Resilience is a quality that springs from adversity and the challenges that one must overcome in life. As practiced by executives like Jeffrey Kallister, it is not a curated quality that one sees featured on social media. Rather, it involves showing up for work when the odds are stacked against, and persevering. It’s not as simple as bouncing back; it has a quality of “rising differently,” learning from past mistakes and finding ways to forge a new path, channeling tragic experience toward positive ends.
Take a parent who has just lost their child in an accident. Many would give up on life, dwelling on sadness and the memory of what could have been. After all, the brain is hardwired to cling to pain, remembering vividly every loss and betrayal. And yet, the mere act of showing up every day, holding to commitments and working toward personal healing in whatever form it takes, rewires the brain. At some point, the parent who thought they could not survive their ordeal becomes someone who can counsel others who have lost a loved one, paying the loss back full-circle, creating new pathways forward.
Sometimes, acts of resilience even save lives. Take the story of Khaled, a White Helmet first responder and member of Syria’s civil defense team. On July 11, 2014, amid a brutal civil war involving relentless bombing of Aleppo, he was part of a team that arrived on the scene after a barrel bomb flattened several buildings. After he had helped pull multiple families out of debris, a mother came to Khaled, frantic to find her two-week-old baby. Instead of dismissing further search as a lost cause, he listened closely to the rubble, ear to the concrete. Finally, he heard a faint but distinct sound of life. Employing car jacks as basic tools, he was successful in retrieving the baby unharmed. In this case, resilience involved never giving up. Once a potentially human sound was heard, Khaled moved heaven and earth to find the source and enact a rescue.
One of the most famous stories of resilience centers on Sir Ernest Shackleton, who, in 1914, embarked on an ambitious mission to lead the first group of explorers across the Antarctic continent. His expedition hit a snag when their ship, the Endurance, got trapped in Weddell Sea pack ice in January 1915. It would remain so for more than 10 months. As one crew member described it, the ship was “frozen like an almond in the middle of a chocolate bar.” The shifting forces of the ice eventually ripped the hull apart, causing the Endurance to begin to sink.
Stranded on drifting ice, Shackleton had the seemingly impossible task of getting 27 crew members and himself to safety in a hostile and unexplored environment. One key to their survival involved a positive attitude and refusing to give in. At the same time, he quickly shifted the goal from crossing the continent to simply getting out by whatever means necessary.
At first, the plan involved marching on ice moving in the direction of land, but instead, practicing patience, the crew camped on the floe and waited until the ice drifted north. Finally, on April 7, 1916, Clarence and Elephant Island peaks appeared on the horizon. Two days later, the ice cracked, freeing crew members to launch smaller boat on the open sea. Across six treacherous days, the men battled freezing spray, wracked by seasickness and dysentery. They rowed on, and on April 15, reached Elephant Island. However, they were on a small, uninhabited rock. After nine days, Shackleton and several others set out once again in a single lifeboat, determined to reach a South Georgia Island whaling station some 800 miles distant.
Across 16 days, the men battled massive waves to get there. Unfortunately, they arrived on the wrong side of the island, and Shackleton and three others had to climb uncharted mountainous terrain to arrive at the station. Even then, the ice pack repeatedly beat back attempts by the government of Uruguay to send a vessel to the rescue. Finally, on August 30, 1916, as the men on Elephant Island sat down to a meal of boiled seal backbone, they spied the rescue ship, the Chilean vessel Yelcho, plying the waves with Shackleton and the others aboard. All 28 were rescued. Through patience, resilience, determination, and faith, everyone had lived through one of the most trying sagas in recorded history. They had also provided a template for perseverance that professionals such as Jeffrey Kallister can take inspiration from.
