Build Your Resilience
“A good half of the art of living is resilience.”
—Alain de Botton
On February 27, 1991, Major Rhonda Cornum was in the back of a Black Hawk helicopter flying fast and low across the Iraqi desert, so low that they would have collided with an American convoy of trucks crawling across the landscape below if the pilot hadn’t pulled up in time. The helicopter’s crew of eight was responding to the call that an F-16 had been shot down, and the pilot had a broken leg. Cornum, a flight surgeon for the 229th Attack Aviation Regiment, was on board to administer medical aid to the downed pilot.1
Just forty-five seconds after they’d passed over the American convoy, green tracers streaked up from the ground “as if we were a lawn mower that had run over a beehive, and the bees were coming up to sting,” as Cornum wrote in her memoir, She Went to War.2 The soldiers on the door guns returned fire. One of the shell casings from the machine gun hit Cornum in the face as she lay on the floor, waiting for one stray round to rip through the floor from below.
Then something big hit the helicopter. The aircraft rocked. The engine strained.
Cornum heard the pilot yell, “We’re going in!” She grabbed on to the aircraft. She wondered if it was the end. The helicopter crashed at 140 knots onto the desert floor. Everything went dark.
Cornum remembers it was daytime when they crashed, and when she came to it was night. She pushed her way through the wreckage to find her way out of the mangled fuselage. The pain was almost unbearable. Cornum reassured herself by thinking, “Nobody’s ever died from pain.”
With a PhD in biochemistry from Cornell University, Cornum had been recruited into the Army to work in a research facility in San Francisco. She never expected to deploy.
“I was the least likely person to see combat,” she says. “I really joined because I wanted to do research and I didn’t want to teach.” She ended up liking the Army, particularly the camaraderie and the mission focus.
When Cornum pushed her way out of the wreckage of the Black Hawk, she couldn’t stand up or even turn over. When she tried a second time to stand up, she found herself looking up into the barrels of five Iraqi rifles. She noted the soldiers’ good uniforms and concluded that they were members of the Republican Guard. Not hearing any other noise, she assumed she was the sole survivor.
One of the soldiers reached down and grabbed Cornum by her right arm. A flash of pain burned through her body. She screamed. The pain told her that her arm was broken, and that his tug had dislocated it as well. Her other arm was also broken. Cornum had been shot, but wouldn’t know it until later. The soldier took her by the hair and dragged her behind him.
Cornum, eventually put upright, was forced to walk into a subterranean bunker. In a room deep inside the bunker the soldier led her to a circle where one of her crew members was kneeling. Then Cornum and her fellow crew member were taken back outside, pushed into a truck, and taken to a second bunker, and then a third, each time interrogated by a new group of soldiers. Then they were put in another truck, and this time the guard in charge of Cornum sexually assaulted her. She remembers feeling as amazed as she was repulsed. Her hair, matted with blood, covered one eye. Both arms were broken. Her knee was badly injured.
The assault was not the worst part of her captivity. At one bunker Cornum was forced to kneel for a mock execution. She felt the pistol against the back of her head. She waited for the click.
In the midst of this crucible, Cornum understood that how she thought about her situation would define her experience, would determine whether she survived her ordeals or was crushed by them.
The day after Cornum was captured, the war ended. She was repatriated a week later, after eight days in captivity. Cornum used that experience, and her recovery from it, as inspiration to pursue graduate studies in resilience. Now she helps to run the Army’s resilience program.
Mindset Is Everything
How you think about difficulties has a great deal to do with how successfully you will navigate them, something that the Army knows well. Many would argue that the greatest weapon in the Army arsenal has nothing to do with helicopters or tanks. The world’s greatest warfighters are equipped with psychological training codified in the program toward which Cornum has devoted her energy since returning home from Iraq: the Comprehensive Soldier Fitness program.
Developed in 2009 in response to the devastating effects of post-traumatic stress on soldiers who are required to repeatedly deploy, the training empowers soldiers to build the base of resilience they need to get through sustained challenge. Resilience for purposes of this training is defined as “a set of processes that enables good outcomes in spite of serious threats.”3 Furthering the Comprehensive Soldier Fitness program, the Army worked with the Positive Psychology Center at the University of Pennsylvania to develop the Master Resilience Training course, evidence that many aspects of resilience are teachable.
Master Resilience Training involves developing six core competencies: self-awareness, self-regulation, optimism, mental agility, identifying one’s own and others’ character strengths, and connection.
The first four chapters of this book—focusing on connecting to your own story, defining your core purpose, developing the right relationships, and cultivating the ability to listen—correlate to three of these six core competencies: self-awareness, understanding your and others’ strengths, and connection. In this chapter, we’ll target the mental components of grit: optimism, mental agility, and self-regulation.
Training for Optimism
The idea that optimism is a key part of resilience isn’t new, but optimism is far from a given. In a study conducted in 1975 by Donald Hiroto and Martin Seligman, the founder of the Positive Psychology Center, the researchers identified something they called “learned helplessness,” where animals, and then humans, showed that they will over time accept traumatic treatment with no attempt to change it.4 In the study, Hiroto and Seligman found that people respond to extreme stressors in a normal distribution, some people falling apart from anxiety and depression and others able to go through what the researchers identified as “post-traumatic growth.” This latter group was able to respond resiliently because of an optimistic outlook.
The Penn Resilience Program (of the Positive Psychology Center) defines optimism as “the ability to notice and expect the positive, to focus on what you can control, and to take purposeful action.”5 It relates to, but is separate from, reframing obstacles. It is a manner of encountering circumstance, keeping your attention focused on the positive aspects of the situation and potential outcomes without getting derailed or defeated by the negative ones. While optimism is a way of thinking and a way of being (that is, somewhat innate), it can be learned and honed.
Cornum, whose story opened this chapter, speaks of optimism as a conscious decision to keep your thoughts focused on what you can control, as well as what you’re grateful for. While in captivity, Cornum says, “I was grateful I was alive, and I was grateful I was in the war that I was in.” Being grateful forces you to look for the things that are in your favor, even when it might seem like life itself is conspiring against you. It trains you to focus on what actually is, instead of what hasn’t actually happened yet.
Optimism is what helped Cornum bolster herself in those first moments of consciousness after the Black Hawk she was riding in was shot down, when—instead of giving into circumstance—she reminded herself that pain itself wasn’t fatal. Cornum summarizes: “Optimistic people believe that a problem is specific and not global.” That attitude helped her to take things one day at a time—a moment at a time—in captivity, and to trust that the situation wouldn’t last forever. “I felt very confident that I might be there for weeks or even months, but I wasn’t going to be there for seven years,” she says.
Now that she’s had years of teaching the six core components of resilience, she has this to say about the power of mindset: “One of the most important things you can learn is that what you think, and how you perceive events is totally up to you. You cannot ruminate about the bad part. The enemy may be able to tell you everything else . . . they cannot determine what you think. It is your choice.”
Granted, positivity is no panacea. All lessons have their limits. Optimism will get you a long way, but not at the expense of reality. Leadership requires blending optimism with a realistic understanding of circumstances.
This optimism tempered by reality is sometimes referred to as the Stockdale Paradox, named for Admiral James Stockdale. Stockdale was a prisoner of war in Vietnam at the Hanoi Hilton for more than seven years, from 1965 to 1973. Over those years he was tortured more than twenty times. He had no set release date, and no way to know if he would ever see his family again. Still, he persevered and inspired hope while instituting a series of coping methods with the other prisoners. To combat imposed isolation, he developed a tapping code that allowed the prisoners to communicate with each other. Because prisoners are expected not to give any information to their captors past their rank and serial number, an expectation which is not sustainable over prolonged torture, Stockdale put together a schedule over which they could release bits of information. He understood the need to have some small control over a situation. His work with his fellow captives gave them discrete tasks that helped them to get through times that would otherwise be unbearable.
He later went on to earn three stars and became the first Naval aviator to be awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor.
When Admiral Stockdale was asked what caused others to perish while he survived, he responded: “That’s easy. Optimism.”
This might come as a surprise given Cornum’s dogged optimism, but Stockdale understood that optimism has its limits.
In his seminal business-leadership book, Good to Great, Jim Collins recounts the comments Admiral Stockdale shared with him: The optimists “were the ones who said ‘We’re going to be out by Christmas.’ And then Christmas would come and go. Then they’d say, ‘We’re going to be out by Easter.’ And Easter would come, and Easter would go . . . and they died of a broken heart.”6
Then Stockdale put into words what has come to be called the Stockdale Paradox: “This is a very important lesson. You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end—which you never can afford to lose—with the discipline to confront the more brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they may be.”
Tempered optimism is key to grit, a crucial ingredient to surviving the most difficult challenges of leadership and of life. Maintaining flexibility in your thinking is a necessary component of this tempered optimism—acknowledging the negative without losing focus on the positive, adopting a new plan when circumstances require.
Building Mental Agility
The next component of the resilience mindset is mental agility, or what the military calls “Battlemind”—a soldier’s capacity to face fear and adversity with courage.7 Cornum’s mental flexibility empowered her to adapt her thinking to match her circumstances, and that helped her survive. She admits that prior to being shot out of the Iraqi sky, “I didn’t do helpless at all.” And yet, as a captive with serious injuries, she was completely dependent on her captors (as well as trusting that her fellow soldiers would come back for her).
“That was probably the most difficult thing, getting someone, especially the enemy, to help you,” she says.
Cornum laughs about it now, but the challenge at the time was very real. Without the use of her arms, she could not pull down her flight suit to use the bathroom. When she finally was able to communicate her need to her captors, they seemed flummoxed—they were not permitted to see an infidel woman without clothing. Finally, one soldier put a robe around her and tied it so that he could assist her with this basic need.
“It’s all about plan B,” she says. When obstacles arise, “you just have to have a mission change.” For Cornum, that meant focusing on keeping herself and her fellow prisoner alive.
How exactly do you cultivate the battlemind, or mental agility? Because mindset is by definition internal, it’s a bit of a slippery subject, but one that the Army has worked out a way to teach.
Underlying this module is the work of influential American psychologist Albert Ellis. Ellis developed rational emotive behavior therapy in 1955, which helped make cognitive-behavior approaches central to therapy. His ABC model—short for adversity-belief-consequence—holds that your beliefs about an event drive your emotional and behavioral reactions to said event. Therefore, if you want the freedom to choose how you respond to any particular circumstance—whether it’s one you’re facing in the moment, or one that happened in your past that is still affecting you—you have to examine and challenge your beliefs.
To train for a more positive response in the moment, the Army’s resilience program offers a reframing exercise. The training suggests using “sentence starters” to help reshape thoughts. This practice suggests that a different perspective can come from restating the challenge, provided one avoids the “common pitfalls” of “dismissing the grain of truth, minimizing the situation, rationalizing or excusing one’s contribution to a problem, and weak responses.”8
Some of the sentence starters suggested include:
•That’s not completely true because . . . This prompt requires you to prove your own assumptions and recognize contradicting evidence.
•A more optimistic way of seeing this is . . . This helps you actively seek the positive aspects of whatever issue you’re facing.
•The most likely implication is . . . This sentence starter nudges you to take a broader perspective. Because the phrase most likely is contained within it, it also helps you keep your answers rooted in reality instead of conjecture.
Answering these questions can be performed on your own, either inside your own head or in a journal. I find that writing—and then reading back—my answers to these questions helps me be more objective and reveals insights that I might not have discovered otherwise. Another effective tactic is to answer these questions in conversation with someone who I know supports me, especially if this person is outside my immediate work environment. This brings together mental agility and connecting with others. Grit doesn’t operate in a vacuum.
Erin McShane is not only one of the first women to go through the Army’s Ranger School but also one of relatively few to graduate from the combat-engineer (sapper) course. McShane remembers the sapper course as being the hardest.
“On the day of Boat PT [physical training], we woke up long before the sun and assembled next to our Zodiac boats, inflatable black boats weighing over three hundred pounds each. Though we only had a mile to carry them and six soldiers to a boat, the instructors made sure that every inch of that mile was painful. They stood on top of the boats, yelling for us to pick up and put them down, overhead press the boat, and do a number of terrible exercises . . . I never want to do it again.”9
“I have a personal rule: never complain,” she writes in Shave Your Head, the guide she put together for other women considering Ranger School. “Things could always be worse and you always have a better lot than someone else.”
I ask her if, for all of her successes, she can recall a failure, and how she came to work through it.
McShane remembers a patrol in Ranger School. Patrols are used to evaluate soldiers in different leadership roles, and McShane had already served as patrol leader. She wanted to help her fellow Ranger candidates, and mentioned an idea to her colleague filling the patrol-leader position. The Ranger Instructor pulled her aside and gave her feedback: she shouldn’t be interfering in her fellow soldier’s decision making. She needed to stay back and support. She was downgraded for her role in the patrol.
She was frustrated. She had thought she was helping, but she was getting in the way.
Later, a mentor helped her think differently about that failure.
“I learned that my failure was in what I did, and not in who I was,” she says. “Failure is a result of the methods chosen, and not of the person. It was such an important thing to take away.”
It is wisdom I would have liked to have had. Despite having lived through challenges in uniform, I found myself doubting my capabilities in the new arena of the corporate world. In the middle of my first year at business school, I jumped into the fray of interviews for summer internships with an initial focus on consulting. After the on-campus interviews, a particular consulting firm invited me to come in for a subsequent and final round of interviews in Boston. This firm was known for the academic prowess of its consultants, many of whom spoke multiple languages and held more than one PhD. While I’d done well in the early interview rounds, once it came to packing my bags to head to Boston for the final rounds, I started to doubt myself.
I called my dad from my apartment in a hundred-year-old farmhouse in Lebanon, New Hampshire. My travel bag was spread out on my bed, half-packed. I paced back and forth. My dad had always been my anchor (a crucial role on my dream team, as I discussed in chapter 3). I told him how nervous I was about my interview, and how utterly ridiculous it was that they’d even asked me to come talk to them.
His response showed me how to reframe the damaging monologue playing in my head.
“Your experiences are just as incomprehensible to them,” he said. “You’ve been through bigger challenges. Besides, they asked you to come, and they wouldn’t waste their own time.” He ended with one of his typical aphorisms, saying, “Remember that every single person gets out of bed in the morning and puts on their pants the same way, one leg after the other.”
I hung up the phone. The afternoon light filtered in through the window. Outside, spring buds pushed their way out on tree branches. I thought about it—literally visualized people in their respective bedrooms pulling on pants, one leg at a time. I remembered flying, the total mastery and the confidence it required. It was a conscious effort to smooth out my wrinkled thoughts, taking my scattered fears and organizing them neatly. I had overcome more-difficult things than an interview, no matter where it was, and had done them well. I closed up my travel bag, and focused on the work I’d done to prepare. I didn’t get an offer, but I’d given it my best.
It isn’t only our interior monologues that sabotage us, though. Without care, we can easily be brought down by negativity in others, whatever their motivation. As Cornum notes, “You need to have enough self-efficacy to not be negatively influenced by what people expect of you. You will be surrounded by people with low expectations . . . mediocrity really loves company.”
It’s far too easy for many of us to succumb to the negativity, the doubts, the worst-case thinking, and the false narratives that come out of others’ mouths, whether they are well-meaning or not. Redirecting your thoughts requires the earlier work of under standing your story and staying focused on your core purpose, and it requires the continual work of remaining positive, disregarding negativity, and continuing forward against the odds. As Theodore Roosevelt reminded us: It is not the critics that count. And once in the arena, we all have to do the work to stay focused. That work requires self-regulation.
Fostering the Ability to Self-Regulate
The third of the core competencies of resilience that relate to mindset is self-regulation, which the Army’s Master Resilience Training workbook defines as the ability to “regulate impulses, emotions, physiology, and behaviors to achieve goals, express emotions appropriately, and stop counterproductive thinking.”10 Imagining a realistic worst-case scenario helps you self-regulate by practicing calm even in the face of failure, and thinking through your response before you’re in the moment. Some circumstances require a more immediate approach.
While reframing and thinking through your response to failure (as we covered in the section on building mental agility earlier in this chapter) are important, both take time for reflection and consideration. Real life doesn’t always offer the time and space to support this kind of work. There are times that require a more immediate approach. Mission focus, especially in the cockpit, requires 100 percent concentration. A few pilot tricks can help make this exercise work: flight planning, checklists, and rituals.
The first, flight planning, involves preparing for what has to be done. This preparation would include taking into account contingencies—related to your own limitations and to challenges inherent in the mission—in order to help you anticipate what might come up. One specific way to think about this is to write down in advance anything that might interfere with focus. Then make a decision to put such things aside. Put them mentally into a box, and decide to address them at a later time.
As a part of flight planning, compartmentalization is a temporary solution to get through a period requiring extreme focus in the face of difficulty. The concept is named for how it might be visualized: consider that you have a compartment, or a box, into which you can put a concern or a distraction. The terms concern and distraction may seem euphemistic at best for a serious challenge, but temporarily consider that such things might be packaged up or put away. Visualize putting them into a box and then closing and securing that box. After the mission, after the flight, you can take them back out again, but before you take off, they have to be put away.
This technique does not suggest that you try to ignore a real problem, or in any way disregard its implications or its impact. Instead, compartmentalization recognizes that focus on the work at hand may require special measures. This compartmentalization takes work, and is another learned skill—one I did not learn successfully until after much practice. The best example of my own failure to compartmentalize was during an instrument check ride (a certification test) as a lieutenant newly assigned to Fort Bragg. My check ride was scheduled with a warrant-officer instructor pilot whom I liked and respected, though he was outspoken in his discomfort about flying with (and working with) women. He was never unkind, or unfair, but I remember one conversation in which he bristled at finding out I would sleep in the pilot tent in the field.
“I’ve been married for ten years, and my wife has never even heard me fart,” he told me. I didn’t have a response to that, but I felt his discomfort every time we were around each other.
Both of us were on edge before and during the check ride. It was a summer afternoon in North Carolina, and thunderheads towered in an otherwise blue sky. The heat of the day rose from the fields, and I wrestled the air currents that were pushing us higher over the agricultural land and dropping us down in the relatively cooler air over the forests. The combination of discomfort flying together and the challenges of the check ride were too much. For the only time in my years in aviation, I failed to keep my altitude within the 100-foot margin that was required. And for the first and only time in my years in uniform, I failed my check ride.
I was mortified. I felt the weight of the fishbowl—my performance reflected on me and, as I saw it, on all women who might follow. I had confirmed what may have been this instructor’s suspicions that I wasn’t up to the task, that I didn’t belong. None of these were productive thoughts. I would have benefitted from Erin McShane’s mentorship—remember that a failure reflects on the technique chosen, not on you.
There was no time for me to indulge my own shame. If I were to wallow in my misery, I would never rectify what had happened. I had to put away my mortification, close it up in a box, and work forward. My commander scheduled me for a follow-up check ride with an instructor pilot in another company. The flight came with the same weather challenges, but none of the anxiety, of the first. I transmuted the significantly higher stakes of the second check ride into sheer determination to succeed. (Had I failed this check ride, I would have been grounded.) Our flight was textbook. I kept altitude in the fluctuating air temperatures and landed with a restored sense of accomplishment. During my first check ride, I failed to compartmentalize anxiety unrelated to the task at hand. During the second ride, given the stakes, I had no choice but to compartmentalize. I had learned to put unrelated concerns temporarily aside.
The second tactic involves using checklists. In Atul Gawande’s book The Checklist Manifesto, checklists gained the respect all pilots already knew they deserved. Gawande examines examples in aviation and medicine, among other fields, suggesting that in some cases the work has become so technically complex that checklists are necessary to reduce error based on incompetence.
“The volume and complexity of what we know has exceeded our individual ability to deliver its benefits correctly, safely, or reliably,” writes Gawande.11
The key aspects of preparing a plane for flight are subject to detailed checklists, which pilots are required to follow to reduce the probability of error. No matter how well I knew—or had memorized—the preflight or run-up procedure, I followed the checklist. All pilots did. And while a checklist may seem like overkill in the office, it can be helpful. There’s a reason they’re considered a best practice in high-risk operational settings, as they give you guidance, ensure you don’t miss anything, and perhaps most important, reduce cognitive load, freeing up mind space for other concerns.
Aviators have protocols for everything in flight, too. While not technically checklists, these protocols are specific and detailed, and every bit as important. Our most important in the Apache—where we were seated in tandem, unable to look over at one another—was the three-way positive transfer of controls.
“You have the controls,” my backseater would say to me, indicating that I was in charge of piloting the aircraft.
“I have the controls,” I would confirm.
“You have the controls,” he would answer.
That three-part communication was required every time.
Another kind of prescribed action helps to focus you on the task at hand and connect you to purpose, both of which are aspects of self-regulation. That action is ritual. There are two different kinds of rituals that help with self-regulation. The first is the daily ritual, and the second is the ritual of a given experience. Pilots can be superstitious about rituals. When I was flying cross-country with a new backseater once, he shared his own superstition: on every flight, he had a pencil in one pocket, always the same pocket, and a pen in the other, also always the same. He spent time justifying his ritual to me, as though expecting I would—and should—adopt it myself.
I’d adopted my own rituals in earlier adventures. After attending the Army’s Airborne School following my freshman year of college, I had trained as a skydiver, earning my advanced license after more than a hundred jumps. From my very first jump, I had my ritual for every flight to altitude. A few minutes before the door opened, I’d ask a fellow jumper to check my equipment. This was both a visual and a physical comfort, seeing and feeling a colleague’s hands passing over the lanyard to the drogue chute to be sure it wasn’t twisted or in any way encumbered, checking the release pin on the reserve. After this check, I closed my eyes, said the Lord’s Prayer, and prayed for the people I loved. When the door opened, I was ready to jump.
It turns out that there is plenty of both social science and brain science supporting the importance of rituals. Francesca Gino and Michael Norton, behavioral scientists and professors at Harvard Business School, looked at the use of rituals by everyone from high-performing athletes to those experiencing grief, and found such use associated with greater confidence and reduced anxiety. “In one recent experiment,” Gino and Norton write in Scientific American,
people received either a “lucky golf ball” or an ordinary golf ball, and then performed a golf task; in another, people performed a motor dexterity task and were either asked to simply start the game or heard the researcher say “I’ll cross fingers for you” before starting the game. The superstitious rituals enhanced people’s confidence in their abilities, motivated greater effort—and improved subsequent performance. These findings are consistent with research in sport psychology demonstrating the performance benefits of preperformance routines, from improving attention and execution to increasing emotional stability and confidence.12
Rituals of experience connect you to core purpose, as the military knows well. The commissioning oath is laden with both the weight of words and of tradition, a public ritual involving raising your right hand and pledging to fulfill certain duties and loyalties. The gravity of this public statement, made in a formal way, in a formal environment, cannot help but impress itself on your psyche. Parades, promotion and retirement ceremonies, and other events are also carefully scripted and rehearsed. These rituals connect you repeatedly to your pledge, your adopted purpose. They are comforting in their rootedness in history, in their power and repetition. Rituals serve the need to do something concrete and prescribed in the face of the unknown. Taken together, these techniques support your ability to get through the hardest times with grit.
Staying Focused over the Long Term
Grit can propel you to seek out challenging opportunities and help you get through finite and specific difficult circumstances. But perhaps the toughest challenges are those that require grit and mental resilience over the long haul.
Sara Faulkner made it through the sustained physical and psychological difficulties of the Coast Guard’s notorious rescue-swimmer training—a crucible I’ll share more about in chapter 6—but it was the career-long struggle in a climate of weak leadership and hostile environments that almost broke her.
“I was sexually harassed in my first unit by the shop supervisor,” she says. “I didn’t do anything about it. The shop supervisor was a ‘cool guy,’ and people liked him, but everyone started to get uncomfortable [with his behavior toward me].” While Faulkner tried to take it in stride, “After a year, I filed a complaint.”
After she filed her complaint, things got worse.
“The command made my life a living hell,” she says. It got so bad that this competitive fighter of a swimmer, who had trained for decades to exceed expectations and stay strong in the face of adversity, almost didn’t come into work one day. Finally, she filed charges.
When the assaulter was arrested, the reprisals she endured were worse than the assault.
“My own command tried to get me kicked out of the Coast Guard. I was sent against my will to a Navy hospital to be analyzed at a psych ward, and then to my district admiral who tried to bribe me. He told me if I dropped my complaint, he’d reassign me, but was going to send me to a unit without rescue swimmers.”
The scare tactics didn’t work.
“I said no. I think he was shocked,” Faulkner recalls. She persevered through sustained difficulty by reconnecting to her story and her core purpose. “I was a rescue swimmer. That’s where I wanted to work.” She went back to her unit.
After a later assignment proved similarly challenging, Faulkner almost left the Coast Guard. “Then another command master chief who came from another aviation specialty talked to me and convinced me to stay,” she says.
This master chief said something that helped Faulkner find the perspective that empowered her to keep going. “He told me I was a role model for other women.”
Faulkner shares this story a year after her Coast Guard retirement, with a voice that sounds hopeful that her example might encourage others.
“At every single station I have had to fight to be treated equally,” Faulkner says, with noticeable emotion.
“I wouldn’t want a daughter of mine to go through what I did,” she says. “I’d tell anyone who wants it: You go, girl, but watch out.”
Faulkner’s experiences are, unfortunately, far from unique. Many of the leaders I interviewed for this project suffered assaults and worse. Most experienced what are now referred to as “micro-aggressions,” resulting in the exhausting and relentless degradation of a person in an environment not accepting of someone for reasons over which that person has no control. The direct physical assaults have negative short-term and long-term consequences, and the microaggressions do too. This kind of environment consumes enormous amounts of energy and can be a distraction of staggering proportion. Faulkner lived it, and she was not alone.
What I remember about enduring years of microaggressions in the military is how much physical energy it took to stay focused and not be pulled into the morass of negativity. It’s easier to be negative than not, and it takes consistent and dedicated commitment to move ahead and not be pulled down. I remember at Fort Bragg going home with a great feeling one day, having flown a successful mission and feeling a momentary hint of the camaraderie I’d craved during most of my years in uniform. That night I relaxed at home alone, which for me often meant making a simple dinner and watching Law and Order reruns on TNT.
At 9:00 p.m., two warrant officers called me. They were clearly out drinking, and they wanted to come by my condo. Neither had been there before. In fact, there was no reason for them to know where I lived. They were insistent, and I was as insistent that they were not welcome. But I was shaken. I locked my doors, turned out the lights. It was a reminder, like so many others, that I was not a part of the team, as I’d just that afternoon allowed myself to imagine I was. I’m not sure whether I was more afraid for my physical safety or more broken by the clear indicator of how I was considered—as a target for untoward advances. After the fear came sheer exhaustion. Experiences like this were not isolated, and happened at random. I had to keep my guard up at all times. What did I do about it? I walked up those hangar steps the next day into my office as though nothing had happened, and I focused on the next task ahead.
While this particular kind of microaggression was more a part of my military time, the drain of negativity it produced isn’t unique to the military. When I was nineteen and climbing Denali, one team member complained continuously. The physical challenge of climbing Denali was greater than anything I’d ever experienced (or have experienced since), by orders of magnitude. This team member’s negativity was toxic and draining.
I remember forcing myself to smile and make positive comments. According to our team journal, written by that same gloomy team member, I was annoying in my overuse of the word awesome. I have no doubt that his perspective was true. He did not summit, but turned back due to headaches. I don’t know if physically he might have had a chance to make it, but I am certain that his fatalism did nothing to help him (or others) in a pursuit that required every ounce of his being.
Everyone who encounters a hostile work environment inevitably comes to a point where she has to ask herself if it is worth it to continue. Does it make sense to spend so much energy on combating environments where leadership does not support your efforts, or at least does not take steps to counter the forces that are buffeting you, or where team members themselves are toxic? Only you can answer that question in a given situation. If you don’t have a resilient mindset, adversity causes only misery. Optimism, mental agility, and self-regulation are what help you transcend, or at least move through, adversity.
One thing I believe as much as any other is that success is possible only with optimism, and that the world needs more realistic optimists. There are a million reasons you can’t do something. You have to focus on the reasons you can.
Choosing to focus on the positive, on what you can control, and on taking action comes naturally for some, and through hard-earned experience for others. Leaders know they must consciously cultivate the mindset that helps you move forward, growing as you do. Flight planning, checklists, and rituals will help.
Hunting the Good Stuff
This exercise, taken from the Army’s Master Resilience Training, mirrors what you may have heard of as gratitude journaling. It is specifically intended to help you develop a more positive or optimistic mindset, and it is something you can do every day to build the mindset needed for grit.
1.Each day, record in a notebook three good things that happened that day.
2.Then, next to each positive event, write a reflection about one or more of the following topics:
– Why did this good thing happen?
– What does this good thing mean to you?
– What can you do tomorrow to enable more of this good thing?
– What ways do you or others contribute to this good thing?
Reframing a Problem
Walk yourself through the process of thinking agilely by using some of the sentence starters in the section on building mental agility.
1.Think of a situation that is causing you difficulty or stress.
2.Choose at least two of the three sentence starters, and answer them in your journal.
3.Then ask someone from your dream team to feed you the same sentence starters, and talk out your answers. Notice whether one process revealed more or different insight than the other.
The Army’s Master Resilience Training says that “Managing energy is essential to optimal performance. Deliberate breathing is a tool used to gain control of your physical state, bring your focus to the present moment, and prepare you to perform more optimally.”
To practice deliberate breathing:
•Think of something in your life that causes stress.
•Practice rhythmic breathing, breathing in for the same counts as you breathe out, for five to ten breath cycles.
•After completing those breath cycles, write notes on your thoughts, emotions, and physical reactions. How many counts did you use to breathe in and out? How did you feel? What did you think? How could you bring yourself to a place of greater focus?
Changing Thinking Patterns
To avoid thinking traps and find new approaches to a current stressful situation, think through your answers to each of the following questions:
1.What is the evidence for and against my thoughts?
2.Did I express myself? Did I ask for information?
3.How did others and/or circumstances contribute?
4.How did I contribute?
5.What is changeable? What can I control?
6.What is the specific behavior that explains the situation? What specific area of my life will be affected?