Hardiness

CHAPTER 8How Hardiness Works to Protect Health and Performance: A Look Under the Hood

“Everything outside doesn’t matter when I’m on the court; it’s just me and nothing else. Family problems, school, what happened to my father, all the stress goes away.”

—Kawhi Leonard (Most Valuable Player on Toronto Raptors 2019 NBA Basketball Championship team)

Hardiness emerged on the scene in the late 1970s, at a time when people were just waking up to the fact that stress could make you sick. The odd thing was, when exposed to the same stressful conditions, people responded differently. Why do some people get sick when under prolonged stress, while others stay healthy? It was this question that led researchers at the University of Chicago to discover the hardiness qualities of commitment, control, and challenge. High stress executives who had these qualities managed to stay healthy, while those who lacked them developed various health problems (Kobasa, 1979).

If hardiness helps you stay healthy under stress, can it also help you perform better? One of the first studies to look into this question also came out of the University of Chicago. Researchers there studied a group of high school basketball players and found that hardiness correlated with the players’ performance throughout the season (Maddi & Hess, 1992). Since then, many studies have confirmed the link between hardiness and superior performance. Here are just a few examples:

• In West Point Army cadets studied over a four-year ...