How You Build Resilience for the Long Haul
Publication Date
2020
Publication
Thinkers50
Document Type
Article
Abstract
In our respective roles as a retired 4 Star General, Duke University’s Dean of the Divinity School, and Head of the Coach K Leadership & Ethics Center in its Fuqua School of Business, we reached out to the different leaders in our communities to offer support. Now a month into the national war on COVID-19, we notice a consistent pattern of response from leaders. The adrenaline and optimism that we saw during the first few weeks have been replaced by a fatigue.
Societally, we tend to think about resilience as a bounce back from a momentary failure. It’s framed as something to toughen up about and get over in the short-term – an athlete who won a gold medal after a string of losses, the entrepreneur whose company emerges a unicorn after previous ones tanked. The danger with this construct is when the duration is uncertain, it can result in a hopelessness when we cease to feel the bounce back.
If we are honest with ourselves about the resiliency that’s needed for us in fighting COVID-19, we should be prepared for a resiliency that lasts a season or longer rather than an overnight thunderstorm.
In thinking about enduring resilience, Bob drew on his experience in leading troops through war and long deployments. The U.S. Army builds resilience through its Five Dimensions of Strength: physical, emotional, social, spiritual, and family. He noted that all the dimensions are important, but the spiritual dimension really needed to be cultivated: a sense of a soul that can endure good times as well as bad; a spiritual centeredness in some kind of larger purpose; and the support and connections of a larger team.
During the most challenging times in an intense combat environment, where lives were constantly at risk, the spiritual dimension proved critical to endure and sustain a resilience to move productively forward. As General George C. Marshall noted, “The soldier’s heart, the soldier’s spirit, the soldier’s soul, are everything. Unless the soldier’s soul sustains him, he cannot be relied on and will fail himself and his commander and his country in the end.”
The soulful shape of enduring resilience is about our character: our thinking, feeling, living, and perceiving woven together. It is how we learn to navigate the uncertainties, the turbulence, the anxieties of a war or of a pandemic. The soul isn’t a once-and-for-all thing: it is something we cultivate and nourish; and, like a reservoir, it can become depleted and needs to be replenished.
Here are three ways to think about how you can replenish your soul and build enduring resilience.
Recommended Citation
Jones, Gregory; Brown, Bob; and Siang, Sanyin, "How You Build Resilience for the Long Haul" (2020). Public Intellectual Writing. 67.
https://repository.belmont.edu/gregoryjones_public/67
