listening for the good

Stephen: First I want to talk about—you have issued another beautiful book inspired by your late mother. It's called Just Shine!. One of the things I understand she says is, you don't know what's going on with someone else. You may disagree with them.

Justice Sotomayor: You have to ask them.

Stephen: Does that come in handy in your job?

Justice Sotomayor: A lot. But she showed me something else, which is you can't really judge people by their opinions because you may differ in them. You may not like what people do. One of my favorite stories—she had a friend who talked nonstop. How many of you have those kinds of friends? I bet a lot of you. They walk in, they never stop talking. My brother and I would scurry out of the room as fast as we could. My brother would probably go out to play basketball. I would go hide in my room and read. My mother would sit there and just listen.

One day after this woman had left, I looked at her and said, "How do you have that patience?" And she said, "Sonia, it can be frustrating moments, but I always remember that she really has such a wonderful heart. When I've been sick, she comes over and she's the first one to bring me food. If I am stuck not having a ride somewhere"—so she didn't drive at the time—"I call her up and she offers before I say anything. Not everybody does that."

She taught me to look for the best in people. That was the lesson that moment gave me, and it's one I look for in my colleagues, you know. I don't agree with them much—at least not with the majority—and they can be really frustrating. And there are moments when I want to scurry out of the room. But I don't. And what I look for to maintain our collegiality is the good in them. My mother was right—there is good in almost everyone. I say "almost everyone" because I was a prosecutor, and there are some evil people.

Sotomayor, Sonia. Interview by Stephen Colbert. The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. YouTube, uploaded by The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, 10 Sept. 2025, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xKSzq4keAx8.

塞翁失馬 or Sāi Wēng lost his horse

Sāi Wēng lived on the border and he raised horses for a living. One day, he lost one of his prized horses. After hearing of the misfortune, his neighbor felt sorry for him and came to comfort him. But Sāi Wēng simply asked, “How could we know it is not a good thing for me?”

After a while, the lost horse returned and with another beautiful horse. The neighbor came over again and congratulated Sāi Wēng on his good fortune. But Sāi Wēng simply asked, “How could we know it is not a bad thing for me?”

One day, his son went out for a ride with the new horse. He was violently thrown from the horse and broke his leg. The neighbors once again expressed their condolences to Sāi Wēng, but Sāi Wēng simply said, “How could we know it is not a good thing for me?” 

One year later, the Emperor’s army arrived at the village to recruit all able-bodied men to fight in the war. Because of his injury, Sāi Wēng’s son could not go off to war, and was spared from certain death.

Qiu Gui Su

The Chinese Proverb of 'Sai Weng Lost His Horse': The Changing Winds of Luck and Good Fortune. ThoughtCo. February 10, 2019

the world needs your spark

The world needs your spark. The world needs your energy. The world needs you to show up for your life and take hold of your potential! We need your ideas. We need your love and care. We need your passion. We need your business models. We need to celebrate your successes. We need to watch you rise back up after your failures. We need to see your courage. We need to hear your what if. We need you to stop apologizing for being who you are and become who you were meant to be.

Rachel Hollis

Girl, Stop Apologizing: A Shame-Free Plan for Embracing and Achieving Your Goals. HarperCollins Leadership. 2019. As found in 2022 Great Quotes From Great Leaders Boxed Calendar: 365 Inspirational Quotes From Leaders Who Shaped the World. 

the stockdale paradox

Admiral James Stockdale, a pilot whose plane was shot down over Vietnam in 1965… observed that the POWs who broke the fastest were those who deluded themselves about the severity of their ordeal. They imagined that they would be freed next week, or next month, or by Christmas. But he lasted unbroken for seven and a half years because, in part, he refused to lie to himself.

Here’s how he explained the Stockdale Paradox: “You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end – which you can never afford to lose – with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.”

Resilience: Hard-won Wisdom for Living a Better Life by Eric Greitens. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. 2015. p.30

great calamity

What happens to us becomes part of us. Resilient people do not bounce back from hard experiences; they find healthy ways to integrate them into their lives.

In time, people find that great calamity met with great spirit can create great strength.

Resilience: Hard-won Wisdom for Living a Better Life by Eric Greitens. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. 2015. p.23

the virtue of resilience

Resilience is the virtue that enables people to move through hardship and become better. No one escapes pain, fear, and suffering. Yet from pain can come wisdom, from fear can come courage, from suffering can come strength – if we have the virtue of resilience. 

Resilience: Hard-won Wisdom for Living a Better Life by Eric Greitens. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. 2015. p.3

resilience like a muscle

There is an inherent fallacy in the way people view resilience, believing it to be a trait rather than a skill. Thus, people operate under the false mantra that “you either have it or you don’t.”

The truth is that resiliency is much like a muscle — over time it grows stronger through effective leadership. That’s not to say a workforce constantly exposed to adversity will eventually become more resilient. Rather, leadership needs to create a culture where hardships can also be seen as an opportunity to evolve both the individual and the organization.

Resilience can also be misinterpreted as overconfidence. People who are resilient are often seen as tough, self-reliant, and unaffected by the same stresses and negative emotions others might face. This can lead others to believe that resilient individuals don’t need any help. Not only does this stifle collaboration, but it can have a negative effect on the mental wellbeing of resilient individuals.

It’s important that leadership understands how these misconceptions can be detrimental to their organization. Furthermore, leadership has to realize that there is no one-size-fits-all solution to building resilience in the workplace. Rather, it requires a robust strategy.

"5 Ways to Build Resilience in the Workplace" FTI Journal. October 2020

resiliency

Over the past decade, the pace of change and the growing complexity of the business environment has increased dramatically. Leaders often find themselves overworked and overwhelmed in response to these challenges. Building up their resilience is an essential skill set. Resilient leaders are able to manage personal and organizational anxiety effectively and exude calm and confidence.

Irvine Nugent, Sonos Leadership
"13 Leadership Skills You Didn't Need A Decade Ago That Are Now Essential." Forbes. December 13, 2016

never give up

Mike Tyson said, “Everyone has a strategy until they get punched in the nose.” I know we can get better. Leadership is a deep journey into yourself. How fast can you learn? How much can you change? What do you want to give? What will you put up with?

Jeff Immelt

"'Keep a lot of thoughts to yourself,' and other wisdom from Jeff Immelt on his last day as CEO of GE" Business Insider. 8/10/2017

perceived control

Everyone knows it’s important to keep employees in the loop, however, few employers are very good at this.

If you’re serious about keeping employee morale high and building organizational resilience, you need to shift this idea from “know it” to “act on it.” The more employees know what’s going on, the less time and energy they spend wondering — and worrying — about what they don’t know.

Research on stress and control shows that when we know what is going to happen — even if it’s bad — we feel less stressed than when we are faced with the unknown. Psychologists call this phenomenon “Perceived Control” because even though they don’t technically have control, knowing what’s going to happen creates a sense of control.

So, find out where employees feel left in the dark and how best to keep them in the know.

David Lee

"How To Build A Resilient, Stress-Resistant Workforce" TLNT 2/24/2014

find your inner grist

Today, most assume that Xbox was somehow destined to be a winner, but having been Microsoft’s chief Xbox officer, I am here to report that its early years were much more like a ship on the rocks than a sloop cutting through the waves.... As I reflect on surviving the near-death Xbox experience, which we turned around using a strategy process called the 3P Framework to create Xbox 360... I would humbly suggest the following...

Find your inner grist. Being in the depths of a crisis strikes at the core of your being and challenges your very soul. As an individual, you have to believe that you can lead the team successfully and fix the issues you face. If you have this type of faith in yourself and in others, it will become a force-multiplier, making you and the team stronger. You also must consciously decide to persevere regardless of the obstacles, and in the process have the courage to make difficult make-or-break decisions. I’ve heard several people recently define this combination of faith, perseverance, and courage as grist, a wonderfully rough-hewn word that clearly communicates what it takes to transform crises into opportunities. There is no logical, rational reason why Xbox was successful, but the team absolutely had the grist required to do what others thought was improbable.

Robbie Bach

"The Big Leadership Lessons I Learned Almost Failing To Create Xbox For Microsoft" Forbes. 11/5/2015

crucibles of leadership

[O]ne of the most reliable indicators and predictors of true leadership is an individual’s ability to find meaning in negative events and to learn from even the most trying circumstances. Put another way, the skills required to conquer adversity and emerge stronger and more committed than ever are the same ones that make for extraordinary leaders…. 

We came to call the experiences that shape leaders “crucibles,” after the vessels medieval alchemists used in their attempts to turn base metals into gold. For the leaders we interviewed, the crucible experience was a trial and a test, a point of deep self-reflection that forced them to question who they were and what mattered to them. It required them to examine their values, question their assumptions, hone their judgment. And, invariably, they emerged from the crucible stronger and more sure of themselves and their purpose—changed in some fundamental way….

So, what allow[s]… people to not only cope with these difficult situations but also learn from them? We believe that great leaders possess four essential skills, and, we were surprised to learn, these happen to be the same skills that allow a person to find meaning in what could be a debilitating experience. First is the ability to engage others in shared meaning…. Second is a distinctive and compelling voice…. Third is a sense of integrity (including a strong set of values). 

But by far the most critical skill of the four is what we call “adaptive capacity.” This is, in essence, applied creativity—an almost magical ability to transcend adversity, with all its attendant stresses, and to emerge stronger than before. It’s composed of two primary qualities: the ability to grasp context, and hardiness. The ability to grasp context implies an ability to weigh a welter of factors, ranging from how very different groups of people will interpret a gesture to being able to put a situation in perspective. Without this, leaders are utterly lost, because they cannot connect with their constituents….

It is the combination of hardiness and ability to grasp context that, above all, allows a person to not only survive an ordeal, but to learn from it, and to emerge stronger, more engaged, and more committed than ever. These attributes allow leaders to grow from their crucibles, instead of being destroyed by them—to find opportunity where others might find only despair. This is the stuff of true leadership.

Warren Bennis and Robert J. Thomas

"Crucibles of Leadership" Harvard Business Review. September 2002

my boss is a jerk

“My boss is a jerk” is pretty much the number one stressor in the workplace.... What to do? Well, if you really don’t think you can quit, here are some ideas....

Build yourself a really thick skin.

Part of the problem here is that you are taking personally the fact that your boss has a lousy personality. You just can’t. The fact that someone is an awful person has nothing to do with you. It is as disconnected from you as the weather. You don’t take it personally when it hails, do you? No. You wear a good coat and warm boots and you carry an umbrella. So treat your boss and his moods like the weather. Stay out of his way when you can, and when he does act out, observe the behavior and say to yourself “Wow, he is going off the rails again, how interesting.” Tell yourself that it’s not about you. It is about him—and the poor thing has to wake up as himself every morning. But you get to be you, which is way more fun. So put your thick skin coat on, carry your psychic umbrella, and get on with it....

Use Silence.

When it comes to communication, often the person who speaks the least has the most power. Your instinct might be to talk things out, but if you don’t have a willing participant in building or repairing a relationship, it’s really not worth trying. So, if forced into a conversation with your boss, prepare by being clear about the one or two messages you want to share and share only those.

Madeleine Homan-Blanchard 

"My Boss Is A Jerk—What Do I Do? Ask Madeleine." Blanchard LeaderChat. 8/22/2015

cultivate resilience

According to experts, the following 11 activities help cultivate resilience:

1. Having a core set of beliefs that nothing can shake.
2. Finding meaning in whatever stressful or traumatic thing that has happened.
3. Maintaining a positive outlook.
4. Taking cues from someone else who is especially resilient.
5. Not running away from things that scare you: Face them.
6. Reaching out for support when things go haywire.
7. Learning new things as often as you can.
8. Having an exercise regimen you’ll stick to.
9. Not beating yourself up or dwelling on the past.
10. Recognizing what makes you uniquely strong—and owning it.
11. Practicing mindfulness.

Mindfulness deserves a special mention. In a study, Marines who underwent an eight-week course in mindfulness showed great gains in resilience. No only did their heart rate and breathing rate show less reactivity when faced with a stressful situation, their brains changed too: They showed lower activation in the region of the brain associated with emotional reactions. By the end of training, their brains looked more resilient.


Samantha Boardman M.D.
"Bounce Back: 11 Ways to be More Resilient: Data-driven insights to help deal with stress." Psychology Today. 8/14/2015

a sense of connection

If you get most of your self-worth from your job and you get fired, you’ve suddenly lost both your source of income and a big part of your identity, says [Michael] Ungar. Resilient people often have a number of areas from which they get their sense of self-worth, says Ungar. They may have deep friendships or family connections, strong faith, or a leadership role in the community. They’re better able to bounce back, because even if one goes away, they still have a sense of connection and being valued from those other areas, he says.

Gwen Moran

"6 Habits of Resilient People." Fast Company. 1/7/2014

they accept failure

Paul LeBuffe lectures about resilience as part of his role as director of the Devereux Center for Resilient Children, a Villanova, Pennsylvania, facility that works with educators and mental health professionals to develop more resilient children. It’s not uncommon for his audience to include young people who were highly successful students, but graduated during the recession and are devastated at their inability to find jobs.

"They don’t know how to cope with the fact that they didn’t get the first job they applied for. So we hear a lot about these young people sitting in their parents’ basements playing video games," he says.

If you don’t give yourself the opportunity to fail sometimes and accept it as a part of life, you’re going to struggle with bouncing back, LeBuffe says. Successfully emerging from failure develops the ability to be optimistic that things can be bad now, but they’ll be okay eventually, he says.

Gwen Moran

"6 Habits of Resilient People." Fast Company. 1/7/2014

life is a storm

Life is a storm.. You will bask in the sunlight one moment, be shattered on the rocks the next. What makes you a man is what you do when that storm comes. 

Alexandre Dumas

The Count of Monte Cristo. 1844.

some might call it character

IQ offers little to explain the different destinies of people with roughly equal promises, schooling, and opportunity. When ninety-five Harvard students from the classes of the 1940s – a time when people with a wider spread of IQ were at Ivy League schools than is presently the case – were followed into middle age, the men with the highest test scores in college were not particularly successful compared to their lower-scoring peers in terms of salary, productivity, or status in their field. Nor did they have the greatest life satisfaction, nor the most happiness with friendships, family, and romantic relationships.

A similar follow-up in middle age was done with 450 boys, most sons of immigrants, two thirds from families on welfare, who grew up in Sommerville, Massachusetts, at the time a “blighted slim” a few blocks from Harvard. A third had IQs below 90. But again IQ had little relationship to how well they had done at work or in the rest of their lives; for instance, 7 percent of men with IQs under 80 were unemployed for ten or more years, but so were 7 percent of men with IQs over 100. To be sure, there was a general link (as there always is) between IQ and socioeconomic level at age forty-seven. But childhood abilities such as being able to handle frustrations, control emotions, and get on with other people made the greater difference. 

Consider also data from an ongoing study of eighty-one valedictorians and salutatorians from the 1981 class in Illinois high schools. All, of course, had the highest grade point averages in their schools. But while they continued to achieve well in college, getting excellent grades, by their late twenties they had climbed to only average levels of success. Ten years after graduating from high school, only one in four were at the highest level of young people of comparable age in their chosen profession, and many were doing much less well.

Karen Arnold, professor of education at Boston University, one of the researchers tracking the valedictorians, explains, “I think we’ve discovered the ‘dutiful’ – people who know how to achieve in the system. But valedictorians struggle as surely as we all do. To know that a person is a valedictorian is to know only that he or she is exceedingly good at achievement as measured by grades. It tells you nothing about how they react to the vicissitudes of life.”

And that is the problem: academic intelligence offers virtually no preparation for the turmoil – or opportunity – life’s vicissitudes ring. Yet even though a high IQ is no guarantee of prosperity, prestige, or happiness in life, our schools and our culture fixate on academic abilities, ignoring emotional intelligence, a set of traits – some might call it character – that also matters immensely for our personal destiny. Emotional life is a domain that, as surely as math or reading, can be handled with greater or lesser skill, and requires its unique set of competencies. And how adept a person is at those is crucial to understanding why one person thrives in life while another, of equal intellect, dead-ends: emotional aptitude is a meta-ability, determining how well we can use whatever other skills we have, including raw intellect.

Daniel Goleman

Emotional Intelligence. Random House LLC, 2006. 358 pages, p.35,36

demonstrated the resilience

Before Jimmy Carter sat in front of the microphones Thursday morning at the Carter Center in Atlanta to discuss his cancer diagnosis, some speculated the former president might use the moment to raise public awareness about the disease.

As a man who has a family history of cancer and has devoted his post-presidency to championing a vast array of complex causes, it made sense. The health-related news conference, itself an unusual move for a former president, could be the start of yet another area of advocacy for Carter.

But while such efforts may be yet to come, Carter's news conference did not launch research initiatives or public platforms for cancer advocacy. When asked what message he had for others, there was no public-health speech for the masses.

Instead, there was simply Carter: gracious, smiling, honest, at ease. The 90-year-old former president spoke openly about his diagnosis—doctors have found four small spots of melanoma on his brain—and how he was feeling. He shared details about the medications his doctors were using and said his first radiation treatment would be Thursday afternoon.

He also shared the story of telling Rosalynn, how he plans to still teach Sunday School this weekend in Plains, Ga., and what he felt when he heard the news. "I was pleasantly surprised that I didn’t go into an attitude of despair or anger," he told reporters. "I was just completely at ease. ... I've been very grateful for that part of that. I'm ready for anything."

In doing so, Carter gave us yet another model for responding to a setback. A man who will be best remembered not for his presidency but for what he accomplished after he lost it, Carter has again demonstrated the resilience that has been a driving factor in his life and career.

Jena McGregor

"Even in cancer diagnosis, Jimmy Carter shows leadership." The Washington Post. 8/20/2015