A recent area of research of mine is in the psychological concept of “hardiness.” Hardiness, put simply, is the ability to withstand and perform well under stress. The concept was initially defined in the late seventies when a guy named Kobasa began studying the psychological profiles of men working as executives for AT&T during a financial crisis in which many of them were losing their jobs. Kobasa found that certain men portrayed specific characteristics which, over the course of the five-year study, kept them emotionally happier, physically healthier and at a higher level of job performance. Since then, this concept has been refined and tested in many “high reliability occupations:” Those in which demands are high and failure can be catastrophic. The military is, of course, full of such jobs and the Special Operations Communities have been studied intensively. The biological markers of stress-resistant individuals have been identified earlier… read more »
