can see the load, the plan changes
We can read it now, on an individual baseline, early. And once you can see the load, "be more resilient" stops being the plan and becomes what it always was: a way of asking people to absorb a failure that was never theirs to fix.
Resilience isn't the answer. Measurement is. The people in your house have carried enough of this alone.
About the author
Gary Roberts is the Founder & CEO of Neurovus and has served 20 years with Fort Lauderdale Fire Rescue. He built NAVI to track each firefighter’s drift from their own baseline, helping fire departments spot burnout before it becomes a crisis. Connect on LinkedIn