Creating Mindful Leaders

Chapter 4Are You Increasing Your Resilience or Decreasing It?

Stand up straight and realize who you are, that you tower over your circumstances.

—Maya Angelou

The key to managing stress is building up your resilience. When we feel like we're constantly under pressure, we tend to fall into a commanding leadership style. A common reaction to stress is to increase the amount of work we do. Being addicted to busyness makes us falsely believe we are productive or working hard. Putting in more hours, sleeping less, and just working through it are fairly common self‐prescriptions. Without the proper time to recover from stress, we're really just working inefficiently, wearing ourselves out, and cutting years off of our lives.

Dr. Liz Stanley, Ph.D., is a friend and security studies expert at Georgetown University with joint appointments in their School of Foreign Service and their Department of Government. Earlier in her career, Liz served as a U.S. army intelligence officer in Asia, Europe, and on deployments to the Balkans. She left the service as a captain. Liz speaks, teaches, and writes widely on a variety of topics related to resilience, decision‐making in stressful environments, civil‐military relations, military effectiveness and innovation, and international security.

Liz is also the creator of Mindfulness‐based Mind Fitness Training (MMFT), which has been tested through ...