Image by: Corporal Sébastien Lauzier-Labarre, Valcartier Imagery Services
Private Dariane Ross Vollant, member of the community of Pessamit and participant in the 2023 Carcajou program, laughs at a joke in the training area at 2nd Canadian Division Support Base Valcartier, Quebec, on August 8, 2023.
Meaghan M. Wilkin, PhD is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Military Psychology and Leadership at the Royal Military College of Canada. Meaghan is a senior team member with Resilience Plus focusing on research and education. In 2021, under Meaghan’s guidance, the Resilience Plus program launched The Resilience Plus Podcast. Her research focusses primarily on the long-term effects of stress, how stress affects the brain and how social bonds can prevent or alleviate these effects and lead to resilient outcomes.
Rémi Paré-Beauchemin, MSc, Ps Ed has just completed his master’s degree in psychoeducation at the University of Sherbrooke. His master’s thesis explored school stressors and appeasing factors in adolescents using Photovoice. He is beginning a doctorate in education to build and evaluate an intervention aimed at developing the “true self” in post-secondary students to foster their sense of meaning in life, their resilience, their well-being, their mental health, and their academic perseverance. Resilience is one of his passions, hence his interest in joining the team of The Resilience Plus Podcast.
Lobna Chérif, PhD, CAPP, CRT, PPCC, MBSP is the Founder and Director of the Resilience Plus program at the Royal Military College, where she is an Associate Professor at the Department of Military Psychology and Leadership and where she also holds the Chair in Resilience. Dr. Chérif’s current research focuses on character strengths, mindfulness, resilience, and accomplishment — and how to apply this understanding to improving well-being and performance.
Talking About Resilience
Over the last 60 years a variety of research fields (e.g., biological sciences, psychological sciences, engineering, disaster recovery, etc.) and industries (e.g., medical, military, government, etc.) have increased their use of, and research on the term “resilience” (Buzzanell & Houston, 2018; Folke, 2016; Hermann et al., 2011; Houston & Buzzanell, 2018; Manyena, 2006; Rutter, 1993). Not surprisingly, usage across these various fields results in a variety of definitions for the term “resilience”. For example, the field of mechanical engineering defines resilience as how well a system or structure can withstand and adapt to changes in the environment (Altherr et al., 2018). When applied to humans, at either the individual or group level, the field of psychology defines resilience as the ability to “bounce back” after experiencing challenging circumstance (Buzzanell, 2010). However, some researchers argue that human resilience is not a singular trait that people either have or do not have, but rather a dynamic trait that is developed, maintained and fostered by experiencing challenging situations (Buzzanell, 2010) and that people do not simply “bounce back” but can rebound and perform to a greater magnitude; a term referred to as “antifragility” (Talib, 2012). This ability to bounce back or perhaps thrive in challenging situation is enhanced by the use of one’s character strengths and virtues (Niemiec, 2019).
Resilience and antifragility are needed in environments where job demands and/or the challenges faced by personnel are high, dynamic, and complex; this is often characteristic of the public service (Franken, 2019; Franken, Plimmer & Malinen, 2020) including service in the armed forces (Bartone, 2006). Several practical, hands-on resilience-based training programs exist in a variety of military forces around the world (e.g., Canadian Armed Forces: Road to Mental Readiness/R2MR, Bailey, 2015; Fikretoglu et al., 2019; British Army Infantry: Mental Resilience Training, Precious & Lindsay, 2018; Australian Defence Force: BattleSMART, Cohn, Hodson, & Crane, 2010). However, another possible and perhaps more subtle way in which personnel learn about resilience and antifragility is through listening to their superiors talk about this topic. Of particular interest for our team is whether leaders mention, either directly or indirectly, character strengths when discussing resilience in informal settings. That is, do leaders use language associated with character strengths when describing their own experience(s) of resilience? To the best of our knowledge no study to date has examined this possibility. Therefore, as a starting point in understanding how military leaders speak about resilience, we listened to various episodes of the Resilience Plus Podcast that featured currently active or recently retired military leaders (i.e., guests of the podcast ranking at or above Lieutenant-Colonel). We evaluated each episode for the overall message conveyed about resilience and whether it aligned with an identifiable character strength or virtue as detailed below.
Resilient Language in The Resilience Plus Podcast
The Resilience Plus Podcast is part of various initiatives (i.e., Research, Training, Education, Mentoring, Coaching) offered at the Royal Military College and the Royal Military College—Saint Jean. The goal of this on-going project is to provide Naval and Officer Cadets with the opportunity to have conversations about resilience with people who have experienced and demonstrated it in their personal and/or professional lives. Beyond this primary goal, a secondary goal of the podcast is to provide a broader audience (i.e., faculty, staff and students) with stories of resilience from people who have lived it. During the podcast sessions, guests were directly asked to address what resilience means to them and how they demonstrate this quality. All podcast episodes contained both universal questions (asked of all guests) and guest specific questions (asked of only a particular guest) which, by default, created semi-structured interviews about resilience. The podcast sought out a variety of speakers from both military and civilian populations. However, since we were interested in the language of resilience in military leaders, we limited the current evaluation to episodes that featured a person who, at the time of recording, was currently an active serving member or a recently retired senior member of the Canadian Armed Forces (i.e., retired within two years prior to recording).
Each episode that met these criteria was evaluated for whether it contained a specific character strength (or virtue) as detailed by Peterson & Seligman (2004). Briefly, the 24 character strengths (including appreciation of beauty and excellence, bravery, creativity, curiosity, fairness, forgiveness, gratitude, honesty, hope, humility, humor, judgement, kindness, leadership, love, love of learning, perseverance, perspective, prudence, self-regulation, social intelligence, spirituality, teamwork, and zest) cluster into familial groups of resemblance according to 6 main virtues (i.e., wisdom: creativity, curiosity, judgement, love of learning, perspective; courage: bravery, honest, perseverance, zest; humanity: kindness, love, social intelligence; justice: fairness, leadership, teamwork; temperance: forgiveness, humility, prudence, self-regulation; transcendence: appreciation of beauty and excellence, gratitude, hope, humor. For more information, see viacharacter.org/character-strengths as well as Macfarlane, 2019, Peterson & Seligman (2004), Ruch et al., (2021), and Seligman (2011). These character strengths, which we all have within us, contribute to our ability to endure a full range of experiences (i.e., positive, neutral, negative) and allow us to thrive (Macfarlane, 2019; Niemiec, 2019). Therefore, a second goal of the current evaluation was to note, which character strengths (if any) military leaders mentioned during their conversation about resilience. This, of course, was a subtle and indirect aspect to note because at no time were podcast guests asked to highlight a character strength and the character strengths were only identified offline after the semi-structured interview was complete.
Two independent listeners evaluated ten English podcast recordings. After listening to the episode in its entirety, listeners selected the most evident character strength presented by the speaker. The two listeners then compared their identified character strength with each other, and only congruent selections were explored further (i.e., the listeners explained how they selected the character strength and what information within the episode guided this selection). Based on this process, a total of ten character strengths were identified as integral to how resilience was described by military leaders on the podcast. These top ten podcast character strengths are described in more detail below. The presentation below is in alphabetical order and does not reflect a rank of importance or amount of usage within podcast episodes.
Character Strengths Presented in the Resilience Plus Podcast Episodes
Bravery. This strength is often described as the antithesis of fear (Rachman, 1990) and is demonstrated when an individual overcomes fear and failure. According to Gruber (2011) it is a cognitive process that “enacts change on a stable system for the intention of positive outcome(s)” (p. 274). It is our behavioural drive toward situations that engage fear or, to a lesser degree, hesitation and is typically demonstrated in times of uncertain outcomes that requires us to be courageous, creative and flexible (Jordan, 2005). Emotional strengths, like bravery, are particularly important for the development of resilience because they provide individuals with the necessary means to face adversity (Martinez-Marti & Ruchs 2017; Ruchs et al., 2010). Not surprisingly, emotional traits, and bravery in particular, are highly correlated with resilience (Martinez-Marti & Ruch, 2017).
Creativity. Like bravery, creativity is considered a cognitive process that is demonstrated when we need divergent thinking (Torrance, 1995), to distance ourselves from stress (Csikzentmihalyi, 1996) and when adapting to solve problems (Kirton, 1994). Unfortunately, most research examining resilience does not include creativity as an influential factor (Metzl & Morrell, 2008) and to the best of our knowledge creativity and its role in facilitating resilience, particularly in military populations, remains an under-represented area within resilience research.
Gratitude. Gratitude has been conceptualized in a number of ways. Generally, it is defined as an experience of noticing and being thankful for the positive emotions, experiences, and outcomes in one’s day to day life (Rashid & Seligman, 2018; Oduntan et al., 2022). This is sometimes labelled as dispositional gratitude. In military populations, demonstrating dispositional gratitude has a “dose-response” effect on psychosocial outcomes such as anxiety (e.g., post-traumatic stress disorder; social phobia), mood disorders (e.g., major depressive disorder), substance use/abuse (e.g., nicotine, alcohol) and suicidal ideation (Isaacs et al., 2017; McGuire et al., 2021; McGuire et al., 2022) whereby high levels of gratitude result in low levels of psychosocial outcomes (moderate gratitude leads to moderate outcomes; low levels of gratitude result in the most negative psychosocial outcomes).
Hope. This character strength is considered one of the foundational terms used in the description of positive psychology (Seligman, Steen, Park & Peterson, 2005) and is defined as a positive motivational state that arises when increased goal-directed energy (i.e., agency) interacts with goal-directed behaviour (i.e., a plan or pathway to meet goals; Snyder, Irving, & Anderson, 1991). According to Snyder and colleagues (Cheavans et al., 2006; Snyder, Feldman, Taylor, Schroeder & Adams, 2000; Snyder, Rand & Ritschel, 2006) people display both approach goals (things we want to achieve, e.g., improving our health) and avoidance goals (avoiding a setback; e.g., barrier(s)to improving our health). Not surprisingly, high levels of hope are associated with being motivated to actively engage in behaviour that pushes us toward the things we want, and low levels of hope are associated with simply avoiding negative outcomes (Snyder, Feldman, Taylor, Schroeder & Adams, 2000; Snyder, Rand & Ritschel, 2006). In this way, when we employ hope as a tool, we are actively (both mentally and physically) and not passively developing our resilience. Interestingly, facilitating hope might be of use when military members transition from service to civilian life where large, and sometimes challenging adjustments in day-to-day life are required (e.g., Umucu et al., 2022).
Kindness. Kindness is a benefit multiplier. When demonstrated, kindness is for the potential betterment of other people, but we also reap the rewards of this character strength (Curry et al., 2018). Using kindness to foster personal and collective resilience means we recognize the dignity of others and can demonstrate emotions like empathy toward their well-being alongside our own. Not surprisingly, this character strength is considered a prosocial behaviour and is necessary among functioning groups (e.g., classrooms, offices, active deployments, etc.) In addition, demonstrating kindness can reduce the expression of avoidance goals (Trew & Alden, 2015) which were noted earlier when discussing hope. Interestingly, however, we do not always have to engage in the action of kindness as several lines of research indicate that simply recalling an act of kindness (whether demonstrated or received) can improve well-being (Aknin, Dunn, & Norton, 2012; Ko et al., 2021; Otake, Shimai, Tanaka-Matsumi, Otsui, & Fredrickson, 2006). However, kindness is not a commonly examined topic within leadership and military research fields and as such it remains an potential future direction of further exploration.
Love of Learning. This character strength is characterized as both a general individual difference and as a universal predisposition (Renninger et al., 2004). More specifically, love of learning describes the way in which a person engages with new information (i.e., whether they approach it openly, ready to absorb as much new knowledge as possible or whether they are avoidant and anxious when new knowledge is available). To experience love of learning, research suggests that people must feel (or expect to feel) some sense of competence and efficacy in the learning process. This means that they must get a sense of mastering a skillset, a sense of filling in the gaps in their knowledge and so on. The paradox, however, is that learning, by definition, also includes instances in which we fail: where the information we thought was correct, turns out to be wrong, and or when we realize the current path we are on, will not work for us in the long run or in the end (Sansone & Morgan, 1992). Indeed, several lines of empirical science have demonstrated that love of learning is one of the character strengths needed for people to experience post-traumatic growth (Niemiec, 2012; Peterson & Seligman, 2003; Peterson et al., 2008; Tedeschi & Calhoun, 1995).
Perseverance. This character strength is defined as the process of sticking to a task regardless of obstacles and barriers that might arise during the completion of the task. It is synonymous with other trait labels such as tenacity, grit, and steadfastness. Perseverance is dependent on other traits such as hope, creativity, learning / work ethic, goal achievement and conscientiousness but is independent of traits such as intelligence (Duckworth et al., 2007). The connection between perseverance and resilience may seem inherent, but it is also supported by empirical research in a variety of fields. For example, research on candidates at the United States Military Academy, West Point, demonstrated that retention of cadets between first and second year (the most challenging/rigorous part of their time) was highest in those that had high ‘grit’ (Duckworth et al., 2007). Thereafter, the fast-paced nature of military operations requires members to be operationally ready in the face of stressful environments and maintain optimal levels of mental and physical performance over long periods of time. It is not surprising, then, that perseverance was noted several times by military leaders on the podcast.
Image by: Sergeant Alexandre Paquin, Canadian Armed Forces photo
Lieutenant-Colonel Luc-Frédéric Gilbert, JTF-U Commanding Officer, addresses the parade at a graduation ceremony at Kharkiv Air Force University on October 29, 2021 in Kharkiv, Ukraine.
Perspective. When we see the bigger picture and do not get overwhelmed by the minor details, we have demonstrated perspective. Again, this is a trait that is independent of intelligence but involves the capacity to maintain and use knowledge and critical thinking (Niemeic, 2020). It is one of the key character strengths that can buffer against the negative effects of stress and trauma (Park & Peterson, 2009), which are an inherent part of military service (e.g., Easterbrook et al., 2022; Straud et al., 2019). Additionally, perspective taking in its various forms (e.g., social, moral) is needed in the development of altruism — or the willingness to help others (Underwood & Moore, 1982). While conveyed as important by leaders on the podcast episodes, perspective does not appear to be a skill that is easily trained. It takes time to naturally develop and is something that must be practiced (Eyal, Steffel, & Epley, 2018) over time before we can use and demonstrate it effectively. This might be an opportunity for future military training and resilience research.
Prudence. Another important theme of resilience is found in the demonstration of prudence. While some interpretations of prudence see it as maladaptive and in opposition to resilience (e.g., Littleton et al., 2007; Mushonga, Rashid & Anderson, 2020), this character strength is a self-preservation technique that can protect people who rely on it from future stress or harm (LaMotte et al., 2016). More generally prudence is demonstrated when we are careful in our decision making and avoid unnecessary risk. It is synonymous with practical knowledge or practical wisdom (Connelly & Connelly, 2013). In terms of military leadership, this skill is dependent on ‘situational awareness’ (see Launder & Perry, 2014; Marusich et al., 2016; Catherwood et al., 2012; Goodwin et al., 2018) and is not only important for one’s own professional/personal livelihood and resilience but also for the well-being of one’s subordinates (Knighton, 2004).
Self-Regulation. Finally, self-regulation is a multidimensional construct that involves both basic physiological functions (e.g., regulation of stress hormones by the sympathetic nervous system) and complex cognitive functions (e.g., contemplating/gauging an appropriate reaction to stimuli; Bandura 2001; Gestsdóttir et al., 2014; McClelland et al. 2015). As such, it is important for all aspects of a person’s ability to adapt (i.e., alter their emotions, thoughts, behaviours and physiology; McClelland et al., 2018) and is an inherent part of functionality within the Canadian Armed Forces. For example, research by Weltman and colleagues (2014) examined the usefulness of a stress resilience training system app in police and military officers. Their research found that training programs that include practical self-regulation skills improve psychological wellness in both law enforcement and military personnel (Weltman et al., 2014).
Why You Should Listen to Stories of Resilience / The Power of Storytelling
Work environments where military leaders demonstrate personal resilience are often more productive and healthier overall (e.g., Ihme & Sundstom 2020; McHugh, 2013). One way in which leaders can demonstrate resilience is by talking openly about the topic. This form of communication and the use of narratives (or storytelling) makes complex concepts easier (Suzuki et al., 2018) and increases our overall understanding of a topic. In addition, listening to how a colleague/superior speaks about a topic allows for a more authentic connection between presenter and listener (Suzuki et al., 2018). Thus, the Resilience Plus Podcast episodes presented by leaders within the Canadian Armed Forces in which the topic of resilience is discussed can increase the overall understanding of resilience. In addition, listeners gain resilience tools and knowledge by listening to what has worked for others in similar lines of work. These later insights might be particularly useful in identifying sustainable and effective opportunities for resilience development and maintenance. It also provides an accessible means for leaders to relay information to more people than their direct team, thereby having a broader impact on resilience development overall. However, as we continue to listen to these stories of resilience on the Resilience Plus Podcast, we recognize the need for a more specific qualitative thematic analysis of this content. This type of precise analysis will help clarify specifically how leaders experience resilience and how they convey this personalized knowledge to their teams and younger members serving in the Canadian Armed Forces.