Beyond Grit
The capstone test for Navy SEAL candidates, Hell Week, is notorious for its brutal difficulty.
It’s five and a half days of extreme training designed to push candidates to the utter brink. It includes sleep deprivation and hypothermia from kneeling in the frigid ocean water with waves crashing into you, all while being assigned physically and mentally demanding tasks to complete. The goal is simple: evaluate how people react under extreme fatigue, stress, and uncertainty.
Can a candidate pull their mind away from the misery of the situation and figure out how to get themselves and their teammates through it? Who can slow the world down and act skillfully during challenging situations? Who has true toughness? For decades, the US military has been trying to uncover the secret sauce that those who make it through Hell Week possess. Do they have a certain mental attribute that separates them from the rest? Research has been mixed, at best. When we asked a former Navy SEAL about who made it versus who didn’t, he replied:
There is no one thing that determines the success or failure of a candidate. However, going into it, I thought the team sports guys, the former football types, would have an advantage. They were used to working with others towards a goal. They were big, strong guys. But I was wrong. The candidates who came from individual sports requiring endurance– rowers, runners, swimmers, wrestlers–those guys made it at a higher rate. I don’t know what it is, but maybe they were used to suffering, being alone in their head. This isn’t just conjecture.
A study commissioned by the US military investigated which physical test could best predict Hell Week success. It evaluated over 2,000 candidates on tasks ranging from strength, speed, agility, and endurance. The best predictor: a 4-mile run. In particular, if you run 4 miles in 28 minutes or over, you have less than 8% of surviving hell week. Improving that time by just over 2 minutes to run under 26 minutes, and the success rate jumps up to 25%. The best success rate, sitting at 35%, belongs to those who run under 24 minutes for the 4-mile course. “The take-home message is to improve your running to the best of your ability because it is the single most important factor for completing Hell Week,” write the study’s authors.
We can only speculate why running faster tends to improve success rates. It could be that Hell Week requires more endurance, aerobic fitness, and a better capacity to recover from the countless tasks. That certainly is a part of it. But we’d be remiss if we didn’t consider the mental component. When Steve spoke with one of his former athletes who also happens to be in the military, he relayed a story about being stranded in the woods: “It’s easy to lose your head out there. You’re in the woods, with nothing to eat and no idea where you are for days on end. No clue when your next meal is coming or when you will be out of here. Stress, anxiety, lack of sleep, and food; that’s the name of the game. People spiral bad. A normal guy can turn into a shell of himself by the end. People default to their basic survival instincts.” When asked about what he thought separated those who were able to keep their cool versus those who let the experience get to them, he said:
You know, in the middle of a race, where you are having that inner debate? Half your mind is screaming at you to slow down as your legs burn with what feels like battery acid. And the other half of your mind is saying, ‘No! Toughen up. You can get through this. You’re fine.’ Being in survival situations is like having that conversation constantly, for hours on end. It’s unrelenting. You’ve got to get used to that back and forth in your head, how to filter out the bad. Running made it where I was used to finding a path through the negative mess. Some guys are used to doing that for short bursts, like a football player who needs to suck it up for a 3-second play before he gets a break to regroup. Others have never really had to experience it all. Modern life allows you to escape without having to win the inner battle. In running and survival, you have to learn how to live on that edge with no breaks coming until it’s all over. That’s not a fun or easy thing to do. Was Steve’s former athlete onto something real in his observations? Did toughness lie in the ability to create space for proper decision-making?
In a study out of the University of Western Australia, coaches of elite Australian rules football teams were asked what characteristics represent toughness. At the top of the list: “consistent and superior decision-makers.” Last on their list: “physical attributes.” In another survey of over 130 elite coaches across sports, the most important characteristic of toughness was concentration. What the research and experience of Navy Seals and Steve’s former athlete point towards is, contrary to the popularly held view, real toughness is not about gritting your teeth, hiding your fear, or blindly pushing through whatever obstacles you encounter. External acts of manliness, strength, and physical posturing may create an illusion of toughness, but they are often telltale signs that someone lacks it, especially when they are contrived or merely performative. The concept of toughness is difficult to pin down. We all intuitively know what it means, but when we drill down to what makes up toughness, it’s not so straightforward. In academia, over 30 attributes have been attributed to toughness, including: determination, confidence, self-control, handling pressure, discipline, dealing with adversity, intrinsic motivation, self-belief, and work ethic. The concept of toughness can apply to just about whatever we want it to. Maybe this is why we constantly profess its value? But instead of having a concept that can mean whatever we want, why not narrow toughness down into the core performance issue that it is trying to represent? What do the military experiences described above have in common with improving a basketball team? Or the employee who is about to give a major presentation, the parent who has to decide what the best route for their child is after they’ve gotten in trouble, or the physician needing to nail a challenging case or deliver bad news to a patient? In nearly every situation, we talk about it being tough or the protagonist needing toughness. What we are after is: did the person (or team) make a good decision under stress? Did they handle the situation skillfully? Did they choose to get up after getting knocked down, to work through their anxiety, to make the difficult decision to move on from a failed project?
When it comes to toughness, it’s all about the decision and how you go about making it. True toughness is quiet and comes deep from within. It’s about making the right choice under stress, uncertainty, and fatigue. It requires emotional control: cultivating the power to respond instead of react, and thus make thoughtful, deliberate decisions during pressure-filled situations. It is born from genuine self-assurance rooted in confidence, not arrogance. Toughness is about figuring out how to thrive in the face of stress, adversity, and everyday challenges. It isn’t concerned with posturing; it’s about what puts individuals in the best place to find the most skillful answer in difficult situations. On the athletic fields, it means staying calm and collected to make a pass while 300 pound linemen are about to tackle you to the ground; refocusing with clarity instead of rage after your last pitch just got knocked out of the park by the opposing team; accepting that the correct decision is to ignore your ego and turn back down the mountain despite the peak being a stone’s throw away, lest you summit in a bad weather window and never make it back down. In coaching and leadership, toughness means offering guidance, but not holding someone’s hand; putting your charges in situations where they are challenged just beyond their reach; letting individuals figure it out with support and care, not mindless discipline; seeing failure not as an invitation for punishment, but as a necessary part of growth and development; allowing for exploration and imperfection. The route towards such toughness doesn’t lie in being callous, but in being vulnerable. It recognizes your strengths and weaknesses so you can learn how to respond to whatever you face. In other words, toughness is a skill that you can develop—not through mindless suffering, but intentional practice.
In this week’s podcast, we go even deeper, teaching you how to develop toughness, as we bring nuance, hard-earned expertise, and science to a topic that is often reduced to ‘grit it out.’ Toughness is more than that. Check it out here (Apple/Spotify).
– Steve and Brad
The post Beyond Grit first appeared on The Growth Equation.
