Their career and life paths might differ, but military veteran Patrick Tower and positive psychology research and practitioner Gloria Park both demonstrated incredible grit and resilience in the most defining moments of their lives.
Tower’s involved leading fellow soldiers through a brutal Afghanistan firefight, losing several of them, including close friends, along the way. The terrifying experience pushed him and his comrades to reveal extraordinary courage and leadership, and Tower was later given the prestigious Star of Military Valour for his actions.
Park’s defining moment was a catastrophic ankle injury at age 16 while training with some of the world’s best figure skaters. The accident instantly shattered her dreams of becoming a professional figure skater and forced her to reevaluate her goals and reframe her prospective career path and life trajectory.
Now both consultants on human performance and leadership, Tower and Park shared advice on how to build resilience and lead in high-pressure situations as guest speakers at Ivey’s Character Leadership and Resilience Conference for HBA1 students. Hosted by the Ian O. Ihnatowycz Institute for Leadership, the conference included a workshop where students were able to observe Nelson Mandela’s character leadership using clips from the movie Invictus, and students also had the opportunity to examine their own character using the Leader Character Insight Assessment. Through the event’s activities, students learned how to cultivate resilience and courage in their everyday lives, empower and support others around them, and identify opportunities in their own leader character development. Here are a few key takeaways.
You’re wired to do hard things
Although we tend to avoid what’s difficult, Park explained how the human heart, mind, and body are built for survival and only by tackling challenges can we see what we’re really made of. Simply reframing situations and goals to make them seem more attainable, or learning ways to reduce the physical effects of stress, can help us maintain composure and confidence in overwhelming circumstances.
“We don’t often understand how the reactions our bodies are having can undermine our sense of confidence in the situations we face in life … We have come to develop this idea that anything that feels yucky isn’t good and that we should move away from these situations,” she said. “Human beings are in fact anti-fragile. We need challenges and setbacks and adversity to grow stronger and learn about our capabilities.”
Battlefield-tested training can apply to the boardroom
Tower saw this firsthand during that unforgettable mission in Afghanistan. He described how young, lower-ranked soldiers with no formal leadership training stepped up in the face of danger and demonstrated extraordinary leadership – risking, and some even losing, their lives that day. He attributes previous coaching and training, particularly experiencing and learning from failures, to their ability to summon the resilience to lead at that critical time. Such training includes mental rehearsals to reduce uncertainty, practicing positive self-talk to shift doubt to determination, visualizing success, and taking the time to debrief after failures and refine your actions so you emerge stronger from them.
Citing how this battlefield-tested training is equally effective in the boardroom, he encouraged the students to adopt the “coach approach” as leaders and seize every opportunity to develop the people around them.
“Those micro-training moments that you take build skills and confidence over time,” he said. “When you create a strong coaching and learning environment within your teams, it gives you an unstoppable team … Your success or failure in a sticky situation depends on the effort you’ve put into building your team beforehand.”
Tower now designs and delivers organizational learning programs and serves as a mentor for Ivey’s Leadership Under Fire course, which offers a semi-military-style training experience to prepare students to lead when the pressure is on. Two students in the audience even shared that they had recently taken the course and described how the experience shaped their approach to leadership.
Embrace your humanity and the power of human connections
During the recent wildfires in California, Park said she heard inspiring stories of how firefighters, first responders, and volunteers worked tirelessly to keep their communities safe. But the stories that resonated most strongly were those of firefighters making time to retrieve family keepsakes or coax a scared family pet to safety – signs they understood the personal impact of the fires and what people would need to rebuild.
Park said showing emotion and compassion for others and trying to understand each person’s unique view of the world will ultimately forge stronger leaders and teams.
“We are stronger together as a species and we are wired to work together … But we as a society are moving away from human connections,” she said. “We’ve all had different life experiences that contribute to the way we see the world. We should be taking steps toward understanding that other person … [Not doing so] is preventing us from growing our capacity to bridge the divide.”
Find your character and let it shine
Tower also emphasized the importance of building connections with the people you serve to create trust, strengthen collaboration, and make others feel valued and enabled to do their best. He encouraged the students to strive for “human-focused leadership” and embody the best qualities of strong character, such as humanity, humility, and justice.
“Leadership isn’t about rank, position, or expertise, it’s about character – the kind that shines when no one is watching. It’s about caring deeply for your people, trusting them to rise to the occasion, and empowering them to lead alongside you,” he said. “When you lead from a place of love and caring … it creates a bond that can withstand even the most challenging moments … In those moments when it feels impossible … your character is what will make the difference.”
Watch the videos with Gloria Park and Patrick Tower above.
