Better Humans, Better Performance: Driving Leadership, Teamwork, and Culture with Intentionality

RESILIENCE

We don’t rise to the level of our expectations; we fall to the level of our training.¹

—ARCHILOCHUS

Taking Archilochus’s, the Greek poet’s, wisdom to heart, the military adopted this credo to train personnel for resilience to perform well under adverse conditions. Under pressure, people default to their training, so trainers repeat the same exercises again and again, until the desired behavior is a habit or second nature.

Whether people volunteered to be put in harm’s way or harm found them, we all need to recover, persist, and even thrive in the face of adversity. For these reasons, resilience is among the greatest moral quests of ...