She had a great corporate job, doing what she felt called and equipped to do. Then Toni Munoz Kaufman contracted SARS, which nearly killed her and did cost her a lung. As she recovered, she was laid off. But her joyous spirit and wisdom passed down from her father pushed her to persevere and help other Baby Boomers overcome their crucibles as entrepreneurs.
Understanding what science has to say about learning the lessons of a crucible experience — from reframing what happened to embracing forgiveness — can be an overlooked key to moving past the pain and toward healing and significance.
Heroic leaders like Winston Churchill and Abraham Lincoln get movies made about them — just like superheroes such as Batman and Captain America. But the rousing triumphs that echo through history, or comic books, aren’t the whole story — or even sometimes the best story. Quietness, patience and humility are key qualities of success and significance even for great leaders.
His big-deal career and its big-money perks left him unsatisfied. So he stopped seeing success as outperforming others and started serving others. Today he’s the best-selling author of The Millennial Whisperer and making a lasting impact on the leaders of tomorrow.
After losing her husband to a military training accident, she fought for joy for herself and her four children by moving beyond surviving.
Mike Valentine was a blue-collar kid who grew into a blue-collar young man, a longshoreman’s son who began working as a steelworker as a teenager, walking his first skyscraper beam at 14. His was a hardscrabble existence: He spent the next decade and a half addicted to alcohol and beset with its devastations — bar fights, car accidents and times behind bars. All that changed when his daughter was born — and he turned his attention to living life in pursuit of a worthy purpose.
Listening is one of the most necessary, and least practiced, leadership skills in business and life today. And lest you think lack of listening is a new phenomenon, brought on by the last few decades of tech advances that have created tech distractions, think again. Harvard Business Review found in 1957 that people remember only about half of what they hear, even when they’re trying really hard to dial in.
Fewer than 10 percent of those living with Parkinson’s Disease are under 60. Tim Hague is one of them. As a nurse for two decades, he sensed immediately what was wrong when, at age 46, he noticed a tremor in his left toe. His self-diagnosis was soon confirmed, and in the months that followed he pressed deeply into his Christian faith to grasp “Why has God done this to me?” But he refused to wallow in regret or self-doubt, and just three years later he was competing on, and winning, The Amazing Race in his home country of Canada.
Ernest Shackleton and the men he was leading on an expedition to cross Antarctica had piled up a breathtaking number of life-threatening crucibles by late 1915. Stuck motionless in polar block ice for months, hundreds of miles off course with no way to communicate their location to anyone who could help, Shackleton and his men were running low on the supplies they had already been forced to ration in miserly fashion when their greatest disaster struck: The ice that had trapped their ship now closed in to crush it, leaving the men fully exposed to the bitter cold with no choice but to traverse the ice floes that surrounded them in desperate search of safety.
Nancy Koehn was on track for an administrative leadership role at Harvard Business School, where she taught the history of leadership to the world’s best and brightest. But a series of personal crucibles — the death of her father, a divorce that came without warning and decimated her finances, a cancer diagnosis — caused the floorboards of her personal and professional lives to crumble beneath her.