June 25, 2024
by Stephen T. Messenger
As a young infantry platoon leader in Afghanistan, we were out patrolling austere places while sleeping either on roads or small forward operating bases. Bad dudes who didn’t like us were all over and weren’t hesitant to attack.
It being my first combat deployment, I quickly found it fruitless to hope we wouldn’t get attacked. The bad people had only one job and that was to harm us. Attacks were inevitable.
An easier way to approach this mental situation was accepting we would come under fire—it made us more mentally prepared when the gunfire started.
Life is the same way. We like to think that life won’t throw curveballs as us. But it will.
We’ll constantly be under attack by injury, illness, divisive people, those that disagree, social media, randomness, or a thousand other external factors. Life will assail us.
The more we understand that attacks will come and prepare by putting on the body armor of leadership, the more we can show resiliency in the face of life’s attacks.
Doing Something Attracts Criticism
Aristotle was believed to have said, “Criticism is something we can avoid easily by saying nothing, doing nothing, and being nothing.” That could not be truer. As an example, it’s a rare moment that back-up athletes on professional teams get criticized.
Teddy Roosevelt said it best, “It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena.”
Once we enter the arena, we’re fair game. Much like patrolling Afghanistan, it’s not if we’ll get attacked, but when. By putting boots on the ground, we open ourselves up to attacks. The faster we can wrap our minds around being criticized, the faster we can be mentally ready to respond.
The Stockdale Paradox
James Stockdale was a U.S. Navy pilot shot down over Vietnam in 1965. He violently ejected from his Douglass A-4 Skyhawk after being hit by enemy fire, slowly drifted into a small village and was taken captive.
Here, he found himself as the senior naval officer at Hoa Lo Prison, known as Hanoi Hilton, and suffered vicious torture, isolation, psychological anguish, and oppressive interrogation. For eight long years, Stockdale was kept in captivity with no real hope of release or survival. And yet he mentally and physically survived the abuse.
One advantage that helped him through was his connection to Stoicism. While studying at Stanford University years before, he fell in love with the writings of the Greek Stoic philosopher Epictetus and his book the Enchiridion. The principles of Stoicism are that acceptance, endurance, and self-control are critical to respond to any of life’s situations.
Stockdale noted that his time in captivity was like a laboratory where he could test Stoicism to see if it worked. Faced with the utmost depravity of human behavior, torture became his personal test of this theory to see if it held up—and Stockdale noted Epictetus’ theory “passed with flying colors.”
His journey as a prisoner of war is now a concept called the Stockdale Paradox, developed by author Jim Collins in his book Good to Great. The paradox focuses on having to balance realism and optimism to survive what life throws at us.
About his experience, Stockdale remarked that, “I never doubted not only that I would get out, but also that I would prevail in the end and turn the experience into the defining event of my life, which in retrospect, I would not trade.”
But on the other hand, he stated that the ones who didn’t survive were the eternal optimists. They would set unrealistic goals such as being rescued by Christmas. Once Christmas came and went, they spiraled in depression and lost faith, swinging the pendulum from hope to despair.
Stoicism preaches that we must know what’s within our ability to control and what’s outside of it. As I recently heard in a military change of responsibility speech, we must control what we can control, influence what we can influence, and let everything else go.
Stockdale was resilient to his captors by adhering to Stoic principles. He accepted his situation, had realistic hope for the future, understood he had a purpose in life, and was disciplined to endure hardships.
Attacks Will Come… And When They Do
We all know life will throw us a curveball. When it does, we need to prepare ourselves mentally to respond. Resilient leaders do this in four ways.
1. Accept the Situation We’re In. It’s often easy to get angry when life attacks us. Epictetus used a metaphor that we’re all actors in a play. It’s our job to play our part whether “a cripple, or an official, or a private person” to the best of our abilities.
There are many things out of our control: where we’re born, how other people respond, the weather, and many other things. It’s not our job to control the uncontrollable, but to understand the situation we’re in and play our role in an Oscar-worthy performance.
2. Have Realistic Optimism. In the face of disaster, our job as leaders is to see the Pheonix rise from the ashes. At 67 years old, Thomas Edison’s laboratory burned down. He should have been devastated from this $1 million dollar loss ($23 million in today’s dollars). But instead, he told a reporter the next day that “I’ve been through a lot of things like this. It prevents an old man from being afflicted with ennui (bordom).”
The factory was partially operational in three weeks and soon they were creating new products and gained almost $10 million in revenue ($200 million in today’s dollars). Edison could have been forlorn but instead rose from the ashes with his optimism.
3. Understand Our Purpose. The Stoics believed our goal is to live in agreement and harmony with the world. This means that when we’re attacked, we react with a calm indifference to what we can’t control. The result is personal resiliency in the face of problems.
According to Socrates, our purpose in life is to live a meaningful one. He defines this as one lived with virtue, reason, and morality. If we understand the greater purpose in life, when we’re in hard places we can remember that our purpose transcends our current situation. It’s never about us; it’s about those around us.
4. Be Disciplined. In the tough times of life, we must be disciplined. This means being mentally prepared to face problems instead of running away. Discipline is the solution to solving problems. Whether it’s creating a new business, patrolling in Afghanistan, shedding a few pounds, or surviving a prisoner of war camp, we must be disciplined to do the right thing.
Marcus Aurelius, Emperor of Rome and another famed Stoic, wrote “At dawn, when you have trouble getting out of bed, tell yourself: ‘I have to go to work—as a human being. What do I have to complain of, if I’m going to do what I was born for—the things I was brought into the world to do? Or is this what I was created for? To huddle under the blankets and stay warm?”
Prepare to Be Resilient
Christian theologian Reinhold Niebuhr developed the famous Serenity Prayer. In one portion of it, the person praying asks for everything we’ve been talking about above: acceptance, optimism, purpose, and discipline. It states:
“God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
courage to change the things I can,
and wisdom to know the difference.”
We need a mindset that attacks in life are inevitable, and we will be more resilient when they come.
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This series is part of our BRAG+1 Leadership Philosophy. If you’re just joining us, start from the beginning on 16 January: A Team to BRAG about and continue from there:
Boots: Put Boots on the Ground
Regimentals: Place Service over Self
Armor: Be Resilient to Life’s Attacks
Gun: Close with and Destroy the Enemy
+1 (Belt): Not a Hint, Sniff, nor Whiff of Impropriety
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