Actually, if I were to be 100% honest, Guam was a great place to spend a couple of years. I could list a lot of reasons why living in Guam made our lives interesting and, at times, difficult. While we were there, we dealt with two separate (and very different) mass casualty events (the Korean Air Flight 801 crash resulting in 229 deaths and the crash of two school buses resulting thankfully in only minor injuries and no deaths), as well as supertyphoon Paka, which knocked out our electricity for over a month and our cable television for about 3 months. It was difficult to travel back to the U.S. in order to visit family too. However, for every negative experience, we had many more positive ones. We formed some great friendships, we traveled to some exotic places, and our family of five became a family of six when our youngest daughter was born there. Our family really enjoyed being part of the local community, and we have nothing but great memories of our time in Guam.
As I look back and reflect, I've noticed that some of the most challenging situations I’ve experienced in my professional and personal life have been the times that I have learned and grown the most. These challenging experiences have turned into ones that I would never trade in a million years. While I know our experience in Guam was the farthest thing from a hardship, and most importantly doesn’t come anywhere close to his story, I am reminded of something that Vice Admiral James Stockdale once said about his experiences as a war prisoner in the infamous "Hanoi Hilton" during the Vietnam War. Stockdale was a prisoner for over seven years, and he was tortured routinely. When asked by Jim Collins, author of Good to Great, how he dealt with being a prisoner and what got him through, Stockdale replied, "I never lost faith in the end of the story. I never doubted not only that I would get out, but also that I would prevail in the end and turn the experience into the defining event of my life, which, in retrospect, I would not trade."
I am just so impressed how Stockdale could turn such a negative experience (he lost over 7 years of his life while a prisoner) into the "defining event of his life" and one that in retrospect he "would not trade." I go back to what the author and psychologist Viktor Frankl, who survived in a concentration camp during the Holocaust wrote in his wonderful book, Man's Search for Meaning, “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way.” He also said, "Life is never made unbearable by circumstances, but only by lack of meaning and purpose.”
I think it would be difficult to find meaning and purpose in as difficult of circumstances that Stockdale and Frankl went through. However, I am impressed by the similarities in their thought processes and attitudes about their experiences. Frankl said, "If there is a meaning in life at all, then there must be a meaning in suffering. Suffering is an eradicable part of life, even as fate and death. Without suffering and death, human life cannot be complete." He continued, "The prisoner who had lost faith in the future – his future – was doomed. With his loss of belief in the future he also lost his spiritual hold; he let himself decline and become subject to mental and physical decay."
Neither Stockdale nor Frankl were overly optimistic about their situation. Rather, they were what I would call "optimistic realists." Stockdale told Collins that the optimists were the ones who never made it out of the prison camp. He said, "Oh, they were the ones who said, ‘We’re going to be out by Christmas.’ And Christmas would come, and Christmas would go. Then they’d say, ‘We’re going to be out by Easter.’ And Easter would come, and Easter would go. And then Thanksgiving, and then it would be Christmas again. And they died of a broken heart … This is a very important lesson. 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."
Here then is the essence of what Collins has called the "Stockdale Paradox". The paradox involves holding two seemingly different thoughts or beliefs - faith in the future (optimism) and confronting the current reality, no matter how bad that reality actually is in the end. I believe, and I think both Frankl and Stockdale would have as well, in the power of having a positive attitude. There is a place for being optimistic about the future (as I have stated before in a couple of posts last month - "Our life is what our thoughts make it" and "Be the sun, not the salt"), but do not forget about your present situation either. The ancient Roman Stoic philosopher (who lived life as a slave) Epictetus wrote, "What, then, is to be done? To make the best of what is in our power, and take the rest as it naturally happens." In other words, have faith in the future, but also be realistic about the present. And don't wait for someone else to save you. Buddha said, "No one saves us but ourselves. No one can and no one may. We ourselves must walk the path."
I have found, particularly in the last two plus years of the COVID-19 pandemic, the "Stockdale Paradox" to be a powerful lesson for how to personally deal with a leadership crisis. Thankfully, most, if not all, of us will never experience an event as challenging as the situations experienced by Viktor Frankl or James Stockdale. However, we can learn a lot about how to deal with our own challenging situations by how they dealt with theirs. I've already recommended Viktor Frankl's book, Man's Search for Meaning, which is one of the greatest books that I have ever read. I would also highly recommend Thoughts of a Philosophical Fighter by James Stockdale, which is equally as powerful.
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