Strategy #17: Foster contrarian toughness

When people quit a job, they often cite stress, burnout, fatigue, and discouragement as factors in their decision. In his book The War of Art: Winning the Inner Creative Battle, Steven Pressfield (a former Marine) writes that what makes the Marines so proud is their infinite capacity to be miserable!  Put a Marine in a wet, freezing foxhole without enough food or water and he’s happy, because he knows that he’s one of the few and the proud who can still function at a high level under such circumstances. That is contrarian toughness.

Think about the leaders who historically have inspired the most intense loyalty. I’ll be that you can’t recall a single one who inspired that loyalty by making life easy for followers. In fact, I’ll bet that every single one of them was responsible for leading people through times of incredible difficulty. We think of George Washington at Valley Forge, or Martin Luther King leading marchers through cities in the segregated South; we think of Florence Nightingale leading her small band of nurses through the incredible hardships of those horrid hospitals during the Crimean War, or of FDR reminding us that the only thing we had to fear was fear itself.

Spend much time in any organization’s cafeteria and it won’t be long before you hear somebody complaining about (fill in the blank: the work is too hard, the pay is inadequate, they couldn’t find a parking space right up front, whatever). What if, instead of whining about these little problems (problems that most people in most of the rest of the world would love to have!), people would express their gratitude for the privilege of having meaningful work to do (and actually being paid to do it – and having a car to drive to work to boot).

Raymond Aaron is a very successful entrepreneur in Canada. He likes to say that life is problems: a good life is new and challenging problems; a bad life is the same old problems repeated over and over. We should be thankful for our problems, since problems mean we’re alive!

One of the most important things loyalty leaders do is help people take pride in their toughness, in their ability to tackle difficult problems and knock them off, so that they can graduate to new and more interesting problems – that essence of good life.  How can you instill this sort of mental toughness where you work?

“What is it going to be for you: a positive attitude or a negative attitude?  The choice seems fairly simple, doesn’t it? The problem is that we often forget that we have a choice… You should choose your attitude thoughtfully because it determines how you respond to the many challenges you will encounter.”

Keith Harrell: Attitude is Everything

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