Building Grit, Part IV: Resilience
Jan-Benedict Steenkamp
Massey Distinguished Professor | Incoming Editor in Chief Journal of Marketing | Award-winning author | Top 0.02% scientist worldwide | Creator of the 4-factor Grit Scale
Resilience is the greatest obstacle to building grit. Seven-out-of-ten of my EMBA students score below the cutoff on resilience. (Curious about your score? Do my grit test online.) Resilience is the ability to rebound from setbacks, to weather criticism, to pick up your pieces and go on.
A person whose resilience was legendary was the 17th-century queen Njinga of Ndongo-Matamba (Angola). I discuss her life in my upcoming book Warrior, Queen, Scientist, Activist: Gritty Women Who Bent the Arc of History.
Time and again, Njinga was defeated by Portuguese colonial invaders, and time and again, she recovered and tried something new, from wielding the axe in battle to becoming an Imbangala and drink human blood, to allying with the Dutch, to presenting herself as a faithful daughter of the Catholic Church to obtain the protection of the Vatican. Time and again, she failed until she finally succeeded and her kingdom remained independent for two centuries. Few of us have Queen Njinga's resilience but fortunately, we don't need her sky-high resilience to have ample grit. In this article, I will talk about sworn enemies of resilience, and then how you can consciously set out to improve your resilience.
Sworn enemies of resilience
#1. Catastrophic thinking
You failed and now believe your life is over. You believe that everybody else has seen your failure and that you have lost face. Be encouraged! Other people's lives are not all about you. It is about themselves. They may not even have noticed that you failed--or may not care.
#2. Unrealistic expectations
Be ambitious, be optimistic. Those are great qualities. But also be realistic. If you are overly optimistic in what you want achieve in life, in your career, in whatever endeavor, you set yourself up for failure. The economists Kahneman and Tversky have identified the principle that losses loom larger than gains (called prospect theory, for which the Nobel Prize in Economics was awarded). Explained simply, most people are more hurt if they lose $10,000 than that they are happy when they win $10,000. That, incidentally, is a key reason why failure is so hard.
#3. Lack of control over your negative emotions
Criticism, setbacks are pleasant, pure and simple. Say in your job performance review your supervisor tells you nine things you did well and one thing you did not do well. Which of these ten things will you still remember after a week? Exactly. Criticism generates (extreme) negative emotions, and they can easily overwhelm you. Backing off is a familiar coping mechanism.
Take a few seconds--which of these sworn enemies of resilience is your worst enemy?
Strategies to build your resilience
#1. Take care of yourself physically and mentally#2. Start a program of slowly, and repeatedly exposing yourself to something that scares
There is a wealth of research that has documented that resilience improves if you take care of yourself. Work out regularly. Get enough sleep. For many people, 7 hours is not enough! (Not for me either.) Meditate or pray regularly, whatever is your thing. This is low hanging fruit. Just do it!
Recommended by LinkedIn
#2. Expose yourself to something that scares you and gradually increase the intensity
You can build resilience in general by choosing anything that scares you. For example, I am afraid of heights. For my career, that is particularly important. I am not a paratrooper or a firefighter. Yet, I used this fear as a way to build a little resilience. I rode increasingly daring roller coasters until I even jumped out of a plane which was several miles up in the air. If there is an issue in your line of work that scares you, you can focus your efforts on that. There are professors who are actually afraid of public speaking. It creates terrible anxiety. Your resilience program should focus on gradually increasing the stakes, from a small group to ever larger groups.
#3. Change how you see failure
Failure is never pleasant but it is part of life. But it tells us something. It is feedback from the world. You did something that for whatever reason did not work out. Can you do it better, different next time? Persistence trumps everything; success comes often only after multiple failures. Great inventors, sportsmen and others often succeed after many, many failures. A personal story to add to this. I once submitted an article on relations between manufacturers and resellers to a top business journal. It was rejected. On to another one. Same result. And so on. It was finally accepted after three rounds in the 7th (!) top journal I tried. The article as finally accepted was vastly better than what I originally had written. These previous 6 failures were actually milestones in a process.
#4. Practice controlling (negative) emotions
I have benefited from practicing what Stoics call the dichotomy of control. “Some things are within our power, while others are not. Within our power are judgments, emotions, thoughts, intentions, and actions; in a word, whatever is of our own doing; not within our power are our body, our property, reputation, office, and, in a word, whatever is not of our own doing.”–Epictetus (c. AD 50-135)
That is, separate things that are under your control from things that are not under your control, and do whatever you can about things that are under your control, and to let go of that what is not under your control. It really helps!--although it remains a struggle. Suppose you are being considered for a promotion. Under your control is to have done all the right things at work, have your vita in good order, and prepare well for the interview. What is not under your control is whether the interviewer likes you, what their mood is, and how strong the competition is. So, if you don't get the promotion, Stoic dichotomy of control teaches us that you should not feel bad about it because you did all you could do.
Don't wait practicing it until it is really important--like the promotion. Practice it on other things, such as flying. I fly often with United Airlines. Delays are common, leading to missed flights. One time, my flight from RDU to IAD was delayed, so I'd miss my connecting flight to Amsterdam. I took action ("What is within my power") by rebooking via Toronto with Air Canada. Then, that flight was delayed, more and more. When I arrived at Toronto, I ran to the other gate. In this case, I just made it. But along the way, my anxiety (and distress) was kept reasonably under control by constantly reminding myself about the dichotomy of control. It helped me in that situation, but also built a little resilience in general.
What can you do to build resilience?
This is the fifth article in a series on grit, published exclusively on LinkedIn. Click on the links for other articles:
Jan-Benedict Steenkamp is C. Knox Massey Distinguished Professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he teaches the wildly successful Executive MBA course Leadership Lessons from History. The course is based on his book Time to Lead: Lessons for Today’s Leaders from Bold Decisions that Changed History. His latest book, Warrior, Queen, Scientist, Activist: Gritty Women Who Bent the Arc of History, was published in March 2024 by Xlibris.