Courage and Resilience: The Superpowers of Leadership [Video]

Tony Stein was a World War II veteran who fought the Battle of Iwo Jima. What’s amazing about Tony Stein is he was the first Medal of Honor winner in that battle. When his group invaded the island on behalf of the US military, Tony Stein ran across the beach. He fought against the Japanese. He was being shot at from multiple places. When he ran out of ammunition, he put his gun down, he took his boots off, he picked up a wounded soldier, and he took him back to the beach, got more ammunition, and went back into the fight. And he did it eight different times.

But you know what? It’s not only people like Tony Stein. Bethany Hamilton, a 13-year-old surfer in Hawaii was attacked by a 14-foot great white shark that ultimately resulted in the loss of her arm. And yet one month later, she ended up saying, I want to go back in the water. I want to surf again.

Even more recently was the flooding that took place in Texas in July 2025 that resulted in the loss of many lives of young people. And yet in one of those camps that was inundated with water, two teenage camp counselors instantly jumped into action, took a number of children, and push them up into the rafters in order to save their lives with no one telling them what to do. That is what I call the superpower of leadership: courage and resilience.

Something Is Different Today

Yet, something seems to be different in society today. We are hearing from multiple clients and organizations, from all different backgrounds, sizes, and types of work and services, that some of their younger leaders and managers are not manifesting that superpower of courage and resilience.

• 77% of young adults do not qualify for military service without a waiver.

• The demographic with the lowest resilience is those aged 18 to 23.

• Only 37% of full-time employees have high resilience.

• 44% of employees feel burned out from their work and only 40% often feel fulfilled.

• And about one-third of people start looking for a new job soon after starting.

What’s also interesting is that superpower of courage and resilience is really not that super. It doesn’t mean that people never feel like quitting. It doesn’t mean that they never feel anxious or fearful. It just means that even when they’re facing those challenges, they are willing to step up and take action while they’re facing things that could cause any normal person a lot of fear.

5 Ways to Build Courage and Resilience in Your Team

What I’d like to share with you today are five ways you can build courage and resilience into your organization and into your teams.

1. Pick team members carefully

It’s best to start by hiring people who already have shown some of the signs of courage and resilience. Is there evidence of self-confidence and optimism? For example, when you find people who come from a military background or have played competitive athletics, or people who haven’t quit or jumped around often in their jobs, those are examples of people with resilience. People who have finished what they started, including their education. All of that matters because it’s easier to start with someone who has resilience than to try to build it into them later.

2. Remember, stress, adversity, and fear are normal parts of life.

Dr. Yulia Chentsova Dutton, a professor of emotions at Georgetown University said this, “Emotions are highly reactive to our attention to them. Certain kinds of attention to emotions, focus on emotions, can increase emotional distress.”

We live at a time where we try to get people to talk about their emotions as though that’s always positive. And when they face duress, challenges, and trauma, we believe that the solution is to talk through it. While that may be true for some, as Dr. Dutton said, it’s not the primary solution in every case.

3. Remind yourself that you are stronger than you think.

When hard times hit, we often believe that we are going to cave in, we are going to lose that stamina, and we are going to lose the ability to stand strong. In today’s culture, we like to attach that trauma language to every challenge that we experience. Trauma is a very real thing in the lives of many people, and I in no way want to discount that.

But Dr. George Bonanno, a professor of psychology at Columbia University, found an interesting thing when he researched trauma and how people respond to it. He found that the majority of people are very resilient even when they experience the most significant, horrific traumas of life, and that within a year or two, they are back to living a reasonably normal life. Sometimes we make it as though people who experience terrible trauma can never get back to living a normal life.

He also said that it’s as though we are hardwired to be resilient. And you know what? We really are.

4. Learn from and be inspired by others who model courage and resilience

One of the ways you can learn from others who model courage and resilience is by reading good biographies that tell the stories of people who’ve been through tough times and yet they came out the other end of that difficult challenge standing.

Another is to watch really good movies, read good novels, and even talk to people in your own life because everyone knows someone who has gone through very difficult circumstances and ended up coming through it and sometimes even thriving through it.

5. Change the chatter in your brain.

Courage and resilience are sometimes built by changing the chatter in our brains. In the book Chatter, Dr. Ethan Cross writes that our brains talk to ourselves at about 4,000 words a minute. But we talk to other people at about 140 words per minute. So, if the story that’s playing within our brains gets out of control, it can start to breed very negative self-talk. It can create a script that can hold us back from being courageous and resilient. Nick Foles, one of the quarterbacks for the Philadelphia Eagles during one of the Super Bowl wins, said this in his biography: he said you know there are times when I go out there and I am just not playing well. And in my head, I am saying, man, you are stinking it up on that field. But then sometimes I have to stop and say to myself, you know what? I just need to go out there, sling the ball and have some fun.

What Nick Foles was practicing was changing a negative narrative in his brain to a more constructive positive one. You replace negativity with a more positive view of reality. That is exactly what happens when you take your thoughts captive and think differently. Resilient and courageous people capture those 4,000 words that are going per minute and guide them towards a more constructive outcome.

Steps to Build Courage & Resilience

To review, you can build courage and resilience into your own life but also into the lives of people on your team and the people around you:

1.      Pick your team members carefully.

2.      Remember, stress, adversity, and fear are a normal part of leadership.

3.      Remind yourself that you are stronger than you think.

4.      Learn from and be inspired by others.

5.      Change the chatter in your brain.

I encourage you to take this list and identify a couple of areas to start practicing in your own life. Perhaps even talk through them with your team members about how you can encourage one another towards those superpowers. But whatever you do, remember you are capable of those superpowers of courage and resilience in your life and leadership.

Contact us to learn how our experienced coaches can help you increase courage and resilience in your leadership and your team.

Jay Desko is the President & CEO of The Center Consulting Group and brings experience in the areas of organizational assessment, leadership coaching, decision-making, and strategic questioning. Jay’s degrees include an M.Ed. in Instructional Systems Design from Pennsylvania State University and a Ph.D. in Organizational Behavior and Leadership from The Union Institute.

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