There is a version of resilience that sounds admirable and functions as harm. It keeps people working through situations that should be fixed, tolerating systems that are broken, staying in roles that are no longer right — because they have convinced themselves that endurance is courage. Nadia Vatalidis, Head of People at Doist, opened her Running Remote 2026 session by naming this directly, and spent the rest of it offering a more useful framework.
The GitLab origin story as a model of agility
Vatalidis opened with the story of Dmitri, who created GitLab in 2011 after a service provider announced charges for his previously free source code hosting. Dmitri could not afford the fees on his salary. Rather than absorbing the cost or accepting the constraint, he built an open-source alternative and released it publicly to help thousands of people facing the same problem. In its first year, 300 contributors appeared organically, without any marketing.
What Vatalidis drew from the story was not the startup narrative but the agility: Dmitri saw a constraint, identified an option others had not taken, acted without waiting for certainty, and built something that fundamentally changed access to remote work for people in places like Johannesburg who could now contribute to global software projects from wherever they lived. He stayed at GitLab for ten years, through IPO, through rapid change. That is sustained courage, not momentary bravery.
Agility intelligence: a learnable skill
Agility intelligence is Vatalidis’ term for the ability to pivot at speed without losing momentum. It is not a personality trait. It is a skill set that can be practised deliberately.
She outlined four steps.
Daily micro bravery. Small acts of courage practised regularly: saying no to a non-priority request, giving difficult feedback with a growth intention, setting timelines rather than accepting undefined pressure. The key word is daily — not the heroic single act of courage, but the accumulated practice of small difficult choices that build the capacity for larger ones.
Capacity awareness. Mental, emotional, and physical capacity are finite and variable. Vatalidis was practical about this: do not schedule difficult conversations when you are hungry, tired, or depleted. Know your own state before you ask someone else to receive something hard. This is not weakness — it is quality control on your own output.
Willingness to experiment. Being vulnerable enough to look foolish. Trying approaches that might not work. This is harder for experienced professionals, who have more to protect, than for people early in their careers. Vatalidis argued it is also more necessary — seniority creates gravitational pull toward the familiar.
Reframing self-talk. The difference between ‘I have too much work’ and ‘there is a lot going on, I will focus on this one high-priority thing today’ is not semantic. The first activates survival mode. The second creates spaciousness for actual decision-making. Language shapes state.
The paradox of resilience
The section of the session that the room responded to most visibly was the paradox. Vatalidis described a period in her career — VP of People at a previous company — when she participated in 75 events and produced 150 blog posts in a single year. From the outside it looked like high performance. From the inside it was failure: failure to evaluate her own capacity, failure to protect the systems she needed to sustain the work.
Resilience had kept her tolerating what should have changed. The company was not the broken system. She had not built personal systems to match the demands she was accepting.
Her personal example was more recent: shoulder surgery on 18 January, discovered only four or five days before the procedure. Eight weeks in a sling, dominant hand immobilised. She had ten days of preparation. She used five of them to install a dictation app and train herself to use her mouse with her left hand — not after the surgery, before, so the adaptation curve was shallower when she actually needed it. She postponed the book project she had planned for Q1, not as a failure, but as a win: it preserved capacity for recovery, work goals, and family time including a trip to France.
The reframe she described — from ‘this is devastating’ to ‘I am experiencing temporary disability’ — changed not just her experience of the recovery but her future empathy as a people leader. The insight was earned through difficulty. That is the difference between resilience as endurance and resilience as growth.
For distributed leaders
Remote work does not make these challenges easier. The lack of proximity means that capacity signals — the visible fatigue, the tension in someone’s posture, the reluctance to engage — are harder to read. Leaders working across time zones and cultures need more deliberate systems for monitoring their own state and the state of their teams.
The most useful question to ask a team member who appears overloaded: is there something you can stop doing this week? Not ‘what do you need?’ which places the problem-solving burden on the person who is already struggling. A specific, answerable question that might actually release some pressure. That is micro bravery in a leadership context.
