Five Games, five golds — and a definition of resilience that has nothing to do with gritting your teeth. What the great oarsman taught me about the crew.
When I sat down with Steve Redgrave, I expected to hear about suffering.
Five Olympic Games. Five gold medals. Diabetes diagnosed mid-career. He is, by any measure,
one of the most resilient athletes Britain has ever produced. I assumed the conversation
would be about grit, about pushing through, about the mental discipline of refusing to quit.
It was not that conversation.
What Redgrave talked about, more than anything else, was his crew.
Resilience, in his telling, was not an individual trait. It was a relational one. The reason he kept
going - through the setbacks, the illness, the years when lesser men would have retired - was
not some private reserve of willpower. It was the men in the boat with him. The shared
commitment. The fact that stopping would have been a betrayal of something beyond himself.
That reframed everything I thought I knew about the subject.
We talk about resilience as though it is internal. As though the way to build it is to toughen
yourself up, to learn to sit with discomfort, to grit your teeth and carry on.
But the evidence - from sport, from the military, from the research - points somewhere
different. The people who endure hardship best are almost never the ones who do it alone.
They are the ones who are embedded in something. A team. A crew. A group of people who
are counting on them and being counted on in return.
Business owners are taught to be self-sufficient. The role demands it, or appears to. The
message is: handle it, do not show weakness, the team is looking to you.
The cost of that framing is high.
What Redgrave gave me was a different model. Resilience is not about how much you can take
on your own. It is about the quality of the people around you when things get hard.That is what we are building in The Network. Not a support group. A crew.
Apply to join The Monumental Network, or start in the free community and get a genuine feel for the room first. No commitment. No sales call.
