“He who has a why to live for, can bear almost any how.”

—Friedrich Nietzsche (German philosopher)

Probably one of the most difficult questions we have ever asked is, “Why are we here?” Most people go through life, day by day, just trying to get to tomorrow. It’s usually when tragedy strikes around us that we stop and think about what life is all about and whether we are making the most of our own lives. People who are hardy, especially in the factor we’ve identified as commitment, have already thought about their lives and what is meaningful to them.

How do we embrace commitment in our lives? Many of us have set specific goals for ourselves in life. We might want to do a certain type of work, become rich and famous, have a loving family, change the world, have lots of friends, help others, travel, party, or any number of things. These goals become our purpose, the things we wake up and get out of bed for in the morning. Some people are pretty nonchalant about their goals—they just get up and go to work—if they move forward in life today, that’s fine, if not, that’s okay too. Other people are driven—they may want to stop world poverty, make a million dollars, or become the next Beyoncé. These people work towards their goals relentlessly.

Having goals, or a purpose in life, is like having a destination you want to visit. You may have always wanted to go to Rome, but somehow never quite made it there. However, commitment is your engagement in the process. People who are committed take action and work towards their goals. They also tend to take a more general interest in life and the world around them. They find meaning in their lives.

There’s one more aspect of commitment that’s important here. Sometimes the commitment, the goal that someone is passionate about, is vocational, a type of work or a life mission. We refer to this as a calling. Some people have a religious calling and enter the clergy. Others have a calling to heal people and become health professionals. We’ll explore this in more detail later in the chapter.

What Is the Theory Behind Commitment?

The commitment facet of hardiness is all about being actively involved and engaged in one’s activities and the surrounding world. People high in commitment see life as meaningful and worthwhile, even though it is sometimes disappointing and painful.

The theoretical roots behind the hardiness-commitment concept lie in existential psychology, as seen for example in the work of Viktor Frankl (2007) and Ludwig Binswanger (1963). Frankl, an Austrian psychiatrist and concentration camp survivor, argued that finding meaning in life was the most important task humans face. For Frankl, it is the lack of meaning that is behind all sorts of problems, from boredom and apathy to depression and suicide.

Ludwig Binswanger was a Swiss psychiatrist and part of Freud’s inner circle. He believed that to fully understand people, you had to take into account how they see and interact with the world on three levels.

The first level is the Umwelt, or “around world,” which is the physical world and environment around you. This would include, for example, where you live and work, and all your day-to-day activities. Next is the Mitwelt, or “with world,” which refers to all the people you know and interact with, your social world. Finally, is the Eigenwelt, or “self world,” or how you see and think about your own self.

Hardiness-commitment encompasses all three of these worlds. People strong in commitment are highly interested in the world and the people around them and see themselves as active participants. This spills over into another hardiness facet, the sense of control, which we discuss in later chapters.

What We Can Learn About Commitment from Prisoners of War

When it comes to surviving adverse situations, few things seem as bad as being held captive as a prisoner of war. What could be worse than being tortured and held in isolation by an enemy? Being a prisoner of war has been described as one of the most brutal of man-made traumas. It includes enduring deliberate, repeated, prolonged, and interpersonal human cruelty (Herman, 1992).

The late John McCain, former US senator and presidential candidate had just such a fate. During the Vietnam War, as a naval aviator, he flew ground bombing missions from an aircraft carrier. During Operation Rolling Thunder over Hanoi in 1967 his plane was shot down. Seriously injured in the crash, he was captured by the North Vietnamese.

McCain was a prisoner of war until 1973. While imprisoned at the notorious Hanoi Hilton, he was beaten, tortured, and suffered from dysentery, severe weight loss, and high fever. He was beaten so badly that his grey hair turned white when he was left to die. How did McCain keep up his morale and survive his imprisonment? By his own account, a key factor that sustained him was his social commitment, beginning with commitment to his fellow prisoners. He didn’t want to do anything to let them down. Several times McCain was offered early release by his captors, who knew that his father was an admiral and that this would attract a lot of media attention. Despite being close to death and denied medical care, McCain refused, saying that other POWs should go home first.

He also believed communication with his fellow prisoners was essential for their survival. Though held in isolation for much of his captivity, he communicated by tapping out Morse code messages on the floors and walls. Prisoners were often beaten when caught making these surreptitious contacts. McCain was also deeply committed to his family and didn’t want to bring any shame or criticism on them through his actions while a POW. Finally, like most other POWs, he was committed to American ideals and values of freedom, fairness, and democracy. These commitments all helped to sustain him through five and a half years of captivity, torture, and suffering.

This kind of commitment, believing in a higher cause, increases your hardiness by building your strength of conviction and enabling you to withstand greater obstacles. Your hardiness grows, much like the muscles you exercise, through overcoming increasing challenges. Each successful encounter with a difficult situation enables your hardiness factor to grow.

People with a strong sense of commitment also tend to apply it to themselves, engaging in reflection and honest self-examination. They want to be aware of who they are, their strengths and weaknesses. McCain had plenty of time for reflection during his captivity and thought a lot about what was important to him—family, friends, fellow prisoners, service to his country. At one particularly low point he did succumb to the demands of his captors and signed a false confession. He later recounted this failure to resist with some regret, but also with an acceptance of the hard reality that “every man has his breaking point.” In this he demonstrates another important aspect of commitment: the recognition of your limitations as a human being and a willingness to accept these limitations with humility (McCain, 2008).

Surviving Post-Traumatic Stress: Hardiness-Commitment Versus Short-Term Pleasures

In a very unique study, some Israeli researchers looked at the effects of stress (post-traumatic stress disorder) on former prisoners of war over a period of 17 years (Zerach, Karstoft, & Solomon, 2017). At regular intervals the former prisoners were reassessed on a number of measures. The idea was to see if the effects of stress got worse over time, stayed the same, or improved. As well, the researchers looked at whether they could predict these outcomes through exploring certain personality characteristics.

In other words, these researchers, along with many others who study war veterans, were looking to identify risk or resiliency factors. If they could discover factors that prevented soldiers, who experience extremely stressful situations, from suffering the ravages of stress, we could likely use these findings to help others deal with the ups and downs of everyday living.

The Israeli study looked specifically at how two different personality characteristics may have helped determine the long-term effects of severe stress. One factor that researchers thought was important, based on some previous research, was sensation-seeking. This is the degree to which people actively seek out new, exciting, and intense experiences. People who take big risks—whether physical, social, or financial—are high in sensation-seeking. The theory here is that people who seek short-term pleasure, like taking big risks and experiencing new things—sensation seekers—should be less affected by stressful situations. These are people who generally experience lower anxiety in their lives.

If, in fact, sensation-seeking lowers people’s stress, then simply teaching people to take more risks or look for short-term pleasures in their lives could help them reduce their stress. This could lead to a whole new set of treatment strategies for people affected negatively by stress.

The other factor examined was hardiness, which included commitment, control, and challenge. Once again, based on previous research with military populations, it was thought that having a hardiness mindset might be a good shield against some of the more destructive elements of these stressful experiences. If hardiness was an important factor here, that could lead to new interventions that could help people to better manage stress.

The results of the Israeli POW study did not work out exactly as the researchers expected. Sensation-seeking did not seem to play a role in differentiating those who suffered more or less over time with post-traumatic stress symptoms. On the other hand, hardiness played a significant role in differentiating those who coped better with their situation from those who continued to suffer over time. Those who were high in hardiness, that is, those who managed stress effectively and directly through commitment, challenge, and control, had significantly fewer post-traumatic stress symptoms over the 17-year time period of the study. While numerous studies have supported the effectiveness of hardiness in managing stress at a single point in time, this was the first study to demonstrate hardiness as a possible buffer against the long-term residues of war captivity.

The authors went on to suggest that screening for hardiness and introducing hardiness training early on—building commitment, control, and challenge—could significantly benefit the military. Imagine, if hardiness can be a protective factor in these extreme situations, how the hardiness skills might benefit you in your day-to-day life.

Hardiness skills or styles can make a difference in the lives of people who have experienced some of the most extreme stress humans can inflict on each other. Adopting some of the components of hardiness may make a difference in your life.

Increasing Commitment in Your Life

Commitment is all about active involvement and engagement in one’s 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.

Mary-Anne was at a crossroads in her life. She had been working at the same job for almost 10 years. As a data entry clerk in customer service at a chemical manufacturing plant, she thought she had nowhere to go career-wise. She felt she was at a dead end. As she thought about her situation, she became angry with herself. Over time she began to experience physical symptoms that included headaches, stomach cramps, and occasional dizziness. She started coming in late to work and missing days when her headaches were too intense. She was in danger of losing her job, with no alternative in sight.

Because her job performance was declining, she was asked to meet with Alicia, the human resource manager at work. It didn’t take long for Alicia to discover how unhappy Mary-Anne was at work. With a little exploration, Alicia discovered Mary-Anne had an interest in event planning. She had planned her own wedding as well as her sister’s and several of her friends’ weddings. Also, her happiest time at work was when she had an opportunity to help the marketing people plan and execute exhibiting at a conference.

Alicia suggested Mary-Anne take some night courses in event planning, an area they established that she had developed an interest in. Over time, Mary-Anne could start applying for any jobs that became available in the marketing department. Suddenly, Mary-Anne felt she had a purpose, something she could strive for. Because this purpose was meaningful for her, and she was motivated to pursue it, her commitment was high. Not only did she feel a new sense of hope and direction, but her headaches and stomach cramps soon disappeared as well.

The ability to overcome these feelings and symptoms increased her hardiness. Hardiness builds on experiences of success in overcoming obstacles. Each time you overcome a challenge in your life, you build more of your hardiness muscle.

What can you learn from Mary-Anne’s experience? Take the time to think about what is important, interesting, and meaningful to you…your personal values and goals. Are you getting enough of these things in your current life, whether at work, in your free time, or at all? Think about changing your life to attain more of these goals. Consider how it may build your hardiness factor.

Victor Frankl: Purpose, Commitment, and Meaning

How is it that some people have gone through extremely horrifying situations, yet are still able come out of it and continue to live their lives? Some go on to live relatively ordinary lives while others go on to great accomplishments. One explanation for this phenomenon was offered by Victor Frankl, the noted psychiatrist who survived the labor camp at Theresienstadt and the death camp of Auschwitz during World War II.

Frankl developed a form of therapy called logotherapy which he first conceptualized just before the war. While being held prisoner by the Nazis, he reported that using the principles of this therapy helped him to survive. Even after learning that his mother and brother were murdered at Auschwitz and his wife killed at Bergen-Belsen, he maintained those beliefs. His therapy approach is largely described in his book Man’s Search for Meaning (Frankl, 1959/2007).

Basically, Frankl had three main ideas. The first he called freedom of will. This means that people have the freedom to choose—whether it’s internal psychological conditions, or external biological and social conditions. He states that it’s within our spirit to make choices in our lives. Even when we are overcome with things like a serious illness over which we have little or no control, there are choices we can make about how to move forward with our lives.

Frankl’s second big idea is will to meaning. This implies that not only are we free, but we are free to choose to achieve goals and purpose in our lives. This is seen as a primary motivation in most human beings. When people are unable to strive for purpose or meaning in life, they are likely to live lives that feel rather pointless. This, in turn, leads to boredom and increases their risk for aggression, addiction, suicide, depression, and various other mental and physical problems.

Finally, Frankl talked about meaning in life. He related this to responsibility. Thus, being free or achieving freedom is a good thing. But it’s not all that meaningful unless we use that freedom responsibly and don’t just fritter it away on worthless endeavors. So real meaning involves purposeful accomplishments with specific situations and people. This takes it to the next level, beyond wishful thinking into actual accomplishments.

Together, these three factors, freedom of will, will to meaning, and meaning in life, add to our hardiness factor. By knowing we have choices in life, have a purpose, and can execute those choices, we become stronger, more resilient—hardier in our lives. This hardiness gives us added strength when we encounter our next life challenge.

There have been a few criticisms of Frankl’s work in more recent years (Langer, 1982; Szasz, 2003). Some of this has to do with the idea that purpose is not necessarily limited to serving the good of mankind. Frankl believed his purpose was to survive the death camps so that he could eventually get back to helping people through his therapy, lectures, and writing. However, purpose can also have a dark side. For example, the Nazi soldiers going through their own hardships could also motivate themselves through their (dark) sense of purpose—to eliminate Jews from the world.

Somewhere along the line we should add goodness to purpose—that purposeful acts are for the betterment of people, animals, or the planet. While being hateful may give some people purpose, there are serious personal and public health costs associated with hate (Abuelaish & Arya, 2017). In fact, in some of our own research developing a new measure of hate, we found that one of the factors of hate we identified, intolerance (being unwilling to learn about other groups of people), was negatively related to hardiness. In other words, people who are high in hardiness tend to be more tolerant and willing to learn about others (Abuelaish, Stein, Stermac, & Mann, 2019).

How much time have you spent thinking about your purpose in life? What do you consider the most important things in your life? For some people it’s putting food on the table and a roof over their family’s head. Are your priorities centered around your family, work, career, money, fixing the environment, eradicating poverty, fame, education, or (fill in the blank) ____________________?

Think about your values and write down your most important priorities.

___________________________________________________.

The Role of Commitment in Success: Jim Carrey

Jim Carrey is a well-known comedian and actor. He’s a two-time Golden Globe winner and was a cast member of the Fox sketch comedy In Living Color (1990). He had leading roles in Ace Ventura: Pet Detective (1994), Dumb and Dumber (1994), and The Mask (1994) which established him as a bankable comedy actor. He gained his biggest success starring in serious roles in The Truman Show (1998) and Man on the Moon (1999), where he earned his Golden Globe Awards for Best Actor.

But Carrey wasn’t always successful. In fact, he had his share of difficulties growing up. His family often struggled to make ends meet. He was born in Newmarket, Ontario, just north of Toronto. He loved performing and performed for anyone who would give him the time when he was young. During his teenage years, his family was hit with serious financial difficulties, and they were forced to move to smaller quarters in Scarborough, a suburb of Toronto.

He and his parents had to take security and janitorial jobs in a factory in order to survive. Jim worked eight-hour shifts after school let out. His grades and morale both suffered. When the family finally deserted the factory, they lived like nomads out of a Volkswagen camper van until they could return to Toronto.

In spite of all this, Carrey saw himself as an entertainer. He kept subjecting himself to open mics and auditions even though he was often ridiculed and told he had no talent. Eventually he was noticed by comedian Rodney Dangerfield and given his first break.

Carrey believed in himself and the fact that he could make it someday, despite all the difficult times he experienced. He also had a great deal of support from his family. Even during their most difficult times his father drove him to perform at unpaid open mics at local comedy clubs.

He had a real purpose to his life. In an interview with Oprah Winfrey on February 17, 1997 (Winfrey, 1997), he revealed that as a struggling actor he would use visualization techniques to get work. He also stated that he visualized a $10,000,000 check given to him for “acting services rendered,” placed the check in his pocket, and seven years later received a $10,000,000 check for his role in Dumb and Dumber (Winfrey, 2017).

The adversity in Carrey’s life seemed to increase his hardiness. It enabled him to persist and follow his dreams despite failures experienced along the way. His hardiness acted as a shield, likely giving him the strength to tell himself, after the next bump in the road, something like, “Okay, this is pretty bad, but I’ve already gone through worse experiences, so why let this stop me now?”

When Commitment Leads to Calling: The Success Factor for Musicians

What does it take to become a successful musician? The music business is extremely competitive with only a small percentage of the people who want to make their living playing music achieving that goal. If we can learn more about success in this field, perhaps that can help us understand success in other, less competitive fields as well.

One of the authors (Steven) contributes time to a nonprofit program aimed at helping early career musicians learn the business, legal, marketing, and psychological aspects of success in the music business. One of the personality characteristics these artists are tested on is their hardiness. We are involved in a long-term study looking at the role hardiness plays in the success (or lack of success) of these young performers.

Fortunately, there has already been a fair bit of research that has been carried out looking at success in the music business. Perhaps one of the most popular beliefs is that musical talent or ability is the best predictor of making it as a musical artist. It seems logical that the artists with the best-selling songs are the most technically competent and talented musicians or performers.

The role of talent (musical ability) and intrinsic motivation—also known as a “calling”—were examined in a creative long-term study that followed 450 amateur high school musicians for 11 years (Riza & Heller, 2015). The subjects were surveyed multiple times, starting from their adolescence up until their early adulthood.

You’re probably somewhat familiar with the concept of a calling. Some people report having a calling early in life to help others, and they follow their calling, for example, by eventually entering medical school and becoming doctors. Others may have religious callings at an early age and become priests, ministers, or rabbis. Another way of framing this could be through the well-known statement made by Steve Jobs that “the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle” (Jobs, 2005).

Riza and Heller gathered ability ratings from the students’ music teachers as well as information on any awards they had achieved or competitions they had participated in. They also surveyed the students as to how well they self-rated their own musical ability. Interestingly, the students’ actual musical ability, as rated by professionals, did not always match the students’ self-perceived ability. In other words, there were students who believed they were much more talented than their teachers thought they were, and others who thought they were less skilled.

Most likely, you would expect the level of objectively rated talent to be the best predictor of success in this group. However, when the researchers looked at who actually became successful musicians, it was not their actual talent or ability that predicted their success. Rather, it was the degree to which they reported having a calling and their own perceived rating of their talent (as opposed to objective ratings of their talent) that better predicted their success.

What does it mean to have a calling? For this study, and several others like it, a person’s level of calling is determined by the degree to which they agree to a set of specific items, such as these examples:

• My existence would be much less meaningful without my involvement in music.
• I am passionate about playing my instrument/singing.
• Music is always in my mind in some way.

The stronger the endorsement of the items, the more intense one’s sense of calling. If you are committed to your calling, you will fulfill your calling. The uber-talented musicians may be the best musicians on the continent, but if it’s not their calling, they’re not committed and won’t succeed the way those committed to their calling will, even if those musicians aren’t as talented.

Consider some of the activities that are meaningful in your life. How often do you think about them? What actions do you take in fulfilling them? Are there additional things you can do to make them more a part of your life?

One of the great things we’ve learned about the hardiness mindset is that it’s changeable. You can actually learn to become more committed to something in your life. In the next chapter we’ll explore some specific ways in which you can increase the commitment in your life.