If you work with people, you know how rewarding it can be. You also know how exhausting it can be.

Teachers hear stories from students that break their hearts. Parents carry concern for their children. Leaders walk into rooms filled with tension, uncertainty and needs. Frontline workers encounter poverty, trauma, illness and crisis every day. Those of us working in community development can sometimes feel surrounded by problems that need to be solved.

So how do we stay compassionate without becoming consumed?

How do we care deeply about people without carrying everything they are carrying?

Recently, I facilitated a resilience session with a nonprofit organization in my city whose staff work with people who are new to Canada. These are social workers, frontline workers and people doing deeply relational work day after day.

As we worked together, one idea kept surfacing:

Resilience isn’t only about becoming stronger. It’s also about learning what is yours to carry—and what isn’t.

And that begins by changing where we look.

Resilience Begins With What’s Strong, Not What’s Wrong

When life becomes difficult, our attention naturally moves toward problems. What’s wrong? What’s missing? What’s getting in the way? What isn’t working?

We absolutely need to acknowledge barriers. But when our entire perspective becomes organized around what is wrong, we can easily move into deficit thinking.

Nothing is good enough.

Everything is hard.

The barriers are everywhere.

Instead, resilience invites us to ask a different set of questions:

What’s strong in me?

What’s strong in the people around me?

What strengths and assets do we already have?

What is working that we can build upon?

Rather than pretending the difficulty isn’t there, we begin looking for the strength that can help us move through it. Think about something difficult you’ve already survived. Ask yourself:

What helped me navigate the uncertainty?

Who helped me?

What strengths did I discover about myself?

You didn’t get through that season with nothing. Something was there. Someone showed up. Something inside you emerged. Remembering that matters, and this changes how we see other people too.

When I encounter someone experiencing poverty, disability or significant hardship, I can focus entirely on the difficulty of their circumstances—or I can begin looking for the strength already present in them.

When a teacher hears a student’s heartbreaking story, compassion matters. But another powerful question is: What strength is already inside this student that can help them move forward?

Parents can do this too. Instead of constantly noticing what our children are doing wrong, what happens when we become curious about what’s strong in them—and intentionally draw more of that out?

Resilience grows when we learn to see capacity alongside difficulty.

The Invisible Backpack

During the session, I brought an actual backpack into the room. Beforehand, I collected a number of large rocks. During our time together, we named some of the heavy things people carry and placed those rocks inside the backpack. Then we passed it around.

It became heavy. Very heavy. The experience created a powerful picture of something we often forget: Everyone is carrying an invisible backpack. There is what you see when someone walks into the room, and then there is what you don’t see. You may not see grief, financial pressure, family conflict, fear, exhaustion, disappointment, trauma, or uncertainty.

Being together in a room and appropriately acknowledging some of those invisible realities was powerful. There is something deeply human about recognizing together: We’re all carrying something. But that realization leads to another important question. If everyone around me is carrying rocks, do I need to put their rocks into my backpack too?

I don’t think we do. There is a difference between empathy and emotional absorption. There is a difference between caring about someone’s burden and taking responsibility for carrying it. Learning that difference can help us stay compassionate for the long haul.

Here are four practices that have helped me.

1. Notice What You’re Feeling

This sounds simple, but it isn’t always. Many of us have spent years learning how not to feel. We distract ourselves, we stay busy, we push through, we intellectualize. We tell ourselves we’re fine. For some people, slowing down enough to acknowledge emotion can bring up difficult physical sensations or memories. If that’s your experience, be gentle with yourself. You may need the support of a qualified mental-health professional as you explore what you’re carrying.

You don’t have to solve everything you’re feeling. That’s an important distinction. Acknowledging your inner world doesn’t mean fixing your inner world. You’re a human being having a human experience. There will always be emotions, reactions, memories and experiences moving through you.

But when we don’t acknowledge what’s happening internally, those things can begin influencing us without our awareness. I sometimes call this my inner tornado. If I haven’t taken time to tend to what’s happening inside me—to cultivate the garden of my heart—that tornado doesn’t disappear. It shows up.

It shows up in my facial expressions.

It shows up in my tone.

It shows up in how quickly I react.

It shows up in the energy I bring into a room.

We all know what this feels like. You’ve probably walked into a room before and immediately sensed tension, or warmth, or anxiety… Our internal worlds affect the relational environments we create. That’s especially important for leaders. And by “leader,” I don’t only mean someone with a title. If you’re a parent, you lead. If you’re a teacher, you lead. If people are affected by your presence, you carry some form of leadership responsibility.

That doesn’t mean you need to have everything figured out before entering a room. It simply means developing enough self-awareness to recognize: This is what is happening inside me right now.

Sometimes you can do this in the middle of a difficult conversation. You might quietly say to yourself:

I feel unsafe.

I feel threatened.

I feel judged.

I feel scared.

I feel angry.

You don’t have to act on the feeling. Just notice it. Once you can name what is happening inside you, you have a better chance of responding intentionally instead of allowing your inner tornado to make the decisions.

2. Ask: Is This Mine?

Once you’ve identified what you’re feeling, ask another question: Is this actually mine? Every interaction involves emotional worlds colliding. You have emotions. The other person has emotions. The question is whether you can tell the difference.

Imagine you’re having a wonderful day. Then you begin talking with someone who is extremely frustrated. Five minutes later, you’re frustrated too. Have you ever experienced that?

Pause.

Before that conversation, you weren’t frustrated. They walked into the interaction carrying frustration, and somewhere along the way you picked it up. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t care. It doesn’t mean you shouldn’t listen. It means recognizing: Their frustration does not have to become my frustration.

I can listen to someone’s anger without becoming angry. I can acknowledge someone’s anxiety without becoming anxious. I can sit with someone’s grief without believing I must carry their grief home with me.

Sometimes, of course, an emotion really is shared. Perhaps your entire staff has just received difficult news. Everyone is disappointed. Everyone is grieving. Everyone is uncertain. That’s different. You might recognize: We’re experiencing this collectively.

Naming the distinction matters.

This is mine.

This is theirs.

This is ours.

Differentiating emotions helps us stay connected without becoming emotionally fused with everyone around us.

3. Return to Yourself

Once you’ve noticed what you’re feeling and identified where it belongs, the next step is grounding. Ask yourself: How do I return to myself? This doesn’t necessarily require leaving the conversation. Sometimes I simply take a slow breath through my nose. That tiny pause helps me reset. It helps me think before I speak—which is something I’ve personally had to work on.

Sometimes grounding means becoming curious. Instead of reacting to someone’s behaviour, I ask: What could they be thinking right now? What could they be feeling? What might be underneath this behaviour? That curiosity helps move me away from reactivity and toward compassion.

Your grounding practices may look completely different.

Maybe you need to journal afterward.

Maybe you need a walk.

Maybe you need silence.

Maybe you need movement.

The important thing is discovering what helps you return to yourself.

You won’t discover that theoretically. You have to experiment. Notice what changes your internal state. Learn what helps you become anchored again.

4. Release What Isn’t Yours

Finally, we have to learn how to release. This may be one of the most important skills for anyone who works with people. How do you care for someone without carrying what they’re carrying?

At the nonprofit session, the rocks in our backpack became so heavy that I had brought a little wagon to transport them into and out of the building. After the session, I loaded the backpack and rocks into the wagon and headed toward the elevator. Some of us were standing there together, laughing about this little wagon filled with rocks.

I said: “I’m not carrying burdens and rocks that aren’t mine.” We laughed. But I realized there was actually something profound about that image. We all need a wagon. We all need practices that allow us to release what isn’t ours. For me, one of those practices is dancing. I go to dance class and move. Somehow, through movement, I release some of what I’ve been holding in my body.

For you, it might be walking.

Running.

Creating.

Journaling.

Talking with someone.

Sitting outside.

Music.

Rest.

The practice itself isn’t the point.

The point is learning how to complete the cycle.

Notice.

Differentiate.

Ground.

Release.

Because if we never release what we’re absorbing from other people, eventually our own backpack becomes impossibly heavy.

You Don’t Have to Work Harder on Someone’s Life Than They Do

There is another boundary hidden inside all of this: Never work harder on someone’s problem than they’re willing to work on it themselves.

You can support people.

Encourage them.

Walk alongside them.

Believe in them.

Help them see possibilities they can’t yet see.

But when you begin taking responsibility for solving another person’s life, you haven’t necessarily increased their resilience. You may simply have increased your own stress. There is a difference between walking beside someone and carrying them, and sometimes the most loving thing we can do is remain present while allowing someone else to carry what belongs to them.

Staying in the Long Game

Working with people can be some of the most exhausting work we ever do. It can also be some of the most rewarding. I’ve discovered that being willing to face my own inner world has made me a better person.

There have been times when I’ve thought: I didn’t ask for this. I didn’t ask for this level of responsibility. I didn’t ask to have to become this self-aware, but I’m grateful for what it has produced in me. It has called me up instead of allowing me to remain where I was.

And maybe that’s part of resilience too. Not becoming unaffected, not becoming detached, not building walls around ourselves so nothing can reach us, but learning how to remain deeply connected without being consumed.

To see what’s strong instead of only what’s wrong. To recognize the invisible backpack someone else may be carrying. To offer compassion without absorbing everything. To know what belongs to us and what doesn’t, and to have practices that bring us home to ourselves again.

So the next time you find yourself carrying the emotional weight of the people around you, remember these four things:

Notice what you’re feeling.

Ask whether it’s yours.

Ground yourself and return to yourself.

Release what isn’t yours.

You can care deeply without carrying everything. You can be compassionate without becoming consumed, and you can keep showing up for people without losing yourself in the process.

That’s how we stay in the long game.