Resilience does not come from understanding stress. It comes from living through a difficult situation with someone there to help you process it. A resilience programme therefore produces knowledge about resilience rather than resilience itself, and the difference only shows when it is too late.
In its third evaluation report, the US Army concluded that there was now sound scientific evidence that the Comprehensive Soldier Fitness programme improves soldiers‘ resilience and psychological health.2
That sentence first needs to be taken seriously, because it rests on the best conditions any development programme has ever had.
Launched in 2009, the programme was the largest attempt to build psychological resilience ever undertaken. Over a hundred million dollars, more than a million soldiers, a concept built on positive psychology and on the work of leading academics.12 It did not originate in a budget office. It was created at a time when the institution had good reason to believe that preparing its people mattered more than anything else.
The logic was watertight. People are going into an environment that will break them. Let us teach them resilience before they get there.
And if that assumption held anywhere, it would hold here. The participants were not managers at an away day. They were people with the strongest motivation possible, a motivation nobody in a corporate classroom has, and the institution put money, time and the best experts it could find into their preparation.
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