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The Five Factors Of Personal Resilience


If you want to build the psychological body armor to achieve personal resilience, then the book, Stronger, is a must-read for you. 

That body armor consists of five factors of personal resilience:
  • active optimism
  • decisive action
  • moral compass
  • relentless tenacity
  • interpersonal support
According to the authors, these five factors of personal resilience are keys to improving your work habits and output in the workplace, and to achieving overall satisfaction from life.

Backed by compelling scientific findings and packed with powerful stories of resilience in action, Stronger teaches you how to gain an edge on making sound decisions under pressure, bounce back from setbacks and layoffs, and motivate peak performance in others as well as yourself,

Each chapter includes self-assessment questions and homework for choosing one thing you'll do the next day to help you begin to develop each of the five factors of your personal resilience body armor.

In addition, the authors explain that their professed five factors of personal resilience are a sequential prescription:
  1. Active optimism is more than a hope or a belief. It's a mandate to bounce back. But the optimistic mandate to be resilient alone is not enough. It must lead to...
  2. Decisive action. You must act in order to rebound. You must learn how to leave behind the comfort of the status quo and make difficult decisions. Making hard decisions to act is easier when based on a...
  3. Moral compass, which includes four points: honor, integrity, fidelity and ethics. Use these to guide your decisions under challenging circumstances. Once your decisions are made, employ...
  4. Relentless tenacity. Carry with you a relentless defiance of failure.
  5. And then, remember that no person is, nor ever should be, an island. Great strength is derived from the support of others...interpersonal support.


One of my favorite parts of the book is the section about achieving success. The authors explain that "If you think you will succeed at something, you are likely to attempt the task with greater effort, enthusiasm, and tenacity. You are less willing to accept initial rejection or failure. You are more likely to see those occurrences as exceptions to the rule and simply precursors of your inevitable success. You will find that your positive beliefs affect your performance."

The book's three authors are:

George Everly Jr., Ph.D., who has consulted with FEMA, ATF, and the FBI National Academy. He serves as Associate Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and Professor of Psychology at Loyola University Maryland.

Douglas A. Strouse, Ph.D., who is founder and CEO of Global Data Source, and a pioneer in special operations leadership and one of the original Navy SEALs, 

Dennis K. McCormack, Ph.D., who holds doctoral degrees in leadership and clinical psychology. 

The authors will donate one-third of the royalties from Stronger to the Navy SEAL Foundation.
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