We live in a moment when our collective faith in national figures—be they from government, business, or religion—is waning. When we think about the latest election or most recent financial scandal and take stock of the people we call leaders, we grow concerned that the men and women capable of tackling the problems and delivering on the promise of this age aren’t among their ranks.

History helps us here. It gives us perspective on how other people, in other times, dealt with huge challenges and large opportunities. It provides a sharp lens through which to view ordinary people doing extraordinary things. It also exposes the fallacies in some of our current assumptions about leadership.

Consider polar explorer Ernest Shackleton whose expedition to the South Pole in 1914 turned perilous when his ship became trapped in pack ice and then sank, leaving the leader to try to get his twenty-seven men safely back home to Britain. Relying on few physical assets other than three lifeboats and some canned goods, his most important resources in ensuring his men’s safety turned out to be his own resilience and a commitment to survive.

Consider Abraham Lincoln’s experience as president during 1862, the second year of the Civil War. This was an extraordinarily difficult period for the Union, the federal forces fighting to preserve the United States as one nation, and the thoughtful, calculating, and worry-laden man who was commander-in-chief. The government was running out of men, money, and political capital to prosecute the war. Staggering under the weight of a divided nation, Lincoln had very few cards left to play yet he forged a path forward to eventual victory.

Consider escaped slave and abolitionist Frederick Douglass, in 1847, when he left the safety and freedom of Great Britain to return to the United States where he faced possible recapture or death. There, he chose a bold, self-determined path as a speaker, writer, and political agitator for the cause of black freedom.

Consider Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a young German minister in Berlin in 1933 when the National Socialists came to power. Almost immediately, he recognized the grave threat that Hitler and his regime posed to Jews, civil and ecclesiastical liberties, and world peace. Long before his fellow countrymen understood the extent of Nazi ambitions, Bonhoeffer resisted the Third Reich, even if it meant imprisonment and the threat of death.

Finally, consider environmental activist Rachel Carson. At a time when few women made their living in the sciences, she was an experienced marine biologist, and by the mid-1950s, she was also a best-selling author. In 1962, this quiet, reserved woman raced against the clock as she battled a life-threatening disease in order to finish her landmark book Silent Spring, which set the world on fire and forced the government, business, and American citizens to confront the dangers of synthetic pesticides like DDT and the larger issue of man’s long-term relationship with the earth. Ultimately, she would lose her battle with terminal cancer.

Each of these examples shows us a leader in a position to make an enormous difference, and each rose to the challenge. Their stories are as astounding as any from the great myths, adventure novels, and films that we remember and return to again and again. The difference is that these stories are real; they actually happened. They’re part of our past, and while each of these stories mattered a great deal in their respective eras, they also have much to offer our generation and those that come after.

For example, these high-achieving individuals make it clear that leaders can emerge from many different backgrounds, genders, races, and personality types. A shy, reserved person like Rachel Carson turns out to be as authoritative as the president of the United States. Charisma and aggressiveness, two attributes we often associate with important leaders, aren’t essential to making a big, worthy impact. Nor is real leadership primarily a result of specific endowments with which a few special people are born. The truth, it turns out, is quite different.

Courageous leadership is the result of individual people committing to work from their stronger selves, discovering a mighty purpose, and motivating others to join their cause. In the process, each of the leaders and the people they inspire are made more resilient, a bit bolder, in some instances, even more luminous. When this happens, impact expands, and the possibility grows for moving goodness forward in the world.

These figures knew during their lifetimes that they’d accomplished their respective missions. But none knew the full power of their influence—influence that continues to reverberate. What each person could see was that he or she was in the midst of a profound personal crisis. It was not of their making. And none of the five had seen such turbulence coming. But once they were in the middle of calamity, they recognized that they couldn’t falter and then fail to recover; they couldn’t give up. Rather, each resolutely navigated through the storm and was transformed in the process.

Each of these leaders was thus forged in crisis. Intentionally, sometimes bravely, and with the messy humanity that defines all of us when we’re at our most vulnerable, each of these people made themselves into effective agents of worthy change. They worked first from the inside out—from within themselves—in terms of the commitment they made to a bigger purpose, the courage they summoned to adhere to this purpose in the face of huge setbacks, and the emotional awareness they harnessed to navigate the turbulence around them. They then used the internal assets and insights they gleaned about their own leadership to try to change the world in important, positive ways.

The insights that these five individuals stumbled upon, cultivated, and honed were not radically new or unusually bold; they wouldn’t easily slot into a modern executive’s dashboard to be used in auto-pilot fashion. They made no pretense of forming some kind of winning playbook for leaders. No, the insights that these four men and one woman absorbed were often subtle. Early in his presidency, for example, Lincoln discovered the power of doing nothing in certain circumstances, of mastering his own emotions in a specific situation carefully enough to take no immediate action, and, in some instances, of forbearing to do anything at all. In our own white-hot moment, when so much of our time and attention is focused on instantaneous reaction, it seems almost inconceivable that nothing might be the best something we can offer. But Lincoln came to understand this well, and he and the country benefitted from his understanding.

Equally subtle, in 1937, when Carson assumed an editorial position for the agency that became the Fish and Wildlife Service, she quickly realized that her bureaucratic commitments at work and her caretaking responsibilities at home would prevent her from doing nearly as much freelance writing as she hoped. In the wake of this disappointment, she came to see the importance of her work in the context of “gathering years,” of preparing herself for what she was meant to do at some point in the future, when the larger opportunity arrived. The concept that, at times, the most powerful thing one can do is invest in oneself without signs of great outward progress, is another that is difficult for us to grasp today. We’re so keen to arrive right now, to check this or that objective off our lists and move on, that we have trouble realizing that periods of gathering—our strength, tools, and experiences—are as significant as the big, external leaps forward along our paths.

Leaders are made. They are not born. As we see in these five examples, there was nothing genetically or divinely ordained about what they accomplished, or how they motivated other people to meet serious challenges. The four men and one woman here became effective leaders by dint of working on themselves: intentionally choosing to make something better of who they were, even in midst of crisis, and never losing sight of the larger, dynamic stage on which they found themselves. Relatively early in their lives, each came to see his or her setbacks as classrooms in which they could sharpen their skills, improve their emotional strengths, and minimize specific weaknesses. With experience, they learned to detach themselves enough from the immediacy of their circumstances to observe the bigger landscape and their place in it, and to take action—within themselves and in relation to external goals—from this perspective.

The work they did on themselves wasn’t some kind of formal Bildungsroman brought to life. No, the self-development work that these leaders did was generally unnamed and unforeseen. It was often accomplished in an ad hoc fashion, in response to an obstacle in their way or a new realization. But once learned, the particular skill, aspect of emotional mastery, or powerful insight became a part of the individual leader’s tool belt—to be used and strengthened going forward. And, as all five individuals came to realize, the harder they worked on themselves, the more effective they became as leaders.

In my experience as a scholar and executive coach, the concept of leaders being made rather than born is often difficult to appreciate. We live in an age that assumes that individuals of great vision and impact are the result of rare, valuable endowments: all nature, little nurture. Whether these gifts are magnetism, strategic planning, public speaking abilities, or something else, we tend to assume they’re divinely ordained. (Perhaps this assumption explains some of the very destructive run-up in executive compensation during the last thirty years.) So we search ardently—if vainly—for these haloed men and women, only to find ourselves angry and disappointed when so many leaders from different walks of life turn out to be incompetent, greedy, or worse.

Effective leadership is a term much bandied about today. But it’s often used in frustratingly vague, and, at times, self-serving, ways. The best definition I’ve encountered is from the American writer David Foster Wallace. Wallace became famous for his novels, including Infinite Jest, but he also wrote thoughtful essays. In 2000, he published an article in Rolling Stone about the first John McCain presidential campaign. In the piece, Wallace riffed on the broader subject of real leadership, including how the word “leader” has become a cliché that is so boring our eyes glaze over when we see it. This is weird, he continued, because “when you come across somebody who actually is a real leader, that person isn’t boring at all; in fact he is the opposite of boring.”

Wallace then went on to define “real”—what I call “courageous” or “effective”—leaders as individuals “who can help us overcome the limitations of our own individual laziness and selfishness and weakness and fear and get us to do better, harder things than we can get ourselves to do on our own.” This definition captures a whole lot about courageous leaders—men and women from whom we can learn and draw credible inspiration—including their ability to see the intersection of human agency and larger historical forces and then, from this perspective, to incite others to right action.

Like the months that Shackleton and his crew spent stranded on the ice, the four years of terrible, turbulent civil war that Lincoln found himself at the center of, or the decades of large-scale, untested chemical use that Carson took up in Silent Spring, our own time—the early twenty-first century—cries out for effective, decent leaders. People of purpose and commitment who want to make a positive difference and who choose to rise: first within themselves, by claiming their better selves, and then on the larger stage, by staking out the higher ground.

Making oneself into a courageous leader is perilous, compelling, and exhausting work that is also some of the most satisfying one can do. As we try to craft lives of purpose, dignity, and impact, we must look to the past and mimic the example of the courageous leaders who have come before us. The world has never needed us to heed their lessons of courage and determination more than it does now. Our collective future depends on it.

Excerpted and adapted from Forged in Crisis: The Power of Courageous Leadership in Turbulent Times by Nancy Koehn. Copyright © 2017 by Nancy Koehn. Excerpted and adapted by permission from Scribner, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, Inc.



