How great leaders develop their grit | Nancy Koehn on building resilience

[Music] My new book, 10 years in the making, is called "Forged in Crisis: The Power of Courageous Leadership in Turbulent Times." It spotlights five astounding, really legendary leaders who found themselves each in the midst of a great crisis, and how, in the midst of that crisis, they made themselves capable of doing impossible things.

So, it's really a book about how ordinary people can make themselves capable of doing extraordinary things. Each of the five people in this book—Antarctic Explorer Ernest Shackleton, American President Abraham Lincoln, the escaped slave and abolitionist Frederick Douglass, the Nazi-resisting Lutheran Minister Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and the environmental activist and crusader Rachel Carson—discover that resilience is absolutely critical to accomplishing their mission.

We like to think, or many of us like to think—I certainly thought this before I really got to know these people—that resilience was something I was born with. I had a healthy slog of it; I would access and use it, and then that would serve me well when I needed it, even though I couldn't be exactly sure when that would be.

But I don't think that's the case. These stories teach us that each of these people worked on their own resilience. They discovered some in themselves. Shackleton finds his ship trapped in the ice, drifting hopelessly like a board stuck in a vise along the currents off the coast of Antarctica in early 1915. He's powerless to do anything about it. After lots and lots of trying, he can't pry the ship loose, and so somehow he's got to find it himself.

Anyway, we can read about his efforts to do this in the diary. The reserves he needs—he says, "I pray to God I can shape my mark to a new mark now that the old goal, now that the old mark has run aground." His old goal of crossing the Antarctic is now over, so he's got to shape himself to the mark of saving his men. And he's like, "Pray God I can do that for myself."

So, he starts off with, "I'm gonna try and do this. I've got to have that covenant with myself to get better and stronger in this moment." And then, interestingly—and this is true throughout these stories in different contexts and different times—a moment arises that demands more resilience.

A mutiny is threatened by his men, and he knows from Antarctic history that mutiny and despair and discord and alienation among the men on a particular expedition can kill an expedition just as quickly, just as surely, as running out of food or cold temperatures or scurvy. So, a mutiny threatens to erupt, and Shackleton has to, in a sense, move into the fear.

He takes one step into the fear of dealing with the head mutineer, holds it together, and then stays resilient enough to get through that moment and then to learn from it. He can do all kinds of proactive things to prevent mutiny from rising up and threatening the expedition again.

One of the interesting things that all five of these people learn as they develop what I would call—and I'm not the first person to use this term—the muscles of resilience, the muscles of endurance, one’s stores of grit. One of the things he discovers is that the way you can access that and then make it stronger is actually in the moment of a crisis.

In the moment of sudden confusion or volatility, you take the first step into the anxiety and the fear that all of us, including the leader, have within themselves. It doesn't have to be a big step; you're not leaving a building at all. You don't have a superhuman cape or a wand or Gandalf's magic from "Lord of the Rings."

You do have the ability to take one small step into that and literally confront, in the case of Shackleton, confront his carpenter, Chippy McNeish, who was threatening to mutiny, and figure out in that moment, in that encounter, that confrontation how to quell both the mutineer’s protests and anger and at the same time cordon him off so that he cannot spread the contagion of mutiny immediately among other team members.

So, the first step of honing and strengthening our resilience muscles is to take the first step into the fear, into the unknown, into the uncertainty. And it's just a small step. The wonderful thing about charting the stories, as I do, is the growth—the making over time of leaders.

You learn that each of these people, from Frederick Douglass to Dietrich Bonhoeffer to Abraham Lincoln, get more resilient and a little bit quicker about stepping into the fear and a little more brave about stepping into the fear with each step that they take.

So, you take the step. Shackleton took the step with the mutiny ship's carpenter, and then four months later, when another moment arises that's really frightening and the men again are really worried, threatening to peel off in the pockets of fear, he actually has quicker access to his resilience because he knows he got through one moment of it before—on and on and on.

So, it's creative—it's about the mileage of moving into our fear just with a tiny step, tightening our core, squaring our shoulders, moving into it, and then getting more access to our inner strength, getting more access to our resilience.

So, resilience is absolutely critical, and yet I am absolutely certain that it doesn't come from on high. We can't download it on our iPhones, but we can discover it within ourselves and develop it within ourselves and find it stronger and easier to access each time as we move forward. [Music]