Thriving Is Relational

You can meditate at dawn, optimize your calendar, track your steps and drink water, and still feel bone-deep exhausted if your days are filled with ambiguity, tension, and unsaid truths.

You can love your work and still dread your meetings. You can believe in your mission and still go home feeling strangely empty.

That’s not a failure of mindset or self-care. It’s a signal about your relationships.

Most of us were taught to think of thriving as an individual project: better habits, better goals, better time management. But our nervous system don’t live in a vacuum. They live in meetings, in Slack channels, in the pause before someone answers, in the way a colleague’s tone changes when budgets are discussed.

Modern organizational research has a phrase for one key ingredient of relational thriving: psychological safety, what Amy Edmondson defined as a team’s shared belief that it’s safe to take interpersonal risks.

When that safety is missing, people don’t just “feel uncomfortable.” They become careful. They edit. They brace. They act. And bracing is metabolically expensive.

The body doesn’t only respond to deadlines. It responds to social threat

When people aren’t sure whether it’s safe to speak up, whether honesty will cost them status, belonging, or opportunity, the body tends to treat the environment as unpredictable.

That uncertainty can keep stress systems activated over time, especially when it’s chronic and interpersonal. Research linking repeated psychological stress to sustained cortisol responses and broader stress physiology helps explain why “nothing terrible happened” can still feel like chronic depletion.

So the exhaustion you feel after certain meetings may not be about the agenda.

It may be about what your system is doing underneath the surface:

• scanning for cues

• avoiding missteps

• rehearsing what to say

• replaying what you said

• calculating how someone might react

  
  

It's a type of very draining survival math.

The sneakiest drain: ambivalent relationships

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: ambivalent relationships, the ones that are sometimes supportive, sometimes cutting; sometimes warm, sometimes dismissive, often drain more than openly difficult ones.

With openly difficult people, you at least know where you stand. Ambivalence forces constant micro-calculations: Is this a good day or a bad day? Can I bring this up? Was that comment a joke or a jab?

Relationship researchers have been studying this for years. The “Social Ambivalence and Disease” (SAD) model argues that relationships high in both positivity and negativity can create unique stress burdens and biological consequences, because the same person is both a source of support and strain. More recent work also links ambivalence with worse well-being and health-related outcomes.

In daily life, it feels like running five apps in the background. You don’t notice until the battery is suddenly red.

Why the real burnout often isn’t the workload but it’s the people-load

The real burnout often isn’t the workload. It’s the people-load.

The emails you rewrite five times so you don’t offend. The feedback you never give because you’re afraid of the fallout. The meetings where you smile and nod while your inner voice goes completely silent.

This is emotional labor: managing expression, tone, and self-presentation to meet (spoken or unspoken) expectations. A large body of research connects “surface acting” (faking or suppressing emotion) with worse outcomes like stress and burnout, compared to more authentic forms of emotional regulation.

You pay for prolonged self-editing in attention, in presence, and in health.

And leaders pay at a premium level.

Leaders carry the unprocessed

On paper, leaders are responsible for strategy, outcomes, and performance. In reality, leaders also hold everyone’s anxiety about change, conflict, and uncertainty.

You absorb projections. You navigate competing needs. You soften bad news. You interpret tension. You become the container for emotions no one wants to name.

That doesn’t mean leaders should become therapists. It means leadership is relational work, and relational work has a physiological cost when it’s done through avoidance.

Avoidance looks like self-protection, but it’s expensive

Yes, avoidance looks like self-protection. But it gets expensive with time.

Every conversation you put off becomes another tab open in your mind. Every “Let’s just let it go” when something mattered teaches your body: It’s not safe to be real here.

Overthinking, fawning, and pleasing can feel like ways to keep the peace. In the long run, they erode the self. You burn out not only from doing too much, but from being too little of who you are.

This is where McKinsey & Company puts it bluntly:

psychological safety is the absence of interpersonal fear.

If fear is present, performance may still happen, but it will be fuelled by bracing, not by vitality.

What relational thriving actually feels like

Thriving isn’t just a matter of better habits or better boundaries. Thriving is the experience of being in relationships where:

• honesty is possible

• repair is normal

• respect is the baseline, not a special occasion

• you don’t have to carry three versions of yourself into every meeting: the one who feels, the one who edits, and the one who actually speaks

  
  

Relational thriving is what happens when you can tell the truth and remain connected.

It doesn’t mean no conflict. It means conflict doesn’t become a silent toxin.

Relationships aren’t “soft stuff.” They’re the infrastructure.

If you want people to thrive (and to stay), you cannot treat relationships as the “soft stuff” you get to when the real work is done.

Relationships are the work.

• the way you respond when someone disagrees with you

• the way you handle the first breach of trust

• the way you repair when you get it wrong

• the courage to say, “Something feels off between us, can we talk about it?”

  
  

Those gestures are the infrastructure of thriving.

And it’s not just a “culture” matter in the vague sense. Ambivalence and strained ties show up in stress reactivity and health-relevant outcomes in the research literature, which helps explain why relational climates have such outsized impact.

Four deceptively simple moves that build relational thriving

Relational thriving doesn’t require you to become a different person. It asks you to practice a few simple moves, simple, not easy.

1) Tell the truth a little sooner

Don’t wait until you’re irritated, avoidant, or rehearsing speeches in the shower. Earlier truth is usually kinder truth.

Try:

• “I’m noticing I’m unclear on expectations. Can we align?”

• “I want to name something before it grows”

  
  

2) Ask one more real question before you defend your position

Curiosity is often a gift to both sides. Try this instead of, or at least before, a defensive reaction:

• “Help me understand what matters most to you here.”

• “What am I missing?”

  
  

3) Name the tension everyone feels but no one mentions

Naming conflict doesn’t create it. It acknowledges what’s already there and opens a door.

Try:

• “I think we’re split on priorities, and it’s showing up sideways.”

• “There’s energy in the room, can we surface it?”

  
  

4) Choose repair over silent distance

Repair is the skill most adults were never taught, and the one that makes relationships sustainable.

Try:

• “That landed differently than I intended. Can we reset?”

• “I think I contributed to tension. Here’s what I’d do differently.”

  
  

These moves build the conditions where people can take interpersonal risks, exactly what psychological safety research says teams need for learning, speaking up, and adapting.

A practical reframe: treat “people-load” like workload

If you track steps (and glasses of water), you can track relational strain too.

Ask yourself at the end of the day:

• Where did I feel most braced?

• Which interaction cost me the most energy?

• What truth am I carrying that wants a conversation?

• What repair would lighten my nervous system this week?

  
  

This isn’t self-indulgence. It’s maintenance. Just like you wouldn’t ignore a grinding sound in your car for six months, don’t normalize relational exhaustion as “just work.”

Closing

Our habits matter. So does our strategy, clarity, our ability to think. But if you are constantly bracing for the next difficult interaction, or replaying the last one, you will not have the energy you need for the work that actually lights you up.

Your energy is precious. Guard it by tending to the relationships that shape your days.

If thriving is relational, then one of the most transformational acts of leadership is this: refusing to normalize relational exhaustion, and instead building a culture where people can tell the truth, stay in the room, and grow without burning out who they are to do it.

An invitation

If this landed for you, it may be because you’re carrying more “people-load” than anyone sees.

As an executive coach and Gallup-Certified Strengths Coach, I work with leaders who want to create meaningful change without burning out, by strengthening clarity, courageous conversations, and the inner capacity to stay present when things get tense.

If you’re ready, reach out and we can start with a brief conversation to explore what you’re navigating and what support would be most useful.

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Hi, I’m Monika, Strengths Coach and facilitator. I help individuals and groups thrive, cultivate resilience, emotional intelligence, and well-being through strengths-based coaching. Passionate about transformative and creative leadership, I empower leaders to drive meaningful change within themselves, their organizations, and beyond.

I hope you’ll visit often, and I look forward to connecting and working together!