The story you tell about yourself is shaping you more than the thing that happened.

Anne-Laura van Harmelen is a professor at Leiden University who studies brains, safety, and resilience. She recently gave an interview in which she said something I have not been able to stop thinking about.

People are desperately searching for a narrative to understand themselves.

Not a diagnosis. Not a solution. A story. Something that explains why what happened to them had the effect it did. Something that makes the pieces of their life fit together into a shape that makes sense.

I see this every week in my work with founders and leaders. Someone sits across from me and within twenty minutes they have told me their story. The difficult childhood. The demanding parent. The company that failed. The burnout that came out of nowhere. The version of themselves they have been performing for fifteen years.

And embedded in every story is a verdict. This is who I am. This is why I am the way I am. This is the explanation for everything that followed.

The story is almost always partly true. And it is almost always partly in the way.

Resilience is not what most people think it is

Van Harmelen makes a point that sounds simple but cuts deep: resilience is not a fixed character trait. It is not something you either have or do not have. It is a dynamic process, entirely dependent on context.

You can be remarkably resilient at work and completely fall apart in your closest relationships. You can handle crisis with clarity and be undone by a single conversation with your father. The version of yourself that holds up under pressure in one domain can be completely absent in another.

This matters enormously for leaders, because the story most high-performing people tell themselves is a story of personal resilience. I have been through hard things and I came out the other side. I am someone who handles pressure. I do not break.

That story is doing two things at once. It is accurate, and it is a protection. It keeps certain rooms locked.

The lie that suffering makes you stronger

Van Harmelen is direct about this. The idea that what does not kill you makes you stronger is not supported by the evidence. Serious stress, especially early in life, tends to make people more vulnerable, not less. It changes how the brain develops. It raises the baseline for anxiety and depression. The scars are real and they are lasting.

What troubles her about the cultural obsession with this idea is the pressure it creates. If hardship is supposed to make you stronger, then failing to emerge from difficulty with a growth story is itself a kind of failure. You went through something terrible and you did not even manage to become better as a result.

I see this in founders more than almost anyone. People who have built something significant, often out of difficult circumstances, and who carry enormous pride about how much they have survived. That pride is real and it is earned. And beneath it, very often, is something that has never been named. Not because they lack the strength to face it. But because the story they have been telling themselves does not have room for it.

The one thing that actually predicts resilience

Van Harmelen's research on young people growing up in unsafe environments points to one factor above all others: social support. Young people who have at least one reliable person in their life, one teacher, one aunt, one neighbour who sees them and shows up consistently, do dramatically better than those who do not.

Not therapy. Not resilience training. Not mindfulness. One person.

This is one of the most consistent results in the research on adversity and recovery. The presence of a reliable human being who does not leave is the strongest predictor of whether someone develops the capacity to cope with difficulty.

In leadership work, the equivalent is not complicated. It is someone who tells you the truth. A coach, a peer, a partner, someone who knows what is actually happening and stays in the room with you. Not someone who manages you or gives you frameworks. Someone who is present.

Most leaders I work with have never had that. They have had good advisors, strong networks, people who believed in their potential. What they often have not had is someone who sat with them in the difficulty without immediately trying to solve it.

The narrative problem in leadership

The narrative someone carries about themselves is not neutral. It is a filter. It determines which experiences confirm the story and which ones get quietly filed away as exceptions. It determines what someone believes is possible for them, and what they assume is just how they are.

A founder who has built a story around self-reliance will unconsciously reproduce conditions that require self-reliance. A leader who has built a story around being the person who holds everything together will unconsciously build teams that need him to hold everything together.

The patterns are not random. They are the story made structural.

Van Harmelen's point is that the narrative can be both necessary and limiting. We need a story to organise our experience. But if the story we carry is one where we are permanently marked, permanently defined by what happened, permanently someone who needs to prove something, it stops being a map and starts being a cage.

The work is not to throw the story away. It is to look at it clearly enough to see which parts are still serving you and which parts stopped being true a long time ago.

What this means practically

Van Harmelen argues against the tendency to make resilience an individual project. Mindfulness, stress management apps, cold water exposure: these place the responsibility entirely on the person and ignore the conditions that make resilience possible. Safety, stability, connection, care. These are not luxuries. They are the foundation.

In a team, the same logic applies. A leader cannot simply decide to be more resilient or demand that their team develop thicker skin. The conditions in which people work determine what is possible. Psychological safety is not a soft metric. It is the soil in which everything else either grows or does not.

What I take from Van Harmelen's work is this: the conversation that changes someone is almost never about strategy or skills. It is about the story. What have you decided about yourself? Where did you decide it? Is it still true? And what becomes possible if it is not?

Those questions are uncomfortable. They are also the ones that matter.

Mees Loman is the founder of Loman Leadership, a leadership coaching practice for founders and leadership teams of fast-growing companies in Amsterdam and beyond. lomanleadership.com