“It’s not enough to have lived. We should be determined to live for something.”

—Winston S. Churchill (British politician and prime minister)

Thinking about commitment may seem a long way off from dealing with all of the stresses—large and small—that you encounter. You may not see any clear connection between what seems like contemplating life and the rigors of your day-to-day activities. Think of it the same way a boxer might approach lifting weights in the gym. The exercise gym is removed from the actual boxing match in time and space, but preparation in advance is a necessary part of being a successful fighter. In the same way, there are exercises you can do to build up your commitment to help protect yourself from some of the negative aspects of stress.

Commitment is all about active involvement and engagement in your activities and the surrounding world, as well as a sense of competence and self-worth. At the opposite pole of commitment is alienation, or meaninglessness. Considering this, let’s start looking at some steps to help build up hardiness-commitment.

Take Time to Think About What Is Important and Interesting to You

Most of us have busy lives. We’re consumed with our daily activities—and messages on our smartphones. How often do we stop to take a breath and think about our lives? Do we really know what matters to us? Do you know what you’re committed to? We all have values at some level that we base many of our decisions in life on. But to most of us, these values are rarely clearly articulated, or even in our general awareness.

Sometimes it’s important to stop and take stock of ourselves. How happy are you with your life? We can break our lives down and rate ourselves in each of the following specific areas. How happy are you from 1–10 in each of these domains?

• Work/school
• Family/marriage
• Friends
• Health
• Fitness
• Diet
• Leisure time
• Hobbies
• Self-development
• Career
• Community
• Retirement
• Religion/spirituality

Now go through these areas and think about how important each one is in your life. What matters to you most right now? Are you in the early stages of building your career? Do you feel you need more family time? Are you looking for a significant relationship? Is there a hobby or some other activity you really want to pursue? Are you planning to leave your current job and find something new for your next chapter? Do you need some time off to explore? Are you looking to retire from work?

Rank order these areas in the order of importance to where you are in your life right now (Figure 3.1). Look at your happiness score for your top three priorities. Think about where it is as compared to where you’d like it to be.

By understanding your priorities in life, you can start to better understand your values. The things that are most meaningful to you are what matter the most. Knowing your values, once you are clearer on what they are, can help you make better decisions. Also, when it comes to hardiness-commitment, people who have a strong sense of themselves, where they stand—why they support the things they do—have a stronger sense of commitment.

Being committed increases your hardiness. By knowing yourself, what you believe in, you become a stronger person. People who fail to take a stand are not sure of themselves, or are wishy-washy, and are less likely to stand up to adversity. The hardier you are, the more you are willing to stand your ground, change directions when you believe it’s justified, and withstand needless criticism.

Are You Plagued by the Work/Balance Conundrum?

Joel was a busy mid-level manager in a large multinational organization. He was very conscientious and worked extremely hard. Putting in 60-hour work weeks was common for him. This left him very little time for his family, friends, and hobbies or interests. He wanted to spend more time with his kids, but the early morning and late evening meetings made it difficult.

His work soon began to suffer. Joel was stretched too thin and did not have enough resources to meet his goals. Fortunately, his supervisor recognized the problem and provided Joel with a coach to help him deal with his workload. In the process, the coach began to explore with Joel his life priorities using the categories above as well as the Hardiness Resilience Gauge. It was clear that Joel valued more leisure time with family and friends. Also, he scored low in the areas of commitment and control. At this point in his life Joel felt he had little control over his life and how he spent his time. Together, he and his coach drew up a plan that would pull back some of Joel’s work commitments, better prioritize his time at work, give him more focus (and therefore more quality work), and establish more sensible work hours.

Joel’s unhappiness in the areas of family, leisure, and friends, as well as their rankings on the priority scale, led to some restructuring in his life. This shift in priorities increased his commitment to what was important to him. By getting a better handle on what mattered, and committing more time to his real needs, he felt renewed in his life.

He also spent some time exploring his purpose and the degree to which he had control over the events in his life. His coach showed him how he could start booking family and leisure time on his calendar, weighing it just as important as business meeting times. Eventually he began to see changes in his life. Not only did his family and leisure time increase, but he became more relaxed. Because of these changes he became hardier. He was much better equipped to take on the challenges that came his way. When he was at work, he was better able to focus on work-related tasks. His supervisor and coworkers all noticed the change in him.

Increase Your Skills and Competence in an Area That Is Important to You

As we saw with Joel, the restructuring of his time was an important element in his improvement. As well, his counseling with a coach opened him up to changing his mindset about work and reevaluating his life. However, there was more needed to enable his transformation.

Joel needed a passion to build on. Having an activity or hobby that you love can help fill a void in your life and give you extra motivation to embrace life more fully. When we’re passionate about something, we become much more committed to it. In his coaching sessions Joel recalled that he once had a passion for acting. In his high school years, he had thought about pursuing drama in college but was discouraged by his parents who thought it was not an easy career or financially sustainable.

He got the drama bug after being picked for one of the major roles in his high school play. Acting came easy to him, and he loved the rush of performing in front of an audience. He also got a lot of accolades from other cast members as well as his teachers and the audience. However, once he graduated from high school, he gave up on any further attempts at pursuing drama. He focused on college and then entered the work world with little time to spare.

However, when the idea of acting came up in his coaching sessions, he felt a twinge of excitement just at the thought of it. His coach pointed out that there were several local community theaters always putting on plays. Also, there were acting courses and workshops both at the local college and at one of the professional theaters in town. They put together a plan where Joel would enroll in an evening drama course and further develop his performing skills.

Think back about some of the passions you may have had as a child (Figure 3.2). Did you play a musical instrument? What about dance, art, photography, gardening, singing, sports, programming, cooking, baking, music, writing, nature, or anything else? How did it make you feel? What did you like about it? Have you ever thought of getting back to it? Are there skills or competencies involved that you could improve?

By perusing these skills, you will find that you can have a more committed, less stressed life. It can also make you feel better about yourself and your contributions to the world. For an example of this, one of the authors (Steven) took up his childhood passion of playing the saxophone after 30 years of not playing. Not only does music and playing music give me pleasure, it allows me to use a different part of my brain from my day-to-day work. As part of my rediscovery of music, I’ve joined a couple of community concert bands—reliving one of my favorite high school memories, playing in the school band.

But the added benefit to this is that we play concerts in seniors’ residences and veterans’ hospitals. We bring live entertainment to groups of people who don’t have the opportunity to leave their environment, and we provide them with memories of songs they loved from their younger days. I’m often amazed at the power of music, in this case from the big band era, to literally bring tears to people’s eyes. On a number of occasions members of our audience have come up after the concert to tell stories of the times they remember dancing to the Benny Goodman or Glenn Miller bands when they came to town.

Take Pride in Your Past Successes and Achievements

Another area that came up for Joel during his coaching sessions was his dismissiveness of past accomplishments, especially at work. Joel worked at a major global organization that was known for hiring only the best people. Their recruitment process was grueling, and much of their talent came from Ivy League schools. He had achieved several awards for his performance while there. His coach asked him to write on a piece of paper a list of his accomplishments since working at the company. He had to think long and hard before he started to come up with some achievements.

Too often we are so busy with our day-to-day work that we seldom stop to appreciate the things we have already accomplished. Think about some of your own achievements, whether at work or beyond (Figure 3.3). How have you benefited your organization? Have you helped your coworkers in any way? Have you helped your team or organization achieve some of its goals? Do you have specific goals at work or in your personal life? Are there things you would like to accomplish by the end of the quarter, halfway through the year, at year’s end, in two years? What about 5 or 10 years from now?

Having goals and stretching ourselves to achieve them helps give us a sense of accomplishment and commitment to our own selves. An important part of achieving our goals is to recognize our past successes. This is not arrogance or hubris, just an honest appreciation for things done well. Feeling good about our success helps motivate us to the next stage.

Often our accomplishments give us a sense of commitment to the greater good. When our deeds benefit others—individuals, groups, teams, organizations, the community, society, or even the world—we feel even more committed and motivated to carry on. This sense of satisfaction and accomplishment in helping others is a powerful motivating force.

Try to list on a piece of paper some of the good things that you achieved over the past year that you are proud of. If you have a significant other, sibling, or close friend, next time you see them have a conversation about some of the things you’re most proud of. Tell them you want to talk about some of the things you’ve done over the past while. You’re feeling good about them and just want to share the news.

Remember the Good Things in Your Life, and Count Your Blessings

This leads into our next area, which is to spend a bit of time remembering some of the good things you’ve experienced in your life. We all have fond memories of our past. However, we don’t always appreciate the good things in life that we’ve encountered. There are many things we can be grateful for—it may be our families, our friends, our community, our country. This helps reinforce the sense that life is valuable and worthwhile—commitment. Most of us have a great deal to be thankful for in our lives. Gratitude has been found to be one of those secret pills that can have a major effect on our lives. In fact, psychologists have discovered that gratitude is a tremendously powerful and healing feeling. But it can be much more than that. It can be an effective antidote to mental health problems.

For example, in a large study that included 2,621 people, a group of psychologists at Virginia Commonwealth University looked at the role that “thankfulness” or gratitude played in protecting people from psychiatric disorders. Their subjects completed a detailed measure of lifetime risk of psychiatric and substance use disorders along with measures of their attitudes and beliefs (Kendler et al., 2003).

The researchers looked at a number of beliefs, in addition to gratitude, which included how religious the participants were, how forgiving, their tendency to be vengeful, their social life, and how much they believed in God. Of all the areas examined, one of those beliefs, the degree to which people believed in thankfulness, was the most important.

Thankfulness was significantly related to nine of the psychiatric disorders assessed. People who were more thankful about their lives had lower risks of major depression, generalized anxiety disorder, phobias, nicotine dependence, alcohol dependence, and drug abuse or dependence. In addition, the researchers found that thankfulness was related to lower rates of bulimia nervosa—a very destructive eating disorder in which people overeat and then force themselves to vomit. This result was especially interesting since it has been found that psychological interventions that increase gratitude also work to improve body image.

How can being grateful increase your resilience, mental health, and commitment to life? Being thankful takes your mind away from your daily concerns and problems. It puts the focus elsewhere and enables you to use positive emotions that can stimulate your brain. It’s like putting the brakes on negative emotions, then stepping on the gas pedal of positive emotions. Positive emotions change our outlook on the world; research has found that when you are in a positive mood your view of the world becomes more open. It allows you to see more—widen your vision. And just remembering the things that you’re grateful for adds to your sense that life is meaningful and worthwhile—commitment.

Positive emotions, like gratitude, stimulate various regions of the limbic system in the brain. More specifically, this stimulation leads to reduced activity in the amygdala region of the brain, whereas negative emotions are associated with increased activation in the amygdala. In addition, positive feelings have been associated with increased dopamine levels in the brain (Burgdorfa & Panksepp, 2006). So, the more gratitude you show, the more you experience these positive connections. And the more practice you have, the easier the transition from negative or neutral feelings to positive ones, so you don’t get as stuck when you have negative feelings.

Experiencing these positive emotions, which enables you to become more open to the world around you, gets you more engaged and committed to your own well-being as well as to the world. Not only does this lead to feeling more confident and having higher self-worth, but it helps you find meaning in life.

So, the next time you experience something good, take some time to be grateful. It not only sends a positive message to the people around you, it’s good for your mental health and builds up your hardiness-commitment.

Spend Time with Family, Friends, and People You Care About

Being around people has lots of advantages. Psychologists call it social support. Everybody is “busy” today. But just consider… what are you more likely to say before you leave this world? “I wish I spent more time at work” or “I wish I spent more time with my family and friends”?

Spending time with friends and family, especially those you have a close emotional bond with, is more than just a good thing to do. It can be good for your health. Bert Uchino, a psychologist on faculty at the University of Utah, has summarized dozens of research studies looking at the connection between social support and health. Specific links were reported between positive social support and cardiovascular, neuroendocrine, and immune functions (Uchino, Cacioppo, & Kiecolt-Glaser, 1996).

You may be wondering, how exactly can being more social have an impact on your health in these areas? And how does this enhance your hardiness? Researchers have identified two ways in which social support improves your health and hardiness. The first is that the people around you can support you in living a healthier lifestyle. They can support you in exercising, eating right, not smoking, and sticking to medical regimens when you are sick. They can do this both directly, by providing you with information and encouraging you, and indirectly, by helping you see that life is worth living and doing what it takes to live longer. Being physically healthier improves your stamina, and greater stamina increases your hardiness. You will have more physical and mental energy to deal with life’s challenges. Also, by strengthening your desire to live, you are increasing your commitment to life.

The other way social support can affect your health is through a more psychological process. Interacting with family and friends directly alters the way you appraise, feel, or experience emotions. This, in effect, can give you a greater sense of control. These emotions and feelings have been found to be directly related to internal processes that can affect certain medical conditions, including cardiovascular disease and immune system functions. Once again, the positive feelings stimulate the brain, taking the focus away from problems or neutral feelings, and increasing your hardiness. The more you experience positive social relations with people you enjoy, the stronger these neural connections become.

There have been a number of studies that looked at the role of social support in helping manage cardiovascular disease. For example, it has been found that just having people you like around you can help lower your blood pressure. Social support in this case acts as a buffer from the more harmful effects of the disease. Having friends around helps create positive feelings, and these feelings in turn act as a protection against some of the negative effects of stress on your cardiovascular system.

Socializing builds commitment and hardiness: you forget about the problems at work, you play with your kids, you talk through your problems, you participate in activities you enjoy, and you improve your well-being.

So, spending more time with friends and family can be an important way for you to improve your health, increase your hardiness, and manage your stress. The benefits of social activities are often underestimated. This is an intervention that you can implement quickly and easily. And in so doing, you will be further building up your commitment levels. We are social creatures, and other people matter to us. Spending time with the people you care about strengthens your feelings of commitment to the social world and the people around you.

Pay Attention to What’s Going On in the World Around You

Part of developing hardiness-commitment is being aware of and engaged in the community and world you live in. How well informed are you about things going on around you? Do you keep up with local, national, or world events? Unfortunately, we live in a time when our news organizations lead with the worst information—otherwise known as “when it bleeds it leads.”

In addition, we hear so much about “fake news.” With so many sources of information—TV, radio, newspapers, magazines, social media, podcasts, blogs, and other online sources—it’s hard to know who or what to believe anymore. What to do?

You can be a skeptical consumer. Read or watch what you can but take most reports with a large grain of salt. Keep in mind that everyone has a point of view; there really is no neutral anymore. So, you can learn more about the events that are going on in the world, but also be less influenced by the opinions the “reporters” give about the events.

For example, you hear about a bomb going off in a crowded marketplace somewhere. Most likely, the nature of the bomb, when it occurred, the number of people injured or killed, and maybe some information about the bomber can be factual. A lot of other information, such as who’s behind the bombing (the sponsors), the intended targets, the message sent by the bombing, and the intended purpose of the attack can be speculation. There are facts and opinions. Keeping up with the facts can be helpful. Being aware of the opinions can be informative.

In today’s world of information overload there are two useful strategies to follow. The first is critical thinking. This involves asking questions about the story and the events around it. Which parts of the story make sense and which parts don’t? Second, try to hear stories from multiple perspectives. Get a sense of what people holding different points of view say and how they interpret the story. This is where it makes sense to get your news and information from multiple outlets and to not rely on just one or two sources.

Social media conveys news almost instantaneously, and that can lead to action (commitment), not just passive receipt of knowledge. Look at the #MeToo movement. The exposé on Harvey Weinstein’s behavior with young, attractive women has changed everything. Fifteen years ago, people would have heard about a story of sexual exploitation and might have forgotten about it within a week or two. But this movement is still going on because people are aware of it and have become committed to doing something about it. It has a hash tag, rallies, spokespeople; this one isn’t going away soon because of women’s (and many men’s) commitment to eradicating sexual harassment in the workplace.

In one interesting study, a group of researchers in the Netherlands examined the different ways that watching the news affects us (Boukes & Vliegenthart, 2017). One of the things they looked at concerned some of the specific benefits of following the news. These benefits include arousing our political interest, increasing our knowledge about politics, and motivating political participation. These are basic contributions to our democratic society. Our involvement in the political process leads directly to increasing our commitment to our communities and nations. It gives us a bigger picture of things to care about that go beyond our own personal welfare.

Being a more critical consumer of news can help you be more aware as well as mentally healthier. Whether you tend to lean towards the political left or the right, use your perspective to frame the news you see. There is nothing wrong with having a perspective or point of view, just be open minded and ask questions about the reports you encounter. And by being more informed about what is going on in the world around you, you are also reinforcing your sense of engagement and commitment.

Try Out New Things

New experiences can also help shape our purpose or commitment in life. While trying new things will be discussed more in the challenges section later, we will briefly cover it here. Psychologists often refer to this as risk-taking or change management. Some risks are relatively small, like eating a food you’ve never tried before, and others can be large, like parachuting out of an airplane.

Another way to look at trying out new things is through your willingness to change or adapt to situations. Adaptability has many advantages in life. People who adapt or are willing to try a new approach to dealing with various situations are likely to be healthier. Changing habits, like quitting smoking or excessive alcohol consumption, are obvious examples.

A group or researchers at the University of Texas at Austin looked at the relationship between adaptability, hardiness-challenge, and symptoms of illness (Soderstrom, Dolbier, Leiferman, & Steinhardt, 2000). They surveyed 111 employees at the 3M Company in Texas who were involved in a wellness program. All these employees completed an earlier version of the Hardiness Resilience Gauge along with measures of their coping styles, perceived stress, and the degrees to which they experienced any illnesses over the previous weeks.

It turned out that their hardiness-commitment scores were significantly related to their coping styles. When it comes to coping with stress, psychologists have identified several different ways people tend to deal or cope with stress, such as trying to avoid the stress altogether. In most cases this does not help the situation.

Getting overly emotional about the stress is also usually not helpful. Or, people may try to deal with the stress head on, by using problem-solving strategies. The problem-solving approach to coping reflects someone’s actual willingness to try to view problems in a positive way, come up with action strategies, and then take action. Their problem-solving scores (and likewise, their hardiness levels) were significantly related to lower stress scores and fewer symptoms of illness over the time period.

Coping directly with stress increases our commitment, leading to greater hardiness. By tackling stressful situations head on, we are more invested in getting through the stress—either fixing the situation or managing our reaction towards it better. The more we cope with stress in this way, the stronger our commitment to engaging with the world around us becomes.

As well, problem-solving coping involves coming up with and trying new strategies. People who avoid stress or use emotional coping tend to use the same old approaches over and over. Trying new strategies through problem-solving increases your flexibility and hence your hardiness.

There are many ways in which you can try out new things. Some examples are having a different breakfast, eating a new food you’ve never tried before, having lunch with someone new, trying a different route to work, listening to a different radio station, starting a conversation with a stranger, trying a new activity, exercise, or sport, and any other example you can come up with.

By trying new experiences, exploring the world, we discover new things in life. Some of these things may not interest us or may feel like we’re wasting our time. However, occasionally, you may hit the jackpot. You may discover an experience that’s really exciting. It may lead to meeting new people, immersing yourself in a new hobby, advancing your career—you never know! It’s this new excitement that increases your commitment. It gives you more reasons to enjoy life and experience more of what life has to offer.

Joanne had broken up with her boyfriend, Matt. She was heartbroken over the breakup and avoided socializing with her friends. She felt sad about losing Matt, but also somewhat embarrassed about the relationship not working out. This kept her from going out with friends and possibly meeting new people.

One of her friends, Susan, got an invitation to an open house office party at an engineering firm from her friend Rob. Susan told Rob about Joanne and asked if she could bring her along. Rob mentioned that one of his colleagues, Mike, had been widowed and had also avoided socializing for some time. Perhaps they could meet.

Susan worked hard to get Joanne to come to the party. She had to beg her to come along, promising they would both leave after an hour if she was bored. Susan agreed to an early departure, if only to get Joanne out of the house. Within 15 minutes of arriving at the party, Joanne was introduced to Mike. The conversation was guarded at first, but when the subject got to favorite restaurants and food, they both became animated. They agreed to meet again and started dating.

It’s now 30 years later, and Joanne and Mike are happily married with two grown children and two grandchildren. By agreeing to come to the party, Joanne was opening herself up to a new experience. By immersing herself in that experience she became more committed to the process and then to the relationship that was initiated. Her sense of commitment helped change her circumstances. It not only pulled her out of her slump, but it gave her a whole new lease on life.

In the next chapter we’ll look at hardiness-challenge. We’ll explore additional approaches to increase your hardiness through the challenge dimension.