Bend or Break - The Pain Game

Written by Kai Adams

“It ain’t about how hard you can hit. It’s about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward.”

So says the philosopher-fighter Rocky Balboa, perennial underdog, punching bag, and people’s champion as he moves through life, stoically absorbing its shocks. He is the epitome of resilience. And we love him for it.

The thing is, I reckon you could change the words “Rocky Balboa” and substitute them for the name of many a leader.

Those who rise against adversity.

Who can take the punishment.

Who can win against the odds.

Who can, as another – this time real – champ, Jack Dempsey, put it, “get up when they can’t.”

This kind of resilience – which the Oxford dictionary defines as the ability to recover from difficulty quickly, or (more graphically!) the ability to return to an original shape after being bent, stretched or pressed – has been fetishised.

Sure, it’s important to be able to bounce-back. Resilience isn’t a bad thing. But it shouldn't have this totemic value.

Because unlike the Weebles of the Seventies, we don’t just wobble.

We do fall over.

And we break, dammit.

We’re unquestionably seeing a higher degree of stress, anxiety, and fatigue from leaders in the current market.

We’re definitely seeing more and more leaders with burnout.

With emotional concussion.

So, rather than filling role descriptions and person specifications with demands for heroic resilience, I’d put the onus on different qualities of even greater importance in boxing as in life: agility and adaptability.

The difference between withstanding the punches and evading them. Or at the very least, rolling with them.

Cus D’Amato, Mike Tyson’s trainer once said, "Boxing is a sport of agility, speed, and timing”.

Well so is leadership.

As complexity grows, pressure increases and pace of change accelerates around us, it’s unhealthy to fixate solely on what someone can tolerate.

Instead, we should focus on how nimbly they react. How well they draw on and deploy the breadth of their experience. How well they “move in and out, shift their weight quickly … always ahead of their opponent.”Dempsey again.

Joe Frazier, famed for his heavy hitting, counterintuitively believed, “you control the fight with your movement." It’s not (just) about hitting – or being hit – it’s about moving. About reframing. About finding new angles. When your plan goes out the window the moment you “get punched in the mouth”(Tyson, of course!), it is your capacity to adapt that allows you to make adjustments to unfolding events. To deal with the new situation. To change.

Maybe none of us will ever be as fast as the glorious Muhammad Ali, who quipped, “I'm so fast that last night I turned off the light switch in my hotel room and was in bed before the room was dark.” Not all of us will get through the ‘fight’ and remain as unblemished, or as ‘pretty’.

But if we continue to put resilience ahead of adaptability, we’re at real risk of more leaders throwing in the towel, as Roberto Duran did with his famous cry of, “No más”.

Rather than asking the leaders of tomorrow to withstand, let's teach them to duck and weave.