The most successful people are those who are mentally tough. They choose thoughts that biologically improve their quality of life. 

Twenty years ago, I set out to combine what I knew about cognitive neuroscience, brain chemistry, and human performance to create a training method to show people exactly how to develop mental toughness. After years of research with clinical patients and having worked with thousands of people considered “the best,” I developed Relentless Solution Focus (RSF). It’s a three-step process that has since been proven to help people win World Series, Super-Bowls, National Championships, Olympic gold medals, and increase business productivity by up to 30 percent year over year.

Mentally tough people actually choose the thoughts that cause them to take actions that lead to positive outcomes, although this is contrary to the way humans are hardwired. Over millennia, our very survival relied on our ability to be alert to potential dangers. That is, we are pre-disposed to look for problems – what I call “Problem-Centric Thought.” This negativity bias significantly limits our potential and increases stress, pressure, and underperformance.

By developing a Relentless Solution Focus (RSF) – which along with my colleague Ellen Reed, we have taught tens of thousands of clients – people can be prepared for adversity and thrive in it. This mind-training regimen makes it possible to reframe every problem into an opportunity for positive, productive action. Here are the three steps:

1. Recognize – First, recognize when negative thinking has set in. The RSF process teaches people to be alert to negative thoughts and to use the onset of this thinking to create positive behavior change. This is critical because what anyone focuses on expands. Focusing on problems makes them larger and less manageable.

2. Replace – Once people recognize their problem-focused thoughts, it’s essential to replace negative thinking with more positive thoughts. The key is to do this quickly — within sixty seconds or less. To do this, people must ask themselves one simple question: What is one thing I can do right now that could make this better? Dr. Selk advises using what he calls “The Mental Chalkboard” to ensure that people focus on solutions. Fortunately, just as focusing on problems causes them to expand, focusing on solutions has the same effect.

3. Retrain – No muscle becomes strong without training. Developing mental strength requires training, as well. Although negative thinking is hardwired, the brain has the ability to change.  

Adversity itself isn’t controllable. What is always controllable is what you do about it — the mentally tough zero in on what can be done — the mental chalkboard’s solution side.

Whenever you hear something repeated, it feels more real when you hear it repeated. In other words, repetition makes any statement seem more trustworthy. So anything you hear will feel more accurate each time you hear it again.

Do you see what I did there? Each of the three sentences above conveyed the same message. Yet each time you read the next sentence, it felt more and more trustworthy. Cognitive neuroscientists like myself call this the “illusory truth effect.”

Go back and recall your experience reading the first sentence. It probably felt strange and disconcerting, perhaps with a tone of outrage, as in “I don’t believe things more if they’re repeated!” 

Reading the second sentence did not inspire such a strong reaction. Your reaction to the third sentence was tame by comparison.

Why? Because of a phenomenon called “cognitive fluency,” meaning how easily we process information. Much of our vulnerability to deception in all areas of life – including misinformation – revolves around cognitive fluency in one way or another. 

Now think about how rumors spread in your organization’s grapevine. It works on the same principle. Employees hear a rumor – say about a proposed headquarters move, just like Elon Musk’s move of Tesla’s HQ to Texas. It feeds into their fears, which is a very cognitively fluid part of our minds. 

They repeat the rumor, and it goes around, and then they keep hearing it from others. It begins to seem more and more authentic, regardless of reality. Before you know it, those who want to stay where they are looking for another job, even though you might never have intended to move your headquarters! 

Fortunately, we can learn about these mental errors, which helps us address misinformation and make our workplaces more truthful.

The Lazy Brain

Our brains are lazy. The more effort it takes to process information, the more uncomfortable we feel about it, and the more we dislike and distrust it. 

By contrast, the more we like specific data and are comfortable with it, the more we feel that it’s accurate. This intuitive feeling in our gut is what we use to judge what’s true and false. 

Yet no matter how often you heard that you should trust your gut and follow your intuition, that advice is wrong. You should not trust your gut when evaluating information where you don’t have expert-level knowledge, at least when you don’t want to screw up. Structured information gathering and decision-making processes help us avoid the numerous errors we make when we follow our intuition. And even experts can make serious errors when they don’t rely on such decision aids.

These mistakes happen due to mental errors that scholars call “cognitive biases.” The illusory truth effect is one of these mental blindspots; there are over 100 altogether. These mental blindspots impact all areas of our life, from health and politics to relationships.

Other Important Cognitive Biases

Besides illusory truth, what are some other cognitive biases you need to beware of to protect your organization from misinformation? If you’ve heard of any cognitive biases, you’ve likely heard of the “confirmation bias.” That refers to our tendency to look for and interpret information in ways that conform to our prior beliefs, intuitions, feelings, desires, and preferences, as opposed to the facts. 

Again, cognitive fluency deserves blame. It’s much easier to build neural pathways to information that we already possess, especially when we have strong emotions; it’s much more challenging to break well-established neural pathways if we need to change our minds based on new information. Consequently, we instead look for information that’s easy to accept, which fits our prior beliefs. In turn, we ignore and even actively reject information that doesn’t match our beliefs. 

Moreover, the more educated we are, the more likely we are to engage in such active rejection. After all, our smarts give us more ways of arguing against new information that counters our beliefs. That’s why research demonstrates that the more educated you are, the more polarized your beliefs will be around scientific issues that have religious or political value overtones, such as stem cell research, human evolution, and climate change. Where might you and your team be letting your smarts get in the way of the facts?

Our minds like to interpret the world through stories, meaning explanatory narratives that clearly and straightforwardly link cause and effect. Such stories are a balm to our cognitive fluency, as our mind continually looks for patterns that explain the world around us in an easy-to-process manner. That leads to the “narrative fallacy,” where we fall for convincing-sounding narratives regardless of the facts, especially if the story fits our predispositions and our emotions. 

Do you ever wonder why politicians tell so many stories? How about the advertisements you see on TV or video advertisements on websites, which tell rapid visual stories? How about salespeople or fundraisers? Sure, sometimes they cite statistics and scientific reports, but they spend much, much more time telling stories: simple, straightforward, compelling narratives that seem to make sense and tug at our heartstrings. 

Now, here’s something that’s actually true: the world doesn’t make sense. The world is not simple, clear, and compelling. The world is complex, confusing, and contradictory. Beware of simple stories! Look for complex, confusing, and contradictory scientific reports and high-quality statistics: they’re much more likely to contain the truth than the easy-to-process stories.

Fixing Our Brains

Unfortunately, knowledge only weakly protects us from cognitive biases; it’s essential but far from sufficient.

What can we do? You can use decision aid strategies to address cognitive biases to defend your organization from misinformation.

One of the most effective strategies is to help your employees and yourself build up a habit of automatically considering alternative possibilities to any claim you hear, especially claims that feel comfortable. Since our lazy brain’s default setting is to avoid questioning claims, which requires hard thinking, it helps to develop a mental practice of going against this default. Be especially suspicious of repeated claims that make you feel comfortable without any additional evidence, which play on the illusory truth effect and the confirmation bias combined.

Another effective strategy involves cultivating a mental habit of questioning stories in particular. Whenever you hear a story, the brain goes into listening and accepting mode. Remember that it’s very easy to cherry-pick stories to support whatever position the narrator wants to advance. Instead, look for specific hard numbers, statistical evidence, and peer-reviewed research to support claims.

More broadly, you can encourage employees to make a personal commitment to the twelve truth-oriented behaviors of the Pro-Truth Pledge by signing the pledge at ProTruthPledge.org. These behaviors stem from cognitive neuroscience and behavioral economics research in the field called debiasing, which refers to counterintuitive, uncomfortable, but effective strategies to protect yourself from cognitive biases. Peer-reviewed research has shown that taking the Pro-Truth Pledge effectively changes people’s behavior to be more truthful, both in their statements and in interactions with others.

These quick mental habits will address the most fundamentally flawed aspects of our mind’s tendency to accept misinformation. 

Hope is a feeling, but what many people don’t realize is that it’s also a mental construct. Here are tangible actions you can take to increase a sense of hopefulness in yourself and your team.

Set achievable goals.

If your team needs to get their mojo and confidence back, be sure to have them set achievable goals they know they can hit — and each time they do, you can watch with pride as their motivation rises. If you have a huge, seemingly insurmountable goal, break it down into smaller ones so you and your team can turn it into a series of smaller wins as you work towards it. 

Increase your team’s sense of agency (aka self-belief). 

Remind team members individually, or as a whole, of what they’ve achieved before and what they are capable of now. Set them up to succeed in many small ways (including having them nail those achievable goals). Build up their sense of personal agency step by step to boost hopefulness and confidence.

Create multiple pathways for reaching goals. 

Never set a goal without including various pathways to achieve it. The more possible paths you can use to reach your achievable goal, the better. Work on one at a time — and be clear about what you’re working on when — but know that if Plan A doesn’t work, then Plan B and Plan C are waiting in the wings. That will increase hope for the whole team. Just be sure to have everyone commit to one pathway at a time. If you do want to put action steps in place for multiple pathways, just be sure from the beginning that everyone is super clear on who is working on which.

Coach leaders to navigate ambiguity.

First of all, uncertainty is tough because, as a leader, you have others counting on you. Your decisions can and will affect the organization and people’s lives, and often there is no clear “right” choice. This is where knowing yourself and your core values become so critical; this is what will help you make the best possible choice when all you have is your internal compass. With this in mind, here are several approaches that help:

• Clearly understand your core leadership values and leadership philosophy. This is a core part of the work I do. One client recently said he doesn’t know how he ever made decisions before this process.

• Focus on the Four Factors that matter the most when leading through complexity:

1. Shared purpose
2. Perspective-taking capacity
3. Dialogue 
4. Mindfulness

• Focus on cultivating habits, including what’s known as “simple habits for complex times.”

• Double down on self-care and emotional self-management.

Control your emotional state within your organization and team.

Only one hundred percent of the time! Leaders’ emotional states permeate their organizations. An anxious leader creates an anxious organization. A reactive leader and leadership team create a reactive organization. A composed leader lowers anxiety in their organization.

Be aware that America has an addiction to positive thinking.

When we’re addicted to seeing only the positive, we fail to look at reality — including realities about ourselves. Most people feel that they have two options: to see everything positively or to come down hard on things and themselves and be critical and judgmental. Neither of these are useful. 

What is useful is a combination of compassion and curiosity. Compassion allows us to look at reality, including the truth about ourselves, without judgment — then our curiosity is enabled by that lack of judgment. This clear-eyed, curious approach to anything allows us to investigate things more deeply and therefore improve or solve them. 

I encourage people not to be overly positive about themselves but instead be positive and hopeful about their ability to create change in themselves and their lives. The important thing is to attain results without unnecessary suffering. Many people create so much additional pain in their lives due to their unwillingness to face the original suffering. 

Another issue an addiction to positive thinking creates is that it oversteps grief. When a leader or an organization is stuck, that “stuckness” can often be traced to unprocessed grief. So many times, I have raised the possibility of unprocessed grief with clients to find that they instantly recognize it in themselves or their organizations. By paying attention to that grief, honoring and processing it, things are freed up to move forward. 

Stay focused.

Most clients seek help to shift from being a leader that raises anxiety in their team to being a leader that lowers anxiety. This includes things as diverse as having the discipline to set boundaries and remain focused on an achievable goal, through to being able to create an atmosphere of safety for people to try new things. It depends on the leader and their situation, but creating safety is always crucial. 

An example of this is an organization I’ve just started working with that has two idea-generating entrepreneurial founders who are continually coming up with new directions and possibilities for their organization, not realizing the thrash this creates for their leadership team and beyond. In this instance, lowering anxiety requires creating more clarity, consistency, and composure for their organization, which takes self-awareness and discipline on the founders’ part. 

Learn from difficult personal or professional challenges from the past.

They already have a successful strategy for overcoming things. They could ask themselves, “What have I learned from how I have overcome things in the past? How can I apply those approaches again when coming up against new challenges? What may need to be adapted or refreshed?” 

I would also say that one of the most important things we can have in adult life is a strong sense of agency or self-belief. Having overcome challenges in the past builds this sense of agency. You can draw from it in challenging times and help others around you do the same by reflecting on how they have successfully overcome hurdles in their own lives. This approach can also be used successfully with teams. 

Just as the First World War precipitated the society of that time into the twentieth century, it could well be that the year 2020 brought us similar disruption.

A microscopic virus managed to destabilize our lives, our habits, and our certainties. One year ago, who could have expected such turmoil? This virus has managed to traumatize many of us with long queues of coffins, putting a short term to what we considered was standard, economic growth, and prosperity that taken as a given. This little monster’s punitive journey followed an erratic trajectory, hitting regions that did not expect its visit and hence were badly prepared for its arrival. The impact made us collectively rediscover the relativity of things.

This pandemic has gnarled people’s patience; hence, polemics opposing preventive sanitary measures to individual freedom. In fact, what is at stake is a fundamental re-evaluation of our society’s values. That crisis has once again revealed our collective inability to find concerted solutions to address a problem, which is global by essence. Each State tries to define its path and to apply its solutions. This turmoil is shaking a number of the current political systems. We cannot yet measure the full impact of this pandemics’ pernicious effects. It would appear that we are far from being out of the tunnel with the longer-term consequences of it. We have no real clue what the “new normal” will look like, except that Asia is prone to come out stronger from this crisis and that it has accelerated our entrance into the digital area.

Very few times in recent years have our trajectories been so near dependent on the evolution of society. What each of us is doing may appear in that context as relatively futile, but at the same time, this crisis acts as revelatory. It is up to each family, to each one of us, to reinvent its sustainability model. Some couples have experienced difficulties to overcome the confinement period together, while others have felt their ties reinforced.

However, those strange circumstances did not affect my working rhythm. It was merely necessary to adapt — as everybody did — to the new working tools. Skype, Zoom, Google Meet, and a few other Californian neologisms have become our new daily work companions. I’m at least four to five hours a day in communication with India, the United States, our European neighbors, Russia, China, Singapore, and the Middle East. To establish new trust relationships by internet is far from easy, but once the relationship exists, we save a great deal of time! No queues in the airports, and no traffic jams. Anyway, let us face it: nothing will ever replace face-to-face contact, a frank handshake, the warmth of a smile!

I am surprised by what it has been possible to undertake and implement this year, despite such odd circumstances. It happened in a different way than expected, but the results are there. Of course, like everyone else, I have travelled less than during previous years due to the pandemic. I did not visit more than a dozen countries.

Now that we are reaching the end of this somewhat strange year, let us welcome 2021, with renewed optimism and energy, under the sign of an improved sanitary situation and the return to multilateral relations more favorable to global solutions.

Leaders’ work lives have become a whirlwind of daily demands — packed schedules, urgent meetings, pressing deadlines, and grinding out as much productivity as possible. Notifications and other interruptions fracture their attention further, undermining the ability to advance their most vital efforts. 

While these obligations will always have a place, leaders can be more intentional about designing schedules that advance their most important work. Here are seven practices grounded leaders use to shape their lives. 

1. Think bigger. To-do lists and urgent demands narrow a leader’s focus resulting in days consumed with less significant tasks and smaller outcomes. Establish a weekly ritual to counteract this tendency by reconnecting with your most meaningful and valuable aspirations. With this improved vantage point, you will see more valuable actions and find the resolve to counter the forces that attempt to undermine better choices.

2. Unproductive patterns. Escaping unproductive work patterns is no easy task. Review how you invested your time during the prior week. Where did you fulfill your intentions? Where were you blown off course (external forces)? Where did you wander (internal resistance)? Design a countermeasure to break one of your unproductive patterns in the week ahead.

3. Think smaller. Escaping ingrained patterns requires better choices. Don’t fall into the trap of making too many changes at once. Commit to one behavioral change that will meaningfully impact your life. It’s easy to forget that small changes create the momentum that leads to big, enduring shifts. 

4. Leverage boundaries. You can expect to face 50–60 unplanned interruptions per day. Achieving anything of significance requires focused attention. Design your week to include protections that fence you off from people and devices. With protections from external distractions in place, you can more readily focus on advancing your most meaningful priorities. 

5. Blank canvas. Each week offers an unlimited number of ways to invest your time. Taking back control involves consciously designing days that enliven you versus unconsciously reacting to the whirlwind around you (an ongoing design challenge). Design time for health, fun, family, and friends — not just work. As importantly, be sure to design space for recovery and doing nothing at all.

6. Concentrated effort. Your most significant work is a function of uninterrupted time and the focus you bring. Arrive committed to applying focused effort, or you will sabotage your protected time with less demanding, superficial work that you perceive as more pressing. Become skilled in resisting these diversions. 

7. Daily escapes. The design you envision for your day will come under attack. Rather than succumbing to forces that could undermine your intentions, imagine and enact escape paths. It takes just one second to switch from a less effective choice to a better one. 

The power to manifest a professional life filled with greater meaning and impact comes down to the quality of your imagination and choices. Little by little, your weekly adjustments in thought and effort, stacked one atop the other, can create dramatic breakthroughs in the quality of your outcomes and work experience. 

Real leaders are not afraid of a challenge. But 2020 presented obstacles like never before. In response, tens of thousands of people worldwide stepped up to save lives while putting their own at risk. 

To me, humanitarian workers stand out as particularly inspiring. In addition to overcoming tremendous uncertainty and fear of Covid-19, they faced down floods, droughts, historic swarms of locusts, and other crises to treat potentially life-threatening malnutrition among the world’s most vulnerable communities.

Women also have been on the front lines of the global response, often directing teams, working remarkably long hours in unimaginably difficult situations, sacrificing the ability to spend time with their own families to help others. I see them as leadership heroes and want to spotlight three leaders working in places that rank among the worst in the world for poverty and hunger, saving hundreds of young lives in the process. This is what real leadership looks like, and I hope more people will step up to lead in the year ahead.

Pakistan 

Dr. Ayesha Aziz (pictured above) runs a nutrition program in Sindh, Pakistan, where nearly half of children under five suffer from severe acute malnutrition – the deadliest form of hunger. She oversees approximately 2,800 community health care workers who go door-to-door, screening children ages six months to five years. Those who need treatment are referred to a treatment center where they can receive therapeutic foods; or a local hospital if they have pneumonia or other complications. 

Sindh was the first region of Pakistan hit by COVID-19. A lockdown was instituted, and fear swept through communities and among health care workers. Many people stopped going to health centers to get the nutrition treatment they needed. “Just getting people out and reaching the sites is one of the major challenges,” said Dr. Aziz.  

Health care workers were concerned, as they lacked the personal protective equipment (PPE) essential to stay safe. Supply chains were interrupted, causing some nutrition and other medical treatments to be unavailable for days at a time. 

Nevertheless, the team worked tirelessly with the local, district, and national governments to ensure that the nutrition centers were able to remain open and safely operating. After several weeks, PPE was procured so that the health care workers could safely continue their work, but the number of children traveling for nutrition treatment fell by approximately 75%. 

Dr. Aziz and her team overcame all of the obstacles to screening almost 500,000 children and are working to screen nearly one million more in the next several months. About 80,000 have been treated for malnutrition. Despite the ongoing threat of COVID-19, the team still goes door-to-door to monitor the children’s progress and help their families avoid a relapse into malnutrition.

Somalia

At the beginning of the pandemic, the De Martini Hospital in Somalia’s capital of Mogadishu was the country’s only coronavirus hospital, with just 71 beds to serve a city of more than two million. Fardosa Hussein, Action Against Hunger’s Somalia Communications Manager, visited the hospital to learn more about the facility and found something she didn’t expect: a close-knit community of women on the frontlines. These women were doctors, nurses, and other health care staff who left their families at home to live at the hospital – women who have been fighting to save every patient and support each other. 

“The reason I went to school to get an education is that, if such pandemics take place, I can be on the frontline to support my people,” said Xilwo Daud Ibrahim, a doctor who was not able to see her infant daughter or elderly parents for months. “I made a personal decision not to go home to reduce the risk of affecting my family.” 

Dr. Ibrahim said that many people in Somalia have been too scared to seek medical care due to the stigma of COVID-19; for those who did, there were not enough ventilators or other supplies. She and her colleagues watched many suffer and eventually die. 

Those suffering from malnutrition are much more vulnerable to the negative impacts of COVID-19, as their immune systems are already compromised. Even before the pandemic, one in three people in Somalia didn’t have enough food due to poverty, flooding, and swarms of locusts.

Despite these obstacles, doctors like Ibrahim showed up each day to save lives. “I will serve my people as long as I live,” she said. 

Bangladesh

When the first coronavirus case was confirmed in Cox’s Bazar on the southeast coast of Bangladesh, the government-imposed lockdowns. Suddenly, streets and buildings were emptied, markets and restaurants closed, and offices – once hives of activity – turned silent as staff members started working from home. 

But not every worker could stay indoors and protect themselves and their loved ones. During these difficult times, Abeda Sultana Liza, Action Against Hunger’s Supervisor for the Food For Peace Program, has been committed to fighting the virus and delivering essential services to those who depend on her. She considers herself a soldier in an army of dedicated humanitarian workers. 

Every day she wakes up early, shares her morning tea with her family, and sanitizes her motorcycle. Then she sets out with five other community facilitators, helping low-income families find ways to supplement their income to afford things like food, medicine, and school supplies. “We do not know who is sick and who is not, but we always make sure to keep a safe distance, sanitize our hands, clean equipment and have a big smile,” she said. 

Traveling between areas on her motorcycle, Liza’s days have gotten much longer due to COVID-19. She has put her professional life over her personal life, leaving her family early in the morning and coming home late, working hard to keep interactions with them to a bare minimum in case she has been exposed to the virus. “The first thing I will do after this ends is to give a big hug to my family, my team, and all the people I care about,” she said. “My fight with COVID-19 is not the only battle: I also fight hunger, poverty, inequality, discrimination, and global warming. I want everyone to have a better life. And I will keep on fighting.”

Of all the different trainings companies put employees through that they don’t think they need, imagine hearing that you will be required to undergo lessons about your character.

It doesn’t matter if you’re upper or middle management, the CEO, or a young rising star. When it comes to questions about character training, the responses I hear from even the most established leaders in Corporate America are pretty much the same.

“Why me?”

“Did I do something wrong?”

“What does this mean?”

“Am I in trouble?”

“Did I get put on a development plan without even knowing it?”

On a human level, I understand their defensiveness. It is jarring to feel as though your character is being questioned. Character is personal. It is linked to our sense of integrity, our perceived sound judgment, and who we fundamentally are. Questioning character is questioning our sense of self.

As an academic and a coach, I feel validated by the strong reactions. They prove that we feel so confident in our character that we do not even consider that we have flaws in our moral and ethical reasoning. With the same certainty and defensiveness echoed from those leaders, we all believe we are honest, have moral courage, and lead with integrity. We even believe we are humble! And this may be, for the most part, true. But if we can’t even for a moment consider that we have been shaped by biases of what we deem right or wrong, could we lack some of that humility we felt so strongly we had?

Consider why character training is so apt. Over the last few years, we have seen a major increase in CEO dismissals for ethical lapses, an increase in CEO turnover, and a rise in leadership failure within the first year and a half of a CEO assuming their new role. To me, the question isn’t, “why are we focusing on character training in leadership development?” but rather, “why has it taken until now to prioritize character in leadership development?”

Preventable ethical lapses have cost companies dearly. Shouldn’t we learn from these statistics that something can be done, helping save individuals and companies from scars to their reputations and bottom lines? Is the damaging, expensive, reactive way—how most things are currently done—the only way?

I’ve spent the last 40 years of my career coaching and studying successful people. I’ve trained 17 #1 athletes in their respective sport, numerous CEOs, NAVY seals and hostage rescue teams, and more than 400,000 executives through the B2B employee wellbeing and performance company I built and sold to Johnson & Johnson. The core of what I trained each of these very different groups in was the same: improving the performance of individuals, teams, and organizations for the long-term. Four decades have shown me that character is at the heart of sustained performance.

Performance vs. sustained performance (or performing at your best for the long-term) is an important distinction: no athlete’s ultimate goal is just to win a match; it’s to win the title. No CEO’s goal is to have one profitable year; it’s to succeed in that role for years to come and make an impact. If you’re mid-career or younger, your goal might be to move up in your organization and manage a bigger team. This is the long-game, over time. Character, too, plays the long-game.

Sure, we may get by fudging a number here or there, or keeping quiet when we believe the group is doing something ethically risky, or even outright lying now and again. But character, like strong performance, reveals itself over time. With repeated use, poor character traits that we didn’t bat a lash about become the new normal until one day something is done that is irreversible and leads to a dramatic end (losing a job, ending a relationship, creating a corporate crisis that takes years to emerge from, if the company ever does).

Character is challenged left and right, and it is often under the most difficult conditions that character strength and weakness come to light. Anyone can make a decision when the consequences are small, but it takes a special kind of strength to do the hard but right thing when your team is waiting for you to make a call and the pressure’s on. That strength is character strength.

As evidenced earlier by my not-quite warm welcomes introducing character training to executives, no one thinks they have flaws in their integrity. As humans, we are programmed to believe our actions are always serving our best interests. The truth is, no one is immune to character flaws or blind spots. Even the “best people” have work to do. Highlighting and training character is a new approach. Ultimately, it’s about helping people understand their natural tendencies and making the hard right decision when every bone in their body asks them to consent to make the easy, wrong decision.

If character is taken seriously–and is met with the same emphasis as other leadership imperatives– I believe we will see a positive transformation in years to come. Dismissals for ethical lapses will fall, and companies will be rewarded with leaders who work with integrity in all that they do.

When chaos and ambiguity are present, one of the first things to falter in both leaders and those within their organizations is hope.

Leaders’ emotional states impact their teams to a massive degree, so it’s crucial to cultivate hope early and often in the face of adversity to maintain your team’s motivation and strength of spirit. Many leaders and teams need an injection of hope right now. 

Hope is more than just a feeling; it has been proven to be a mental construct. And it can be cultivated — which is excellent news for any leader looking to rally their organization amid uncertainty. There are three things you can put in place in your life, your team, and your organization that will increase hope, based on Charles Snyder’s research into Hope Theory, and I’ll share a final fourth step as well. 

1. Create achievable goals

When people are feeling low on hope, it’s easy to have either no goal at all or have a really big goal. What’s needed in these times, however, is an achievable goal. For example, on a personal level, you might recognize that you can’t control the arc of the pandemic, but you can control your investment of time, your peak performance wellness habits, etc. 

At the business level, now may not the time to “go big” and, say, try to double your business. Instead, set an achievable goal like maintaining your existing revenue or retaining your staff during this time of crisis.

If your organization is kicking goals consistently, don’t worry about this so much. On the other hand, if they need to get their mojo and confidence back, be sure to set achievable goals, they know they can hit — then watch their motivation and confidence rise.

Another idea is to take that big, unruly goal you’re all addicted to and break it down into smaller ones. Keep it close. Keep it real. Keep it possible.

2. Build a sense of agency

Agency is our sense of self-belief, self-confidence. Encouraging your team’s sense of agency and integrity — and demonstrating these yourself — will boost their sense of hope. Ask yourself: 

• To what degree do I take committed action, then follow through with it to completion? 
• To what degree do I believe myself when I commit?

Working on your sense of agency and self-control and ensuring your team does the same will increase hope. Remind them individually, or as a team, of what they’ve achieved before — what they are capable of — and set them up to succeed in a lot of small ways (including having them nail and celebrate those achievable goals). Step by step, build their agency.

3. Establish multiple pathways

Don’t just have a Plan A to achieve your goals. Have a Plan B and a Plan C as well. Having multiple pathways to success will help ensure that your goals are met and will build confidence and hopefulness in you and your team along the way. 

The more potential pathways you can use to reach your achievable goal, the better. Knowing that if Plan A doesn’t work, then Plan B and Plan C are waiting in the wings increases hope. However, the critical thing is to be sure to work on one plan at a time, be super clear if and when you shift to the new plan, and very clear from the outset who is working on what. And one goal with multiple pathways is not to be confused with numerous goals, which most organizations suffer from. Know the difference. 

4. Elevate your perspective-taking capacity

If you’re unfamiliar with this term, it comes from Dr. Michael Cavanagh’s four-factor model for leading through complexity. Perspective-taking capacity is key to instilling more hope in your organization and your team. Put simply, it includes the wisdom that we’ve been through things in the past and have come through them and that we will go through things again and survive. The ability to see higher, broader, and farther than others in terms of impact and timelines is what distinguishes a leader’s perspective-taking capacity. For this reason, I often find that leaders with an interest in and knowledge of history have the greatest wisdom, composure, and perspective. They know that “this too shall pass,” and this ability to ground themselves positively impacts those around them. 

These are four evidence-based leadership approaches you can apply right now to cultivate a sense of hope when otherwise things feel out of control. Honing your ability to prioritize and build hope will serve as a guiding light for your organization and your team to ensure that, with your leadership, you will all emerge stronger than before.