CHAPTER 1 REDEFINING RESILIENCE

Here’s a definition from the Oxford English Dictionary:

re•sil•ience

/rəˈzilēəns/

noun

1. 1. the capacity to withstand or to recover quickly from difficulties; toughness.
2. “the remarkable resilience of so many institutions”
3. 2. the ability of a substance or object to spring back into shape; elasticity.
4. “nylon is excellent in wearability and resilience”
5. Similar: flexibility, pliability, elasticity, springiness, ability to last, strength of character, hardiness, adaptability, ability to bounce back
6. Opposite: rigidity, fragility, vulnerability, weakness

The word resilience came into the English language in the seventeenth century, when we needed to describe the ability to bounce (in Latin, salire) back (the prefix re-) from a disruption or attack. With the discovery of rubber, resilience came in handy to describe that material’s physical property of bounciness or elasticity. A resilient material stretches when stressed but rebounds to its original form.

D. E. Alexander explored the history of the term as it evolved from the purely physical to more metaphorical applications to describe the bounce-back abilities of communities and ecological systems. He wrote, “The first serious use of the term resilience in mechanics appeared in 1858, when the eminent Scottish engineer William J. M. Rankine (1820–72) employed it to describe the strength and ductility of steel beams” and then “how mechanics passed the word to ecology and psychology, and how from there it was adopted by social research and sustainability science.”1

By the 1980s, we started to use the word resilience to describe a person’s, community’s, or system’s ability to recover from trauma or stress. This abstract use of the word deals with concrete, real-world problems. Additionally, global organizations launched campaigns to build resilience in communities, economies, and governments. A resilient community retains its cohesion in times of disaster and upheaval. A resilient economy finds ways of surviving financial crises. A resilient government responds to the stresses of social change by reorganizing according to the needs of its people.

Psychologists then took the ball and ran with the concept of resilience on the personal and psychosocial levels. The European Journal of Psychotraumatology surveyed the scientific definitions and ongoing research and found that most proposed definitions for resilience included “a concept of healthy, adaptive, or integrated positive functioning over the passage of time in the aftermath of adversity.”2

The experts agreed that resilience may be defined differently in the context of individuals, families, organizations, societies, and cultures. Scientists reached a consensus that resilience studies require levels of analysis, including “genetic, epigenetic, developmental, demographic, cultural, economic, and social variables.”3 They recommended that resilience-building programs be tailored to individual or community-level definitions and the variables they identify.

The American Psychological Association created its own definition: “Resilience is the process and outcome of successfully adapting to difficult or challenging life experiences, especially through mental, emotional, and behavioral flexibility and adjustment to external and internal demands.”4

Let’s step away from the experts for a few minutes and illustrate the idea of resilience through two areas that have played a role in my life: comics and sports.

I love superheroes and so do my kids. They reflect so much of our worldview. That made me curious about how resilience plays out in the multiverse. According to Superpower Wiki, the power to bounce can be applied for enhanced durability or invulnerability, enhanced leaping, and impact absorption.5 You see this super-power in comic-book heroes from the birth of comics onward.

Plastic Man from vintage DC Comics has the superpower of elasticity, stretching, bounding, shape-shifting, and bouncing back to his resilient original form. Mr. Fantastic, also known as Reed Richards, is a founding member of the Fantastic Four in Marvel Comics. As a result of exposure to cosmic rays, he gains the ability to stretch his body and limbs to incredible lengths and is always able to bounce back. Elongated Man, a DC Comics superhero, also has the power of elasticity. Like Plastic Man, he can stretch his body and limbs to great lengths. Elongated Man’s powers also grant him enhanced agility and durability. And some of you may identify with Marvel’s Wolverine, whose superpower is his resilience: he is haunted by PTSD and the attacks of his archenemies, but he has the power to heal from all assaults and go on to the next challenge.

Fierce Resilience enables us to bounce back from stress, but it does more. Empowered by self-awareness, the fiercely resilient person identifies the sources of stress and then confronts and defuses them. It enables us to bounce forward, taking our organizations to new levels of effectiveness. That’s where assessment and action in the Fierce Resilience Cycle come in. If comic books make their superheroes resilient, then humans might yearn for that super-power too. Elite athletes know that well.

As an amateur athlete, I have been intrigued with the ability of elite athletes to achieve amazing feats powered not just by physical prowess but also by the mental ability to meet challenges, bounce back from discouragement, and forge a path forward. They know how to grow their game out of both success and failure. They have trained themselves to a superhuman physical and mental resilience level. One great example is Bethany Hamilton.

It was just another day in paradise. But for Bethany, this day would bring her face to face with the scariest carnivore in the ocean. Surfing with friends at Tunnels Beach, Kauai, Bethany was attacked by a massive shark. It came up from the murky depths, bit through her surfboard, and took off her arm—a surfer’s worst nightmare.

But amid that terror and pain, Bethany kept her composure, keeping her alive long enough to get to the hospital. She lost more than half of the blood in her body, but if she had panicked, her heart would have worked harder, and she would have bled out a lot faster. She kept calm, allowing her friends to get her to the hospital so the doctors could save her life.

Bethany had acquired an understanding of Fierce Resilience: accept the inevitable wipeouts. She made the commitment to rehabilitation with the goal of getting right back in the water. She learned to adapt to living and surfing with one arm. After her wounds healed and she had built up her strength, she got back on her surfboard, inventing creative, adaptive ways of using balance and buoyancy to stay afloat and ride the waves with one arm. And she learned to accept the inevitable wipeouts.

Bethany had buoyancy. She had resilience. Her physical comeback wouldn’t have been possible without the mental and emotional resilience that powered her rehab.

As a kid, I would act out and get in trouble, especially in high school. When I lost a fight or was “acting like a fool,” my father always said, “Get your butt into the gym.” I returned to the gym to beef up, but what gave me the cojones to get back there? What did I learn from those workouts that empowered me to get back into the fray reenergized?

I learned resilience requires both body and mind. Kicking my butt back to the gym, I learned what elite athletes have been practicing forever: mind-body resilience. The gym workouts built my strength, but I was also building mental resilience. Working out was meditative and got me back to my core. My time in the gym created the mental space to look inward and build self-esteem to handle any problem.

Today, I use those skills as an avid road biker, cycling one hundred to two hundred miles a week year-round. What better place to find your center and connectivity to spirituality than on a forty-to-fifty-mile ride with nothing but you, your bike, your thoughts, and the elements? My dad was right about getting tough, but I needed more than physical toughness. I needed to clear my mind, clarify my goals, and empower myself by getting holistically resilient: body, mind, and soul. My time in the gym created the mental space to look inward.

Resilient elite and amateur athletes teach us that resilience is a physical regimen and an attitude. A regular physical regimen will get us back in the gym despite injury or loss. Adopt an attitude that relishes the process of learning from both failure and success. Discipline is not just a motivation but the discipline of the mind. Fierce Resilience requires both body and soul.

Let’s look at resilience from a historical perspective. By 2014, enough research had been done to merit a survey examining what resilience meant in a wide range of fields, including psychiatry, medicine, management, education, military training, and global development. Researchers found some variables identified with resilience are “positive self-esteem, hardiness, strong coping skills, a sense of coherence, self-efficacy, optimism, strong social resources, adaptability, risk-taking, low fear of failure, determination, perseverance, and a high tolerance of uncertainty.”6

Corporate trainers also were working with the resilience concept, applying it to keep us all sane and functional in the face of workplace stress. Workplace resilience studies look at all levels of the corporate organization chart, including the resilient employee, the resilient team, the resilient CEO, and the resilient organization.

Many resilience models are founded on the hardiness concept, first developed in Suzanne Kobasa’s 1979 article in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.7 As resilience studies moved into the corporate world, Salvatore Maddi and his team at the University of Chicago applied Kobasa’s work to research workplace resilience. In their book Resilience at Work, Maddi and Deborah Khoshaba defined the three Cs of hardiness: commitment, control, and challenge.8

Maddi and his colleagues developed their theory of hardiness through their work with Illinois Bell Telephone (IBT) back in the ’80s.9 Deluged with employee stress during a traumatic period of deregulation and downsizing, IBT engaged Maddi’s team to study the characteristics of the employees who bore up most successfully under those stressful conditions. They found that two-thirds of the IBT workforce failed miserably: employees experienced heart attacks, strokes, substance abuse, obesity, poor performance reviews, demotions, depression, and divorces.

We haven’t improved decades later. We are warned about these outcomes on a daily basis and told that we need to change our diet and exercise more or meditate. These are all good ideas, but they are not enough because they don’t get to the cause and resolution of our stress.

The one-third of the workforce that managed to thrive all had in common the attitudes of commitment, control, and challenge. They were committed to staying engaged in the process, not isolated on the sidelines. They committed to owning the elements of the change process that were in their power to control rather than standing by passively as the company went through its changes. And they faced the challenges of those difficult times as opportunities for learning, growing personally and professionally, even while two-thirds of their colleagues were defeated by the challenges.

Here’s what the three Cs of hardiness look like in resilient people:

• Commitment means staying committed to your goals and never giving up.
• Control means that you believe that you are in control of the important tasks and events in your life. When stressful situations arise, you feel confident and act.
• Challenge means you see a rough road or stressful situation as a challenge to be faced courageously. When you embrace challenge, you accept change as natural. You see stress as an opportunity for growth.

Maddi and his Hardiness Institute later added a fourth C: connection. Connection emphasizes the importance of community in supporting individual and organizational hardiness and resilience.

One C that did not make it into the hardiness model is conversation. My work with Susan Scott and Fierce Conversations has clearly validated the importance of conversations. Susan believes that the next frontier for exponential growth for individuals and organizations lies in the area of human connectivity. She believes that those who can connect at a deep level with the people important to them at home and at work will take the field and hold it as well as experience more joy and health, mentally and physically. And this connectivity happens one conversation at a time. For me, this is the secret sauce and the core of the critical action step in the Fierce Resilience Cycle.

Specifically, Fierce Conversations are the ability to have structured conversations based on practicing self-awareness and discovering root causes. The quality of our conversations equals the quality of our relationships. I will spend a significant amount of time in the upcoming chapters and particularly in part 2 talking about conversations and how they are essential to Fierce Resilience.

For now, think of a Fierce Conversation as one in which you come out from behind yourself into the conversation and make it real. That takes courage and commitment to the organization and your own personal processes of continual improvement. Making the conversation, and therefore relationship, real requires an attitude of control over how you choose to face the challenges. The strength of the conversation is the strength of the relationship.

Perhaps nothing has tested our resilience in recent times more than the COVID-19 pandemic. People experienced enormous impacts on their mental health, with anxiety and depression skyrocketing. Yet experts were also surprised that most individuals showed resilience. They were able to bounce back from COVID-induced stress and learned strategies to use at home and work.

But the truth of the matter is that stress in the workplace has always been a problem. According to prepandemic data from the Anxiety Disorders Association of America, up to 72 percent of American employees said stress and anxiety interfered with their day-to-day lives. Additionally, 40 percent reported persistent stress or excessive anxiety linked to their jobs, and 28 percent reported experiencing job-related anxiety and panic attacks.10

The COVID-19 pandemic sent already problematic workplace stress levels soaring, and its aftermath—particularly economic uncertainty—is still creating stress-inducing situations that affect workplace productivity, communication, and interpersonal relationships.

Until now, resilience training has focused on building an individual’s inner resources. But that view of resilience makes the recipient of stress the victim, leaving the source of stress still out there, lurking in the shadows, ready to strike again, which necessitates a recurrent cycle of stress and recovery. Since the source of stress is often in human relationships and interactions—real or perceived—we needed to find a way of resolving those challenging relationships.

Fierce Resilience is a process of growth for the whole organization, starting with individual self-awareness. As Susan Scott writes about Fierce Conversations, “Doesn’t ‘fierce’ suggest menacing, cruel, barbarous, threatening? Sounds like raised voices, frowns, blood on the floor, no fun at all. In Roget’s Thesaurus, however, the word ‘fierce’ has the following synonyms: robust, intense, strong, powerful, passionate, eager, unbridled, uncurbed, untamed. In its simplest form, a Fierce Conversation is one in which we come out from behind ourselves into the conversation and make it real.”11

Gabe De La Rosa, our chief behavioral science officer, leveraged his decades of experience and research in dealing with stress, building resilience, and optimizing performance in both military application and civilian workplaces. His research clearly shows that having Fierce Conversations lowers stress and drives resilience for the individual and organizations. These bottom-line impacts come from people engaging in structured conversations that enrich relationships, clear up misunderstandings, and add clarity to organizational objectives.

Let’s look at this in simple terms. Millions of interactions happen in our companies and across the world hourly and daily. Think about the statistical probability for misunderstanding from failed delivery by the sender, a listening or processing error by the receiver, or both. This fact is well-documented. We as individuals have a choice to engage these situations we face every day.

Have you ever walked away from a situation thinking, “What did that mean?” or “I should have said this” or “I have no clue what I’m supposed to do.” Our research shows that 90 percent of the time these misunderstandings can be quickly rectified when we address them in a timely and appropriate manner. This is being Fierce.

We also see correlations with organizational objectives when this level of engagement occurs. And it just so happens our measurable stress levels drop an average of 10 to 15 percent and, in many cases, 30 to 40 percent. I’ll share more on this later.

Now that I have redefined resilience, I invite you to join the conversation. In later chapters, I will talk about the following topics:

• How workplace stress works against organizational peace and productivity
• How to identify stressful situations
• Ways to use biometrics to measure and track stress responses
• Traditional approaches to stress management
• How Fierce Conversations overcome stressors

Let’s take a breather to make what I am talking about more relatable to your own life. Try answering these three questions:

• Where in your life experiences have you shown resilience?
• What was the situation?
• What did you do to combat the stress?

Let’s flip this:

• Where in your life experiences have you failed to show resilience?
• What was the situation?
• What was the result?