Salvatore R. Maddi, Ph.D.
University of California, Irvine and the Hardiness Institute

When your life gets stressful, it is really important to stay involved with the people and events going on around you, rather than attempting to protect yourself by avoiding it all or striking out. This attitude of commitment (rather than avoidance or attack) is especially powerful when combined with the related attitudes of control and challenge. Control means that you will continue to try to influence outcomes, even when things get rough (rather than sink into powerlessness). Challenge means that you will see the stresses as natural, and a stimulus to learning from them and growing in the process (rather than bitterly yearning for easy comfort and security). Together, the 3Cs of commitment, control, and challenge define personal hardiness, which our research and practice has shown constitutes the courage to live as well as you can. This hardiness, or courage, is the pathway to not only surviving, but also thriving under pressure, by turning stressful circumstances from potential disasters into opportunities for growth, development, and wisdom.

You may be thinking that this sounds good, but how in the world can anyone actually do it? Is it not naïve to think that you can just turn all the stresses that happen into advantages? The book that Deborah Khoshaba and I have just written answers these questions in two ways.i

First, our book summarizes twenty years of research and practice on how commitment, supplemented by control and challenge, positively influences the lives of people under stress. Hundreds of studies have been done on working adults in companies, or military, safety, and health-care organizations, as well as homemakers and retirees. Studies have also been done on college and high-school students. The results are very consistent: The higher your attitudes of commitment, control, and challenge (the courage of hardiness) the better your performance, conduct, stamina, and health under stressful conditions. An example is that hardiness, measured before members of the military go abroad on combat or peace-keeping missions, protects them against posttraumatic stress, and depression disorders when they encounter life-threatening stresses. Other examples show that among working adults, the higher the hardiness level the better the performance, leadership, and job satisfaction. Further, immigrants to this country, and people doing work missions abroad show greater ability to deal effectively with culture shock the higher is their hardiness level. Among college students, hardiness is a powerful predictor of retention and grade point average. As to high school students, hardiness has been shown to predict sports performance in those who are varsity athletes, and avoidance of alcohol and drug abuse in general. With the growing accumulation of such research findings, it behooves us to relinquish skepticism concerning the value of HardiAttitudes of commitment, control, and challenge in constructing the good life.

Secondly, our book immerses you in the process of building the attitudes and skills constituting hardiness, or existential courage. This is based on our carefully-formulated, technologically advanced HardiTraining program, and our years of practice utilizing it to help people. The HardiSkills involve coping with stressful circumstances in a way that transforms them to your advantage, and interacting with others in a way that resolves conflicts and replaces them with social support. Then, we show you how to use the feedback from your coping and social interaction efforts to deepen your HardiAttitudes, so that you have that increased courage for next time.

Most of our stressful circumstances involve other people, so let us merge the coping and social interaction efforts in this brief introduction. As our book explains, the first step is to make a list of the significant social relationships in your life (such as with family members, friends, loved ones, fellow employees, community members). Then rate the level of social support involved in each of these relationships. What you need to work on is the relationships where there is insufficient social support, indeed, conflicts. The point is not to avoid these relationships, or strike out at the other, but rather, to resolve the conflicts and replace them with a mutual pattern of giving and getting assistance and encouragement. This is a HardiSkill.

Once you have identified a relationship that is undermined by a conflict, ask yourself how this difficulty comes about? What is the other person's contribution, and also, what is your own? Perhaps the other tends to get angry when you disagree about something, and you then respond by withdrawing, or fighting back. Neither of these reactions is ideal on your part. Instead, you need to discuss the conflict constructively. Start by admitting your tendency to withdraw or fight back, and how this may be hard to take. Go from there to sympathizing with the other person's frustration when you disagree. Here is where you make the transition from conflict to assistance and encouragement. You will probably have to make this transition unilaterally, so practice seeing the ability to do that as strength, rather than weakness. Tell the other person that when he/she expresses anger, you will realize that as painful frustration, and will try to help it get expressed as such, by your appreciation and encouragement.

Then, you have to carry this out. Listen carefully whenever the person expresses anger about an interaction with you. Just how is the person feeling threatened or undermined? Speak to that, by indicating that it is not your intention to obstruct the relationship. Try to assist the person to talk about the problem, rather than just express anger. You can do this by talking about it yourself, rather than responding angrily. Also let the person know how much he/she matters to you, even when there is a disagreement. Make suggestions about resolving the disagreement that take into account the other's needs and beliefs, along with your own. If you take this stance of giving assistance and encouragement, it is likely that the other person will follow suit. After all, it is difficult to keep striking out against another who is trying to understand and help the relationship, for the good of you both. But, be careful in all this not to subtly put all the blame on the other. Remember that relationships are a two-way street, so you are not likely to be an innocent victim. It is less important who is to blame, than how the relationship can be improved.

The final step is that, as you and the other person swing toward working constructively on the relationship, think carefully about the feedback you are getting. You are learning that you can actually improve relationships by increasing in commitment to them, despite stressful arguments that festered in the past. This will deepen your HardiAttitudes of commitment, control, and challenge. So, as other relationships occur, you will approach them convinced that you can deepen them through staying involved despite disagreements, and promoting mutual assistance and encouragement, rather than fighting.