Perseverance balances faith and honesty

Overcoming adverse circumstances involves simultaneously never losing hope that things will get better while also facing the brutal reality that the hoped-for outcome will not be easy or immediate. James Stockdale exemplified this in “Hanoi Hilton” Prisoner of War camp during the Vietnam war:

Stockdale understood that two groups of POWs were at risk: those who were overly optimistic (“We’ll be out by Christmas!”) and those who had lost hope (“We will never get out alive.”)… By balancing faith and optimism with brutal honesty about their dire straits, Stockdale positioned the Hanoi Hilton inmates to do the seemingly impossible: to defeat their captors’ attempts to use them for propaganda and to return home as a team, without abandoning each other or their values.^[1]

#character #leadership