The Mindset Shift Every Resilient NGO Leader Needs

When everything around you feels unstable — shrinking budgets, shifting priorities, constant change — do you find yourself feeling defeated, or do you rise stronger from the challenge?

As a humanitarian or development leader, you’re constantly navigating uncertainty. But while most conversations about resilience focus on the communities you serve, this episode turns the spotlight on you — the leader behind it all. You’ll learn why some leaders thrive under pressure while others burn out, and how a simple but powerful mindset shift can help you stay grounded, confident, and effective, no matter what’s happening around you.

By listening, you’ll discover:

• The critical mindset difference between leaders who stay resilient and those who crumble under stress.
• How to turn setbacks into growth opportunities that strengthen your leadership and your team.
• A practical reflection tool that helps you move from feeling like a victim of your circumstances to becoming the hero of your leadership story.

Listen now to learn how to build true resilience — so you can face every challenge with clarity, confidence, and purpose.

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FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

The Mindset Shift Every Resilient NGO Leader Needs

[00:00:00] When something difficult happens in your work or your life, do you freeze or bounce back? Find out how a modern NGO leader becomes more resilient in today's episode.

Welcome to the Modern Humanitarian and Development Leader podcast. The podcast helping humanitarian and development supervisors make a greater impact by taking control of your time, leading more inclusively and empowering your team all the while avoiding stress, burnout and overwhelm. I'm your host, leadership coach and former aid worker, Torrey Peace. Are you ready? Let's get started.

Welcome my aspiring modern humanitarian [00:01:00] development leaders. I hope you're having a wonderful week. And today we're talking about Resilience. The final part of the CLEAR Leadership Model, if you've been following over the last few weeks, I've gone through all the steps that it takes to become a CLEAR Leader, and this is the final one.

And I feel like Resilience is actually something that is the underlying theme of being a leader. We need to be resilient. So in this episode, you're gonna discover why some leaders thrive under pressure while others burn out, and how a mindset shift makes all the difference. The simple shift that turns setbacks into opportunities for growth.

And how you can start practicing it today and how to move from feeling like a victim of your circumstances to becoming the hero of your leadership story. Alright, let's get started, shall we? In our sector, we [00:02:00] talk a lot about resilience, but usually we are talking about it at the community level. But what about you, the leader, the one behind the people helping the community?

With all the changes that we're seeing with shifting and shrinking budgets, shifting priorities, and constant change, your ability to stay grounded and keep perspective is more important than ever. You need to be resilient.

So what makes some leaders resilient and others struggle? It comes down to mindset; how you interpret what is happening around you. So in cognitive behavioral theory, which is a type of science, we show that our thoughts create our emotions. The thinking in our mind [00:03:00] creates our feelings, and therefore also drives our actions.

And what's important about this is it means that the way you think about a situation or really anything in your life for that matter, determines how you feel and therefore how you respond to it. And so the results that we have in our work and our life a lot of times are directly related to our mindset or our thinking.

And I'll give you some examples of this in a few minutes. So your thinking can be the difference between you being a victim of your circumstances versus being the hero of them. So this year when USAID funding was cut, and of course USAID basically was dissolved, this impacted many of you out there.

Many organizations, which I [00:04:00] ended up coaching several leaders from, were being directly impacted by this. And I noticed that one group actively managed their mindset; so they limited negative news, they focused on what they could control, what was within their control. And they believed that this circumstance, this thing that was happening, that many would label bad, was something that they were gonna benefit from. They were gonna find a way to grow from it or to benefit from it, to find the opportunity in it, rather than just seeing it as a bad, horrible thing. They took action with confidence and when they were doing their job search, because this is part of what I was helping them coach on at the time, many found roles that were even more better of a fit than their previous [00:05:00] ones. And even in the NGO sector, despite all the things that say, there aren't enough jobs and too many people are outta work and there isn't enough - their mindset kept them in the game and kept them from becoming a victim of their circumstances. So, the other group felt powerless. They told themselves that this should not be happening. This was not supposed to happen, and that they were going to be competing with all these other people looking for jobs, and likely, they would never be able to work in our sector again. And the results showed many of these leaders did not get jobs in the NGO sector because their thinking, “there are no jobs available,” led to them, many times, [00:06:00] not applying for those jobs that they thought there was too much competition for. And so, the result was, they were pushed out of this sector and often didn't get the jobs or the results that they wanted.

So, the difference here is not circumstances, but mindset. Now, I'm not saying that having a positive mindset will fix all your problems, but it definitely will lead to a different set of actions coming from a different set of feelings than if we are the victims of our circumstances or situation. Another way of looking at this is a growth versus a fixed mindset. There's been a lot of research on growth mindset that shows that resilient leaders believe their abilities can develop through learning and effort. What does that mean? It means they have control over [00:07:00] them. When we think that we can grow from our own learning and effort, it means that we are willing to put in the work and we are willing to keep going even if we fail. So, when faced with failure, they ask, what can I learn from this? Those with a fixed mindset, on the other hand, they see failure as proof that they're not good enough and they stop trying. Because they think that what makes them able to grow or actually they think that they are not able to grow and that they only have a certain level that they can aspire or reach, and after that, they're unable to proceed. And so failure for them means something about them personally, that as a person, they just can't go beyond that point. And so they stop trying. This is a very powerful difference.

And I'm not saying, [00:08:00] these are two extremes, but you might have some, you might be along some spectrum between these two. And where are you in this spectrum? Are you further towards growth or further towards fixed mindset? And it might even depend on the circumstance; maybe with the job market or with o pportunities for promotions, you're more around going toward the fixed mindset that you feel it's not within your control. Whereas with funding, maybe you feel like it's more growth mindset, that it is within your control. These ways of thinking are very important to notice in ourselves because they make a big difference in how we show up and the results that we get.

Okay, so resilience isn't about never feeling discouraged, right? It's about deciding that every challenge has something to teach you. It's not, "This should not [00:09:00] be happening to me," it's that, "This is happening for me because I am making it happen for me. I will benefit from this in some way."

And you know what? The most difficult times in our lives and our work are when we grow the most, but it has to come with a growth mindset first. So, this week, when something doesn't go as planned for you, pause and ask yourself, am I being the hero or the victim in this story? That one question can completely change how you experience challenge and how resilient you become. Next week, we're gonna build on this conversation with something that ties directly to resilience and something that I've noticed that many leaders don't even really think about having, and that is courage, because being resilient isn't just about bouncing back, [00:10:00] it's also about having the courage to go against the norm. To be first, to lead differently and to create that change you want to see, which is what we do as modern NGO leaders. It is going to be part of what I call the Three Cs of the Modern NGO Leader.

You're not gonna wanna miss it. All right, until next week, keep evolving. Bye for now.

Are you the type of leader that tells others what to do, or do you let them figure it out for themselves? Understanding your leadership style is a first step to deciding what's working for you and what's not. To find out your leadership style, take my free quiz. What is your leadership style? You'll immediately find out your default style, how it may be impacting your team, and a few practical ways to become an even better leader.[00:11:00]

Just click on the link in the show notes, www.aidforaidworkers.com/quiz. Fill out your quiz and click submit. So what are you waiting for? Go to www.aidforaidworkers.com/quiz and discover your leadership style now. Your team will thank you for it.