Virtue:
Resilience
Other names:
Endurance
"Patientia" (“patience” is sometimes used as a translation, but is not generally understood to mean what St. Thomas meant by “patientia.”)
Definition:
Don't give in. Mental toughness; not letting sorrow divert you from the good you’ve intended to do.
"safeguard the good of reason against sorrow, lest reason give way to sorrow" (II-II, q136 a1)
Advice:
Empirical Research:
Case examples:
Gifts of the Holy Spirit
Further reading:
Vices opposed:
Feebleness*
Case Study 1
ReplyDeleteOne of Jim Collins’ major themes in Good to Great is what he calls the “stockdale paradox,” which involves a recognition of the brutal facts of one’s situation, combined with an unwavering commitment to prevail in the end: the virtue of resilience.
“The name refers to Admiral Jim Stockdale, who was the highest-ranking United States military officer in the “Hanoi Hilton” prisoner-of-war camp during the height of the Vietnam War. Tortured over twenty times during his eight-year imprisonment from 1965 to 1973, Stockdale lived out the war without any prisoner’s rights, no set release date, and no certainty as to whether he would even survive to see his family again. He shouldered the burden of command, doing everything he could to create conditions that would increase the number of prisoners who would survive unbroken, while fighting an internal war against his captors and their attempts to use the prisoners for propaganda. At one point, he beat himself with a stool and cut himself with a razor, deliberately disfiguring himself, so that he could not be put on videotape as an example of a “well-treated prisoner.” He exchanged secret intelligence information with his wife through their letters, knowing that discovery would mean more torture and perhaps death. He instituted rules that would help people to deal with torture (no one can resist torture indefinitely, so he created a stepwise system—after x minutes, you can say certain things—that gave the men milestones to survive toward). He instituted an elaborate internal communications system to reduce the sense of isolation that their captors tried to create, which used a five-by-five matrix of tap codes for alpha characters. (Tap-tap equals the letter a, tap-pause-tap-tap equals the letter b, tap-tap-pause-tap equals the letter f, and so forth, for twenty-five letters, c doubling in for k.) At one point, during an imposed silence, the prisoners mopped and swept the central yard using the code, swish-swashing out 'We love you' to Stockdale, on the third anniversary of his being shot down. After his release, Stockdale became the first three-star officer in the history of the navy to wear both aviator wings and the Congressional Medal of Honor." (Collins, Good to Great, pp. 83-84)
Case Study
ReplyDeleteWhen she first became CEO of Hewlett-Packard, Carly Fiorina found the company adrift amidst the start of the dot-com boom, more fixated on looking backward towards the legacy of its founders than forward towards the future. In her book, Tough Choices, she explains how facing the necessity of change required both her and the company to exercise the virtue of resilience. "Time had stood still for the people of HP; they did not know how to move forward without their founders. They were afraid of change; what if changing anything meant destroying everything? The organization was brittle and timid.
"Despite the fear, however, I knew there were HP people who longed for change. From my travels and my conversations and those many e-mail messages, I concluded that a critical mass of people knew that if the company wasn’t moving forward, it was falling behind. People who talked with customers and encountered competitors felt the need for change most keenly. They sought a champion for the change they knew was necessary.
"Change always takes great effort. Once begun, change is never exactly what you expected it to be; people sometimes tire of the effort and long for the good old days that now seem better after all, especially when viewed through the mists of time. In every institution the powerful and the decision makers always favor the status quo; continuity preserves their position. As I’d learned over and over, many people prefer even a deeply problematic known to the risks of the unknown. Be careful what you pray for; Don’t rock the boat; Don’t change horses in the middle of the stream are all cautions about the risks of uncertainty and the consequences of imprudent action. For all these reasons, the natural inclination of any organization or institution is always to maintain, to preserve, to protect the way things are. In many real ways, change is an unnatural act and so requires a sustained disruption of sufficient force." (Fiorina, Tough Choices, ch. 20)
Case Study
ReplyDeleten Everyone's a Coach, businessman Ken Blanchard recalls one occasion on which he was able to observe co-author and legendary football coach Don Shula living out the virtue of resilience. "I got to witness firsthand Don Shula's capacity to rebound from a setback , in December 1994 when the Dolphins were blown off the field in the second half of a disappointing 42-31 Sunday-night loss to the Buffalo Bills. The Dolphins were 8-4 at the time, and a win over their archrival would ensure them a playoff berth and eliminate the perennial Super Bowl contenders. The Dolphins were leading 17-7 at half-time, and then the roof caved in. I was part of a group that waited in the Shula sky box for Don to appear after the game. When he did, he looked drained and exhausted. A friend tried to give him encouragement by saying, 'Don't worry, Don, you'll get them next time. I know we'll make the play-offs.'
"Don was quick to intervene. 'What I don't need right now is a pep talk.'
"Shula needed the space to feel the loss deeply so he could then focus his, the coaches', and the team's energy on the next opponent, Kansas City.
"When I saw Don on Monday night before his weekly TV show, he was a different person. His mind was already on Kansas City. While he reviewed the Buffalo game on his show, you could see the hurt was over. As we ate dinner and watched the raiders beat the Chargers, Don Shula had already left the loss behind and was preparing for the next battle. And I'm sure his team was, too, especially the way they blew Kansas City out of the water, 42-21, the following Monday night. After the game, in typical Shula fashion, Don told the press, 'We've clinched it. Now we're looking toward these next two games and the best possible situation we can have in the play-offs."
(Blanchard and Shula, Everyone’s a Coach, p. 45)
ReplyDeleteCase Study
ReplyDeleteBorn Sarah Breedlove to former slaves no more than five years after the Emancipation Proclamation, Madam C. J. Walker would one day become the wealthiest African-American businesswoman of her era. The death of her mother in 1873, followed closely by that of her father in 1875, compelled her to develop the virtue of resilience from a very young age, orphaned in Louisiana during the violent Southern backlash against Reconstruction. “Publically, at least,” explains her biographer and descendent, A’Lelia Bundles, in On Her Own Ground: The Life and Times of Madam C. J. Walker, “[Sarah] did not elaborate with details, dates of causes of death. The particulars remain unknown but the possibilities are many. Disease stalked the swamps and bayous of the Mississippi Valley, often in the form of epidemics poised to activate at deadly, unpredictable intervals…If Sarah witnessed her mother’s and father’s final breaths, she left no clue about the bewildering heartache a young child experiences at the loss of a parent. But the painful aftermath shaped her attitudes for the rest of her life. Dependent upon her older and now married sister, Louvenia Breedlove Powell, she was forced to live in the household of her brother-in-law, Jesse Powell. Years later she would describe him as ‘cruel,’ suggesting, but never fully revealing, the extent of his threats, taunts and abuses.
“Rather than be destroyed, Sarah learned to turn her vulnerability into resolve and resilience. Her determination to escape was her most valuable asset.” (Bundles, On Her Own Ground, p. 35)
Case Study
ReplyDeleteIn the conclusion to his memoir, My Side of the Street: Why Wolves, Flash Boys, Quants and Masters of the Universe Don’t Represent the Real Wall Street, Investment Strategist Jason DeSana Trennert offers the would-be Wall Street careerist some advice on the virtue of resilience or self-reliance. “All the things you’ve heard about the large bulge bracket firms’ mentorship programs and their concern for your career you will learn upon arrival are absurd. The ‘recruitment’ process may have convinced you that you were highly sought after because your unique skills would allow you, in carefully measured steps, to climb the corporate ladder all the way to the C-suite. Sorry, folks: you’re there to do a job that helps the firm make money, pure and simple. If you’re unlucky, you’ll run into someone who is purposefully trying to derail your career. If you’re fortunate, people will leave you alone to privately pursue excellence. The chances are one in a million that someone will actively seek to help you before you’ve actually achieved something you’ve had to accomplish on your own. This isn’t because people on Wall Street are mean-spirited, necessarily; it’s because the pace and the stress of most Wall Street jobs leave precious little time for senior people to spare any meaningful time teaching and training those just starting out. This means that career advancement for the young Wall Street professional requires ambition, self-direction, and a thick skin. In a world where everyone these days gets a participation trophy, younger people are having a harder time realizing that no one will look out for their own interests better than they will.” (Trennert, My Side of the Street, pp. 185-86)
Case Study
ReplyDeleteJohn D. Rockefeller’s legacy is complex and controversial, as historian Ron Chernow demonstrates in his monumental biography, Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller. Nonetheless, the devout Christian Rockefeller exemplified several virtues in both his business and philanthropic activities. From his early boyhood in the backwoods of upstate New York, Rockefeller was forced by his dissolute father’s long absences to grow up quickly and take on the role of provider for the family, including his mother, Eliza. “For a woman of Eliza’s intense pride and religiosity,” writes Chernow, “it must have been hard to endure the unaccountable absences of her gallivanting husband, and she drew closer, of necessity, to her oldest son, who struck her as precocious and prematurely wise. She saw qualities in him still invisible to the world at large. Because she confided in him and gave him adult responsibilities, he matured rapidly and acquired unusual confidence.” (22) John Rockefeller found himself managing the family budget and earning money on the side before he left primary school. “His manifold duties habituated him to a heavy workload. When not attending school, he cut wood, milked the cow, drew well water, tended the garden, and went on shopping expeditions while also supervising his younger siblings in their mother’s absence. ‘I was taught to do as much business at the age of ten or eleven as it was possible for me to do,’ he later noted.” (Chernow, Titan, p. 32)
Case Study
ReplyDeleteEWTN founder Mother Angelica was born Rita Antoinette Rizzo in an impoverished and crime-ridden Italian neighborhood in Canton, Ohio. The child of a broken family, raised by her struggling, single mother, Rita nonetheless displayed several of the qualities that would make her a success later in life, including a talent for showmanship. According to biographer, Raymond Arroyo, her first stage performance in the Italian festival at her local parish was itself a test of resilience. “A couple of years after Al Jolson’s The Jazz Singer took the country by storm in 1927, Rita impersonated him onstage. Wearing a little boy’s suit, the six-year-old walked into the crowded church hall to ‘Danny Boy.’
“‘The stage looked gigantic to me…My mother was petrified, so she says, “Look, I’m going to be right there in the audience so you keep your eyes on me and you’ll be okay. You just sing your song. Okay?” I said, “Okay,” and all of a sudden my uncle pushes me out, the big curtains part, and there I am. So I start singing the song. And just in the place where Al Jolson begins to cry because Danny Boy dies, I couldn’t find my mother. Someone must have stepped in front of her. So I’m crying my eyes out. I keep singing, but I’m crying like a baby and I’m going “Oh Danny boy.” Pretty soon, the whole place was crying. Then suddenly, I see my mother and I’m all happy again, singing away. It was perfect. My uncle Nick went bananas. He picked me up and threw me in the air, and the people were yelling and clapping.’
“Even at a tender age, Rita would draw acclaim not so much for her performance as for her ability to display honest emotions in public. The audience connected with the basic humanity they saw coming from the child and responded with their love.” (Arroyo, Mother Angelica, p. 12)
Case Study
ReplyDeleteEWTN founder Mother Angelica was born Rita Antoinette Rizzo in an impoverished and crime-ridden Italian neighborhood in Canton, Ohio. After experiencing a miraculous healing from her chronic stomach spasms, she chose to devote her life to Christ and entered the St. Paul’s Shrine Monastery in Cleveland. The early months of her new life, however, would prove to be a harsh lesson in resilience, biographer Raymond Arroyo explains. “Wearing a simple black dress and a cap, Rita attempted to conform to monastic life. She cleaned floors and baked altar breads as part of her initial assignments. During her first weeks in the cloister, she arrived late for prayer and made a habit of disturbing the elder sisters by barging through the enclosure doors.
“None of this escaped the watchful gaze of [Rita’s superior] Mother Agnes. In her Germanic way, the abbess began to prune Sister Rita, imposing a series of humiliations on the young postulant to teach her obedience. Each time Rita happened upon the abbess, she was to cease all activity, kneel down, and kiss the scapular of the Reverend Mother. But Mother Agnes did not stop there. In the presence of the entire community, the abbess would point out Sister Rita’s faults, especially her volatile style of entering a room. As penance, the plucky nun was made to kneel in the middle of the refectory, where the sisters ate, and recite a prayer that began ‘I am nothing. I can do nothing. I am worth nothing. I have nothing but my sins.’
“‘Applesauce,’ Sister Rita would sometimes mutter under her breath after finishing the litany. The penance would be repeated ‘Monday after Monday after Monday,’ until the nun accepted it as truth. While these tests moved her contemporaries to tears, Sister Rita was neither broken nor particularly disturbed by them.
“‘My whole life was a matter of survival, and I think that attitude of survival just changed places,’ Mother Angelica told me. ‘In the monastery, I had a lot of security; I didn’t have to worry about anything.’” (Arroyo, Mother Angelica, pp. 45-46)
Case Study
ReplyDeleteIn the summer of 1984, EWTN founder Mother Angelica experienced a spiritual and a financial crisis simultaneously. As biographer Raymond Arroyo explains, Angelica lost her mother, Mae, with whom she had always had a difficult relationship, at the same time the fledgling network found itself deeply in debt and in danger of losing its satellite time. “Angelica’s description [in her journal] of her inner turmoil and estrangement from God reads, on the surface, like a textbook ‘dark night’ experience. On July 9, she wrote to her spouse: ‘You emptied Yourself so totally. Are you asking me to do the same? I am afraid. It seems like a living death. I do not possess the strength – help me Oh Lord.’ The following day, she was even more anguished. ‘The struggle continues Lord. Am I fighting whatever You are trying to do in my soul?...Everything around me seems to be falling apart. Everything I hold dear is getting further and further away.’
“Perhaps nothing was drifting away faster than the network. On more than one occasion, before her community and in front of network employees, Mother broke down in tears over the two unpaid transponder bills, which she knew portended EWTN’s extinction.
“On July 13, in her monastery office, Mother Angelica dialed a reliable donor in a last-ditch effort for funds. Watching her reaction, Sister Raphael could tell that help would not be forthcoming. When the call ended, Raphael proposed a way out, even though she knew mother Angelica would probably veto it. Raphael thought the family of viewers should be informed of the network’s dire state and given a chance to save it through a telethon. Believing that airtime should be spent spreading the Gospel, Angelica loathed what she had seen of telethons of the Evangelical networks. But given the gravity of the moment, she acquiesced to the plan.
“‘I can’t now, I’m too emotionally upset,’ she told Raphael. ‘I’ll do it tomorrow night.’
“Mother pulled herself together and for six nights, starting July 14, 1984, begged for dollars. Jabbing her Italian hands and the camera, she spelled out the crisis and approached the audience with subtle lines like: ‘All right, cough it up, kids.’ Coming from sixty-one-year-old chortling nun, with a crucifix dangling from her neck; who could resist?
…
Ultimately, the telethon procured the needed funds. “‘It was a major shift in the relationship between Mother, EWTN as an entity, and the viewing public,’ Sister Antoinette, a violinist who entered the monastery in the spring of 1984, said of the telethon. ‘It really intensified the sense of family, which Mother spoke of from the beginning.’ From that time forward, donations became personal: The viewers weren’t sending their checks to the network; they were sending them to Mother Angelica. Years later, she’d coin a phrase that would become her live show sign-off, and the sum total of her fund-raising efforts: ‘Remember to keep us between your gas and electric bill. This network is brought to you by you.’ Viewers believed her and would religiously send their donations in each month to keep their network up and running.” (Arroyo, Mother Angelica, pp. 186-88)
Case Study
ReplyDeleteLate in life, EWTN founder Mother Angelica suffered a stroke, distorting her features and causing her to lose muscle-tension in her face. Nevertheless, as biographer Raymond Arroyo relates, she went forward with her next scheduled on-air appearances, offering an example of resilience that inspired countless other stroke victims. “Sixty-five thousand pieces of mail came in reaction to the broadcast, most expressing concern about Mother’s visage. At a time when the cult of perfection dominated the airwaves, when youth and beauty were television’s most venerated values, here was a striking countercultural statement: a disfigured old woman shamelessly and without vanity proclaiming what she believed to be the truth.
“Stroke victims and the deformed, living in shadows of shame, wrote to offer their thanks. Mother had given them permission to come out of hiding and had inspired them to return to life. ‘One woman said, “I listen to you, Mother Angelica, I see all your programs, and I love you, but now you’re one of us,”’ Angelica told me. ‘It took me a while to kind of understand that. I hope I understand it.’” (Arroyo, Mother Angelica, p. 316)