Career Resilience in Sustainability: Why Your Body, Mind, and Strategy Need to Work Together
- Gary Sharkey
- Oct 27
- 7 min read
Updated: 3 days ago
When your career depends on impact, resilience isn't optional, it's strategic.
Sustainability professionals face a unique challenge: career insecurity while trying to create long-term planetary stability.
The gap between 20th-century assumptions and 21st-century reality is creating structural risks for impact-driven careers.
Building resilience requires integrating career strategy with wellbeing practices, not treating them as separate domains.
We have been hearing similar stories from sustainability professionals for months now. It usually starts with: "I thought my role was safe because our work is so clearly necessary." Then comes the layoff, the restructuring, or the quiet erosion of budget and mandate.
The paradox is striking. At a moment when climate action, social equity, and sustainable business practices matter more than ever, many of the people leading this work are finding themselves professionally vulnerable. According to recent data from sustainability recruiting firms, job insecurity in the sector has increased significantly throughout 2025, even as the urgency of the work has never been greater.
If this sounds familiar, we're developing a practical tool to help: a 7-minute Career and Wellness Check-in designed specifically for sustainability professionals navigating these tensions. We'll share more at the end, but first, let's examine why this moment requires a different approach to career resilience.
We believe this isn't just a temporary market correction. It reflects something deeper: a fundamental misalignment between how organisations still operate and what 21st-century reality actually demands.
The assumption gap
Here's what we're seeing: Many organisations built their sustainability functions based on assumptions from a more stable era: assumptions about economic growth, stakeholder priorities, and the timeline for climate impacts. Those assumptions are breaking down faster than most institutions can adapt.
The IMF's 2024 Annual Report explicitly warns that we're facing structural shifts from climate change, geopolitical fragmentation, demographic pressures, and technological disruption happening simultaneously.
When organisations realise their revenue models depend on a "return to normal" that isn't coming, sustainability roles are often early casualties—not because the work isn't valuable, but because it was positioned within an outdated strategic framework.
This creates a painful irony for sustainability professionals: You're working to help organisations navigate long-term planetary instability while your own career stability depends on short-term economic assumptions that no longer hold.
The resilience equation
Traditional career advice tells you to build your brand, expand your network, and sharpen your technical skills. That's all important. But we've learned something else through our combined decades of coaching sustainability leaders and impact-driven professionals: Career resilience in this sector isn't just about what's on your LinkedIn profile. It's about whether you have the adaptive capacity—mental, physical, and strategic—to navigate the volatility that's now built into this work.
Recent research from Harvard Business Review confirms that "soft skills" like adaptability, communication, and resilience are becoming more critical than ever. The World Economic Forum's 2025 Future of Jobs Report lists resilience, flexibility, and agility among the top 10 skills for thriving in shifting markets.
But here's what these reports don't emphasise enough: These capacities aren't abstract qualities you can add to your resume. They emerge from how you actually live, how you manage stress, recover from setbacks, maintain focus under pressure, and adapt your assumptions when reality shifts.
When your nervous system becomes a career asset
We often talk to sustainability professionals who are operating in a constant state of activation, fight-or-flight physiology that never quite turns off. It makes sense. You're trying to drive urgent change in systems that resist it, often with insufficient resources and unclear support from leadership. The work itself creates stress, and now job insecurity amplifies it.
But here's the problem: When your nervous system is chronically activated, your capacity for the very skills you need most—strategic thinking, creative problem-solving, building relationships, adapting to change—diminishes. Your body literally shifts resources away from higher cognitive functions to handle perceived threats.
Our understanding of autonomic nervous system function has improved since polyvagal theory was developed some 30 years ago. Yet the theory still offers a useful frame to think about the mind-body connection. The basic idea: practices like meditation, breathwork, and yoga can help shift your body out of fight-or-flight mode, balance sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system activity, and help you enter a calmer state. When we do this regularly, we notice real improvements. It becomes easier to connect with people, think creatively, and handle pressure without shutting down.
Understanding this isn't just wellness advice, it's career strategy. The ability to regulate your physiological state, recover effectively, and access calm, adaptive thinking under pressure becomes a competitive advantage.
This is why practices like breathwork, movement, sleep quality, and time in nature aren't luxuries for sustainability professionals, they're infrastructure for sustained performance.
Kandi Wiens' work on burnout immunity with the University of Pennsylvania demonstrates how everyday recovery habits like reflection, movement, community and creativity can build resilience by restoring energy before depletion sets in.
Updating your career operating system
At the same time, physiological resilience alone won't protect your career if your strategic assumptions are outdated. This is where many sustainability professionals find themselves stuck: They've built expertise in frameworks, reporting standards, and engagement strategies designed for a world that assumed gradual, linear progress. Meanwhile, the ground is shifting beneath them.
If you're working for an organisation whose core business model depends on 20th-century levels of economic, social, and planetary stability returning, you need to ask yourself hard questions about career risk.
Not because sustainability work isn't needed, but because roles designed around flawed assumptions often become expendable when those assumptions break down.
McKinsey research shows that by 2030, demand for social and emotional skills could rise 11-14% while many technical skills become obsolete. This suggests that future-proofing your career means investing in your capacity to read contexts, build relationships, facilitate change, and continuously learn—not just deepening expertise in current methodologies.
The integration opportunity
What we've found, working with dozens of sustainability professionals navigating career transitions, is that the most resilient aren't choosing between wellbeing and career strategy. They're integrating them.
They're asking: "How do I build the physiological capacity to stay grounded and adaptive through volatility?" alongside "How do I position myself for the roles and opportunities that will matter in the next decade, not the last one?"
They're treating practices like morning movement, community connection, and nervous system regulation as seriously as they treat professional development and networking.
They're examining the structural assumptions underlying their current roles and actively developing skills, relationships, and opportunities aligned with emerging realities rather than defending positions built on outdated paradigms.
This integration isn't easy. It requires looking honestly at where you are across multiple dimensions: career clarity, financial security, energy levels, support systems, planetary alignment, skill relevance, and adaptive capacity.
But it's this holistic view that reveals both your greatest vulnerabilities and your biggest opportunities.
Where to start
If you're feeling the squeeze, whether through actual job insecurity or the more subtle erosion of impact-to-income balance, here are two things you can do right now:
1. Assess your baseline state. Notice in this moment: Are your shoulders tense? Is your breath shallow? This is data. Before your next high-stakes meeting or difficult conversation, try 90 seconds of box breathing (4 counts in, 4 hold, 4 out, 4 hold). This isn't about relaxation. It's about accessing the cognitive capacity you need for strategic thinking when it matters most.
2. Audit your assumptions. Block 30 minutes this week to write down three assumptions underlying your current role: What does your organisation assume about future growth? About regulatory timelines? About stakeholder priorities? Then ask: What would I need to be learning or building if those assumptions are wrong?
These immediate practices address different dimensions of resilience: physiological and strategic. But sustainable career resilience requires looking at the full picture.
Your authors had a check-in call in March, and found great complement in Andy's recent work to help people better balance their impact with income with Gary's to help them balance impact with wellness. Of course we are all balancing all three.
To explore further, we've developed together a check-in for people working in sustainability. One that looks beyond your resume and network to assess your whole resilience ecosystem across career clarity, financial security, energy levels, support systems, skill relevance, and adaptive capacity.
We collided our worldviews and coaching frameworks into each other, learning and leaning on various AI tools along the way to augment research, ideation, and production.
The Ready for the Next Decade? Career and Wellness Check-in takes about 7 minutes and will be available in November. It will help you identify which dimensions need attention first and point you toward specific practices and resources tailored to where you are now. [Link to follow]
Our core insight remains: in a sector where the work is urgent but opportunities can be fragile, resilience isn't just about surviving. It's about positioning to keep doing meaningful work long term. That requires treating career strategy and wellbeing as deeply interconnected, not separate.
The sustainability professionals who thrive in the coming challenging decade won't only be those with the best credentials or biggest networks. They'll be the ones who have learned to adapt, recover, think clearly under pressure, update their assumptions, and sustain themselves through ongoing volatility, not despite it.
About the authors:
Gary has been a lifer in sustainability. One proudest achievement was when his class project offering phonebook recycling to regional grocery stores earned them a 1992 Governor’s award and a spot on national TV. He loves learning and has tried all kinds of jobs, across the last 18 years at PwC. He loves also giving back, and set up Sharkey and Friends in 2018 to share lessons and practices for a healthy mind, body, planet and spirit.
Andy too has been working on sustainability much of his life. He conducted his first board level recruitment assignment in sustainability 25 years ago, helped IKEA’s board with their landmark first CSO search and placement 15 years ago, and founded strategy recruitment and leadership consultancy Six Degree People in 2008. He works with individual, investor and corporate clients to question outdated assumptions and develop in new and more resilient and regenerative directions.
We hope you will enjoy working through Ready for the Next Decade? A Career and Wellness Check-in. We hope it can help you identify areas for potential attention and offer you useful resources.
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