Bravely facing professional and personal challenges on your own is difficult. But things turn up a notch when you're responsible for others. When you’re a leader, even a small challenge can seem insurmountable. Add to this a certain leadership stress: those who follow you place hope in witnessing you bounce back from upset. And whether they’re your staff, your colleagues or your children, those people look to witnessing your falling down and getting back up as a source of inspiration.
But what if you don't feel inspiring?
What if you look back on the challenges you’ve faced in life and don’t believe you’ve handled them well? For example, what if you regret often losing control of your emotions? What if you realize you made some bad choices? What if you still feel the sting of having broken down and cried? How then can you be expected to lead others through difficulty?
Well, according to the science, there’s still hope! In fact, here are 5, scientific signs you might actually be a resilient, mentally tough leader, even if you think you’re not:
- You’ve struggled like a champ through a traumatic experience. Many of us have a tendency to feel ashamed about our traumatic experiences. We subconsciously believe bad things made us weaker or we are bad for having experienced them. Yet, researchers from the University of Buffalo have found such feelings don’t make any sense. In actual fact, people who’ve experienced (and survived) trauma are often the toughest among us. Indeed, the scientists found that merely trying to cope with trauma makes us stronger. And, by comparison, people who've never dealt with difficulty often fall apart. The same can be said for people who faced major trauma but gave up and were overcome by it. Thus, even if you feel defeated by some major challenge from your past, your efforts to cope with it produced fruit. Your fighting spirit has likely made you tough as nails. And that could make you well-suited to lead others through adversity.
- You exude hope and optimism. A few years back, researchers from Michigan State conducted one of the first, battlefield, behavioral science studies. When examining soldiers fighting in Iraq during the 2011 war, they found hope and optimism played key roles in building resilience. Specifically, soldiers with greater hope and optimism took stress and trauma better. Battlefield leaders who fostered these qualities also helped their soldiers avoid depression. Bringing such insights back home tells us something powerful. First, it suggests how we face a trauma—before and during its occurrence—could determine how we cope with it afterwards. Holding on to hope and optimism, for example, helps us avoid clinical depression later. Second, hopeful mindsets in facing adversity could make us assets to those we lead. That happens if we get those we lead to focus on positive outcomes and not lose faith in their capacity to prevail.
- You’ve got a best friend and you promote genuine, supportive relationships in people you lead. Intuitively, friendships are important in helping us address professional and personal challenges. We always need a sympathetic shoulder to lean or cry on, or even just a sounding board for our frustrations. Yet, research from the University of Brighton shows friendship quality is important. Getting support and advice from ‘just any’ friend might not be effective. In fact, relying upon the wrong person’s advice could even be harmful. By the opposite token, getting ‘best friend’ advice builds resilience. Best friends not only reduce our stress by their mere existence, they help us bounce back from major let-downs. And the more ‘best friends’ we have during our youth, the better we’ll cope with stress later on in life. So, as a leader, if you foster close relationship-building in your followers, you’ll encourage greater resilience. That's because you're helping your team learn to rely upon others, specifically in addressing adversity—not just in tackling a mean workload.
- You’re compassionate. Many ‘thought leaders’ preach a tough-love approach to resilience. For example, they suggest mental toughness comes by talking tough, thinking tough and gaining a rough exterior. Following such advice, one demands more of one’s self, becomes more self-reliant (which isn’t always a good thing), and demands others do the same. In other words, under such an approach, one potentially over-estimates his coping abilities and exercise less compassion on others. Hardly the stuff of genuine mental toughness or best friendship building! Indeed, this hard-hearted approach is directly refuted by the data. Researchers at the University of Wisconsin, for example, have found spending time cultivating compassion for others makes us much more resilient. By ‘cultivating compassion,’ they mean: in seeing others suffer trauma, one remains calm and withholds judgment. Compassion also means seeking ways to help others that are struggling, or at least thinking positively of their struggle. This, in turn, enables everyone involved to better handle stress. Indeed, this sort of “compassion meditation” is powerful—especially for leaders. Compassionate meditation among leaders fosters “ethical work environments,” and such environments dramatically boost performance.
- You pray and have strong religious faith. Religiosity is hard to measure, but its effects on resilience and mental toughness aren't. Scores of studies show mental toughness is directly and positively related to our beliefs and practices. For example, like hope and optimism mentioned above, having a strong faith builds resilience in the face of major stress. At the same time, certain religious practices, such as prayer and meditation, yield specific benefits. For example, spending 25 minutes a day in meditation dramatically reduces stress. And in a separate study, the same practice improved physiological and immunological markers left by stress and inflammation. Moreover, get this: One neuroscience study found spirituality and religion thicken the brain cortex and, thereby, protect against depression!
Of course, there are many other factors that give rise to great leadership, such as a capacity to make decisions and vision. But, in the face of adversity, those qualities lose strength if the leader lacks mental toughness. Thus, from a behavioral science point of view, the factors that breed mental strength are among the most important in determining leadership potential. Why? Because if you can help yourself get beyond major professional and personal challenges—the science suggests—you’ve got everything it takes to lead others in doing the same.