Bianca Errigo is the founder of HumanOS, a workplace wellbeing platform helping people build resilience, improve emotional intelligence, and perform at their best, without burning out.
She’s coached for over a decade, delivering 12,000+ hours of one-to-one and group sessions for teams at companies like American Express, Cisco, NatWest and Cambridge University. Named as American Express’s Top External Speaker, in 2025 she co-authored The Workplace Wellbeing Deficit with DEI consultancy Howlett Brown. Bianca speaks regularly at events across the UK and Europe, including Wellnergy Festival and the WeAreDevelopers World Congress, and is a go-to voice on high performance and human wellbeing at work.
For more information go to https://humanos.co.uk
The tech sales floor early. The boardroom where you’re the only woman pitching to investors. The high-stakes meeting where every decision counts and the pressure never stops.
I’ve spent most of my career in high-performance, high-pressure environments like these. From a corporate sales floor in the tech world to raising investment as a tech founder, these are places where you’re expected to deliver quickly and constantly, and more often than not, they’re male dominated.
Early on, I believed resilience was about pushing through. Don’t show stress. Don’t slow down. Just keep going.
That mindset served me, until it didn’t. Like many in fast-paced roles or facing personal challenges, I ignored the warning signs. It took my own mental and physical health hitting rock bottom, and a hospital stay after the loss of my father in my early twenties, for me to realise something needed to change.
At that point, I already had a background in psychology, and I knew I wanted to use it in a more meaningful way. I went on to deepen my training, expand my qualifications, and build a body of work that integrates performance, wellbeing, and behaviour change.
Since then, I’ve coached thousands of professionals. From CEOs and founders to engineers and emerging leaders, I’ve delivered over 12,000 hours of coaching. Through my work at HumanOS, I now help organisations build cultures where high performance and wellbeing can coexist.
And what I’ve seen again and again is this: resilience isn’t a personality trait. It’s a skill. It’s not something we’re necessarily born with, but it is something we can learn.
Redefining Resilience
That’s an important distinction, especially for women navigating high-pressure careers. Resilience isn’t about pushing through or staying emotionless under stress. The most resilient people I know, especially women in senior or high-stakes roles, are highly attuned to how they feel. They don’t suppress their emotions. They understand them. They move through them. They use emotional intelligence to respond rather than react, with a level of awareness that helps them lead through uncertainty.
There’s a simple framework I use in my work: feel, process, choose, respond. Resilient people don’t react on autopilot, they pause long enough to make an intentional choice. It’s not always easy, but it’s where real strength comes from.
The statistics tell us why this matters more than ever. A study of more than 8,000 workers found that 21 per cent of women under 30 were identified as having very low resilience, that’s nearly double the rate of their older counterparts (The Educator Online, 2024).
At the same time, nearly 25 per cent of women aged 18 to 29 are currently experiencing depression or receiving treatment for it (Gallup, 2025). These statistics highlight why we can’t leave resilience to chance and why we have to intentionally build it.
Building Sustainable Strength
That doesn’t mean grinding harder or being superhuman. I used to think staying up late, powering through, and always saying yes made me strong. But true resilience is knowing when to pause, reset, and protect your energy so you can keep showing up over time. It’s about knowing yourself, your limits, and your needs.
According to Gallup, 33 per cent of employed women say they feel burnout “very often” or “always,” compared to 25 per cent of men (Gallup, 2023).
So yes, sometimes resilience means pushing through, but other times, it looks like switching off your phone and being in bed by 7pm with a cup of tea. That kind of intentional recovery is what keeps us going, especially in high-demand industries or leadership roles where the pressure doesn’t stop.
So instead of waiting to hit breaking point, ask yourself what helps you reset today. It might be movement, boundaries, social connection, sleep, and, ideally, it’s a combination of them all. It’s proactive, not reactive, and you have to learn what works for you and put it in place before you need it most.
Creating Your Environment for Success
Equally important is the environment you create around you. By this, I don’t just mean your four walls, it’s the books you read, the social media you scroll, the people you spend time with, the food in your kitchen, the habits you reinforce.
Look at what you are doing, eating and consuming right now, and the people you are doing it with, and ask “is it setting you up for success or is it taking you away from where you want to be?”
Personally, I train most mornings at 6am. I take regular breaks from social media and I go to bed early. On top of this, I keep my social circle small but strong. These aren’t rigid rules, they’re buffers. They support me when things are going well, and they protect me when they’re not. Resilience comes from the positive habits you enforce in your life.
Thriving When You’re the Only Woman in the Room
I also believe that all of this matters even more when you’re one of the only women in the room. Whether I was cold-calling on the sales floor or raising investment as a female founder, in a year when only two per cent of VC funding went to women, I had to get comfortable with hearing no and learning from it.
That mindset made me more resilient than any polished performance ever could. Rejection and criticism are data, and the challenge is knowing when to use that data to adapt and when to let it go.
Resilience also grows in connection. In being able to say, “I’m not okay today,” without judgment. In asking for help when you need it. In surrounding yourself with people who remind you of your strengths when you forget them.
Vulnerability isn’t weakness, it’s self-awareness, and it’s strength.
Your Daily Practice
I want you to know that resilience is something you build every day. It’s in the boundaries you set, the habits you protect, and the people you choose to have around you. It’s knowing what drains you and what brings you back to yourself.
For women working in fast-paced, often male-dominated industries, this matters more than ever. High performance is sustainable, but only when it’s supported.
You don’t have to be perfect, you just have to be honest, intentional, and willing to keep learning and listening to yourself.
Good luck, you’ve got this!
