Tami Simon: Hello, friends. My name’s Tami Simon, and I’m the founder of Sounds True. And I want to welcome you to the Sounds True podcast, Insights at the Edge.
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You’re listening to Insights at the Edge. Today, my guest is Emilia Elisabet Lahti. Elisabet is an awarded educator, applied psychology researcher, and the founder of Sisu Lab, which builds communities and organizational cultures based on everyday leadership as an expression of both courage and compassion. Her work has been featured in The New Yorker, Business Insider, BBC, and Forbes.
Originally from Finland, Elisabet Lahti is the author of a new book with Sounds True. It’s called Gentle Power: A Revolution in How We Think, Lead, and Succeed Using the Finnish Art of Sisu. Elisabet has a remarkable story to tell: how she wanted to understand sisu from the inside out by setting herself up with a nearly impossible feat, and then how she combined what she learned from her inner experience with outer qualitative research in order to come up with a series of insights on how we can each turn adversity into fuel in our lives, accessing what she calls “gentle power.” Here’s my conversation with Emilia Elisabet Lahti.
Elisabet, you’re joining us from Helsinki, the capital of Finland, and of course, Finland is the birthplace of sisu, which is what you and I are going to be talking about today. I’m excited to learn more about sisu. To begin, can you define this hard-to-define word in English and also tell us how you first encountered the notion as a Finnish person?
Elisabet Lahti: Thanks so much, Tami. Yes, sisu, it’s a bit of a paradox because when you look at it, it’s a small word, might look a bit unassuming, four letters, and it’s one of these words that has been described most integral to the Finnish culture. It’s even been said that you can’t understand Finland or a Finn without understanding sisu.
And the word denotes this kind of embodied internal fortitude. It is extraordinary determination and courage in the face of extreme adversity. So it’s not just some kind of a minor setback or being annoyed about something little, but it really is this point when we feel that we have come to the edge of our preconceived or our assumed capacities, and when we stay with ourselves, when we don’t give up just at that point when we feel that there’s nothing more left, that’s when we enter this—you could call it the zone of sisu or a second wind, and it’s something that lifts us.
That’s why it’s also kind of an existential topic to speak about, because it’s sometimes very hard to describe these events when we’ve had them as humans, when we find strength when there’s nothing left. And for me, for anyone growing up in Finland, sisu is so interwoven into our lives that it’s almost like the air that we breathe, in its good and bad sides.
And I don’t really remember the first time when I heard about it, but I do remember seeing it. I did witness it in my parents, how they lived. It’s kind of in this dead of winter where we are right now in Finland as I am having this podcast from Helsinki, and it does get very, very dark and cold. So you need sisu to kind of just go on your daily business. But the beauty of it is that “sisu” is a Finnish word, but sisu as a psychological capacity, it is universal. So every single human has it, because it is life force.
Tami Simon: And when did you decide, Elisabet, that you were going to study sisu, that you were going to do research about it, that this was going to become a real focus in your life?
Elisabet Lahti: Now that I look back and it’s been 10 years that I’ve been on this road of really consciously giving time and putting effort into understanding this concept—but I almost feel like saying I didn’t choose sisu, but it somehow chose me. And for me, the journey kind of began from the first moment when I was born. And it started with a struggle. I had this hospital bacteria, so they had to put me in one of those incubators. And so there was the first fight that ever happened was already in the first moments. And we know from research, too, that when we experience adversity, it does give us the opportunity to grow and become more resilient.
Hormesis is a concept that refers to this. When we go through an adversity or there’s a stressor and then we overcome it, the body makes itself stronger through that, like with muscle tear when we even work out. And so when sisu became a path for me as a research topic, it was to answer my question that was a very serious one for me about 12 years ago when I was going through my personal big tragedy and a trauma in my own life. And what kept me up at nights as I started my journey to healing was this question that, “How do humans overcome extreme adversity? How on earth do we build trust again? How on earth do we have the courage to start rebuilding after when our lives may feel that they have shattered?”
The trauma that I went through was interpersonal violence, and it takes a lot to start to become alive after such a thing because it takes place in the sanctity of our home, where we’re supposed to be safe no matter what is happening outside. So home is supposed to be the place where we get to breathe and relax and leave our shield and everything by the door. But in the case of domestic violence and family violence, that isn’t the case. So it really shakes us to our core.
And as I was on that journey, I realized how unfortunately common it is, and I became very curious of all kinds of adversity and trauma that people go through and just witnessing people around me tap into something that just really, really moved me. And there was a lot of serendipity to this road starting.
I think I want to mention a concept from Richard Tedeschi, who’s an American scholar and a researcher, and he’s the one who coined this term “post-traumatic growth.” So I think many of our listeners have surely heard of post-traumatic stress, but there’s the opposite to it, which is what Richard found was that we grow as a result of these massive tragedies and adversities that we go through, to an extent that sometimes people refer to life pre-trauma and post-trauma.
One of Richard’s discoveries was that when we start healing and with enough time and support, we don’t merely return back to the base level, but what happens is that we grow in sometimes very unexpected and grand ways as a result of trauma, finding deeper connection to our heart, to spirituality, to be less bothered about small things, finding our purpose, finding deeper connection to other humans, and such and such. So for me, it was quite a huge watershed moment, this trauma that I went through.
So I knew that I couldn’t stay with the job that I had back in the day. I was working with the Consulate General of Finland in New York at the time. And around the same time, I happened to be browsing through books at, I think it was, maybe Barnes & Noble or somewhere. And I happened to come across a book by Dr. Martin Seligman, who I’d never heard of, and he wrote about this field of research within psychology that he founded called “positive psychology.” And in that moment I remember I just knew that it was an epiphany that something was here for me.
And very long story short, I ended up applying for University of Pennsylvania to study positive psychology, and I got accepted and there I met Angela Duckworth. And it was during Angela Duckworth’s lecture on grit where I remembered this concept from my own native culture, sisu, which seemed to be a little bit different from grit. And I became really curious, what is this thing? What is this treasure that I may be carrying with me? And could that be the answer to how I survive? And could that maybe help other people as well? And that’s when the research started.
Tami Simon: Now for someone who’s asking a question right now, “What’s the difference between sisu and grit?,” what would you say are some obvious differences?
Elisabet Lahti: So I would first of all say it’s very hard to draw a sharp line where any of these concepts begin and the other one ends and one begins: perseverance, hardiness, resilience. But there are some ways, and one of them is that “grit” is more about, how Angela defines it, it is about passion and perseverance on the long road. So you have a goal that you’ve set your mind and heart to. It means putting in the effort day in, day out and relentlessly keeping going toward that goal. So it is about effort in the long term.
What “sisu” is, is that it’s more about what happens in a moment. So when we are on that road, let’s say grit allows you to train for a marathon. It takes commitment. You have to stay perseverant, do the practices every day or when you need to do them. But at some point, there’s going to be that moment when you feel that you face the wall. For example, at the marathon, in kilometers, it’s around the 32-kilometer mark where people often feel that they’ve consumed all their energy, and that is kind of what you could describe as a sisu moment. So you unearth something that you weren’t even previously maybe aware of. So sisu allows you to keep on going when the road really seems like it’s about to bog you down.
Another thing where it’s different is that just like grit, resilience, hardiness, perseverance, they’re all cognitive qualities. So they look at this human willpower as a matter of brain functioning and how we use our thinking and our cognition. But sisu, on the other hand, it points to a phenomenon and it points to almost an energy circuitry that’s more embodied than it’s cognitive, so it’s more somatic and visceral. And that is something that I find very interesting, because it’s pointing to an area of research that we also don’t know so much about yet. So it also points to our gut and how we might, let’s say, in the future, research courage and sisu and all this willpower not only as a matter of how we use our mind and how much of this mental stamina or mental toughness we have, but how we actually increase our strength through our bodies, through nutrition, for example, and through other embodied practices.
Tami Simon: Now Elisabet, there’s a lot that you’ve said that I want to pull out some strands and look at, but I want to share with our listeners the experience I had when I was reading Gentle Power. Because you introduced the notion of sisu, and I’m like, “Yes, this is really interesting. I’m really curious.” And then just a few paragraphs in, you share that you went on a 1,500-mile run across New Zealand over the course of 50 days, running 30 miles a day, more than a marathon a day, for 50 days.
And I kind of put the book down, fell off my chair at that moment, and was like, “Is that even possible? Can a human do that?” So you wanted to explore sisu very, very personally in the laboratory of yourself. Tell us about how you decided to go on this 1,500-mile sisu exploration.
Elisabet Lahti: I really love that you called it as the laboratory of the self and, really, the inner one. That’s what it really became about. And it was partially for me to collect data, as I had started a doctoral program where I would do the world’s first research, empirical, systematic inquiry into sisu. And I was asking myself that, “How do I go into the fibers of sisu? What is it that I can do that would simulate the experience when I feel that I’ve come to the edge of my capacity?” And I remember reading a paper by William James, who was the founder of modern psychology, and he wrote it around sometime like 1907 or around that time, and he was asking that we should get more intimate with this idea of energy and energy as a human power reserve, and he called it the “second wind.”
And he also acknowledged and said that we need to take it outside laboratories and the labs, because these moments when they happen in our lives, it’s extremely hard to mimic them in some kind of simulated settings because they are so complex in their nature and every human responds in a different way as well. So it is not an easy topic to research, and also because it relates to life force, it’s a nightmare pretty much to introduce such a concept into research.
And so that’s why I went with qualitative methods using autoethnography and phenomenology, and I asked myself that so, clearly, I have to do something a bit ludicrous. And at that point, I was reminded of a dream that I had right around the time after I had found freedom from that violent relationship. And I saw myself in this dream running across this beautiful green country, and I was holding a flag. And somehow in that dream, I knew that it was New Zealand and I was running for men and women, girls and boys, who had unfortunately been in that situation, that they had experienced emotional, physical abuse. And that dream never left me. Of course, I never ever thought that I would go and do something so crazy as go and attempt to run an entire length of a country. But at that moment when I had started researching sisu and I was looking that how to do this—and again, I feel like sisu somehow chose me in a way. Life wanted to test me a little bit, and I was up for the test and up for the game. So when this dream reemerged, before my mind my body said yes, and my mind kind of followed.
And I didn’t start to look for everything that could go wrong. I just had this thought in my mind that, OK, it sounds impossible, but how many times in my life have I not taken a chance because I was afraid of what could happen and how many things people don’t do out of fear of failure? How many books go into graves with people because they don’t have the courage because of maybe having such a harsh inner narrative and that there’s so much doubt in us? So in this moment, for the sake of this journey and for the sake of sisu, I decided to say yes to this absolutely completely crazy dream.
And it really started quite the adventure, and it’s something that it still gives me strength. And often when I speak with people about it, I want to give that as an example of this having the courage to do an initiation to our strength, because there truly is so much more to us than what meets the eye at a given moment.
Tami Simon: Now, I imagine you hit quite a few sisu moments or moments that required some extraordinary reserve of energy to keep going. What did you discover when you were flat out hitting a wall? What did you discover about how you were able to keep pushing on?
Elisabet Lahti: Yes, it truly felt at times like the wall of the marathon, and it just keeps hitting you, hitting you, hitting you again and again and again. And I do sometimes refer to New Zealand as 50 deaths and 50 rebirths, because, as we all know, when we are in that dark forest or the dark night of the soul—and by the way, the reason why I felt that ultra-running and ultramarathon is such a beautiful way to go into sisu [is] because it has a comparison to real life, because life itself is this ultramarathon. We are all running it in our daily lives, and it really spares no one. Adversity is part of human life. And one of the questions I also had in my mind from the very start was, since adversity is so abundant, that is there a way to transform it into a fuel? Can we actually learn to extract something from it that becomes elevating?
And that was something I was observing there in New Zealand as well. One of the most significant moments to me personally happened not quite how I was expecting, because this run was something that I thought would be all about mental toughness. What it ended up teaching me the most was actually about gentleness. And that was really the seed that was planted for this book, Gentle Power. It has its origin on the highways of New Zealand in a way.
So one key moment was after I had been running for 12 days consecutively, 30 miles each day—and we held events when we were in New Zealand. So the second reason for the run was to launch this campaign that I had founded that’s called Sisu Not Silence. And it was to encourage building compassionate cultures, compassionate family cultures, and eradicate the silence around interpersonal violence so that there would be more opportunity to actually discuss what is happening and not place the shame on the shoulders of the abused. And so that was the second part of this run. And we organized events, and we did men’s circles and women’s circles and keynotes, sometimes after I had ran the 30-miler, and then we’d do that. And that, to me, is one of the proofs [of] how much strength there is in us, that I was able to do that. Going to bed sometimes with the most horrible, blistering, painful feet, thinking, “I can’t possibly do this more.” And then you sleep, and you wake up, and you’re ready to go.
And so on this day 12, my feet had got into very, very bad shape. There w[ere] all kinds of unexpected things on the road. We happened to hit a heat wave. That is quite unheard of in New Zealand on the South Island in January, but there it was, which meant that the pavement, the highways that I was running on, the pavement was so hot and my feet were pounding it hour after hour after hour that the hot air got inside my running shoes and it made my feet swell. And I got these most horrible blisters already since day two. And they were blisters under blisters, and the pain was excruciating. And I think what happened was that I started to overcompensate my gait a little bit too much on the left side, so I felt a little bit off alignment, and I started developing this stress injury on my right ankle.
And so after 12 days, I was pretty much a wreck. All of my attention was simply in surviving, getting that next step in and the next step and the next step. And I remember I was approaching the Fox Glacier. It’s on the South Island of New Zealand. And suddenly it hit me that I had let this run run me down, and these old patterns, how I used to live my life and what I built my survival upon, they started to really emerge. You can imagine, Tami, that when you’re on the road, you’re alone. You have a lot of time to think about yourself and the choices you’ve made and who are you? That’s what I wanted. I wanted an intimate encounter with myself and with my sisu, and I was truly given that. And I was having this very intimate dialogue with the road.
The road acted as this character who was asking me questions, because it was just always there and present. And suddenly the road—of course, it was my inner voice inside my head—but the road asked me that, “Hey, Elisabet, do you see that next bend over there, maybe a kilometer, a mile away?” I said to myself in my head that, “Yes, I see it.” And then the road continued. It said that, “Well, after you get there, there’s going to be another bend and another bend and another bend.” And in this extreme pain, I realized that, and what the road told me was that, the pain will end only when I make it end, that I am ultimately the person who’s living my life, and I have to also make the decisions to care for myself. And in that moment, I also realized that it had been, historically, in my own life, easier for me to be hard on myself than to be gentle on myself.
And in that moment, I will make a very long story shorter now, but we took a day off and we went to show my foot to a doctor to see what was going on. Luckily, it wasn’t the worst news that we were expecting, which would’ve really put an end to the run. But I did need to become flexible, become adaptable—which is a huge, huge part of sisu, that we can’t remain stubborn, because when we do that, our sisu might become the very thing that leads to our demise or our destruction or our goals not being met. So part of sisu is this ability in us that we need to reconsider, and we have to allow our sisu [to] also be informed by reason. And at the same time, actually, there happened to be—I’ve forgotten now if you call it a hurricane or there’s a different word for it in New Zealand—but there was absolutely treacherous weather the next day, so we had to take a day off because of that as well, so it was a really interesting coincidence.
But at that point we pivoted, and I included some legs of cycling so that I would [be] able to keep on moving with the power of my body and get to the next city where I would need to do the next event. And I was able to cycle a little bit and then start to introduce more running and cycling and then ultimately get back into the run portion. But I’ll just add one little thing, because I think it might be helpful to some of the people who are listening.
What allowed me to change my strategy was that I imagined myself at the end of these 50 days, and I imagined myself that I have done it, I have endured, and I completed this 50-day ultra-run. And what do I want to say when I look back? Do I want to say that I did it at all cost with no regards to how my body is going to be damaged by it or what happens? Or can I say that I did it, but that I honored myself? And the answer to those questions, it really also describes that what is the kind of future I want to be promoting and perpetuating?
And it is a question that I think is sometimes very good for all of us when we are in those moments of sisu and it’s hard for us to know whether to continue exactly how we planned or if we need to change our plan or if we need to even turn the other way or quit something. These are really these moments in human life that are super tough, and it only comes with learning to really know ourselves and then decide that, how do I want this, what I do now reflect into the future, and also what is the story I want other people to see in it?
Tami Simon: Now, you mentioned life itself is the ultramarathon that we’re each running, and I think one of the questions that comes up for people when they find themself in a position of adversity in their life is this question, what you’re pointing to here, which is how do I combine—you refer to it as gentleness or suppleness or even surrender—how do I combine surrender with “I just need to buck up and push through”? How do you even consider the alchemy of those two different forces, and how could you help somebody who’s in a moment like that right now, in the ultramarathon of their life?
Elisabet Lahti: Yes, first, I want to begin by just acknowledging that it is not easy, because the way how anyone responds to a challenge, it’s not just something that we do in the moment, but our entire history comes, plays a part in it. The way how we’ve learned to survive, whether it’s by pushing onward and being extremely self-reliant, or whether it is by clinging or turning away from adversity and hiding. We all have our patterns. We say in ultra-running that when you’ve been on the road for a very long time and the body starts to get very, very tired and the muscles start to give in a bit, we all have our default poor posture that we go [to]. Someone might lean a lot forward, someone might go a bit tilted left or right, and that’s going to start creating the injury.
So if one is in a moment that they are feeling that they’re getting very, very worn out by the adversity, the number one thing to acknowledge in that moment is that in our lives, we always need to find this harmony between the hard and the soft. If we have been leading our lives for a long time so that our go-to is always the toughness, eventually it will come at the cost of our self-care. It’s going to come at the cost of harshness toward ourselves and toward others as well.
From the first research that I did on sisu, which I collected the data in 2013, and there was a paper released on it in 2019 called “Embodied Fortitude.” And in that, I described these three harmful sides to sisu, which is to ourselves. We might end up really, really consuming our bodies and our minds to a point that it leads to a burnout. We overextend ourselves, and it also creates harm to others.
So it’s not just us who are doing that when we are too hard on ourselves, but when we have too much sisu, one thing that also happens is that we might exert this kind of merciless attitude toward other people, that because we are so tough and we have had to endure, we expect other people to do the same exact thing, and that always comes at the cost of human connection. It comes at the cost of psychological safety.
And then also the third thing is that having too much sisu, it harms our reasoning. So we start to not be able to see and think clearly, but we start to have a blurry vision and we just get simply so blinded by our stubbornness that we get locked in.
So it starts with acknowledging that we need to have both of those. And the tricky thing is that the core of gentle power—because even the book, the name has gentleness and it has power. And the question really is, for anyone who’s reading it, is to start tracing that which one of those aspects it is that one needs to maybe develop right now or in a certain context. Because for someone, it might be that they need to be able to toughen up in a certain moment and have more of that resolve and sisu, in a sense, that sisu as the life force and the determination. And for someone, it might mean that they need to start to open to a little bit of gentleness and softness so that they don’t get blinded by that self-reliance that they might be carrying as their kind of choice of survival mechanism.
Tami Simon: Now you write about sisu as a “previously unexpressed reserve of energy,” and I’m wondering if someone’s like, “I could use that right about now in a situation I’m in.” How do you access it? “I need to access this reserve now.”
Elisabet Lahti: So number one, everything starts with awareness, so that’s why it’s really good we’re having this podcast. I am so glad I got to write the book and it’s out now, because it’s an invitation to become aware of the fact, first and foremost, that we do have this capacity within us. We have sisu, and it’s a universal capacity. You can also call it life force. And so what I sometimes ask people to do—because I know I’ve seen this—I’ve traveled a lot abroad and done the research and what I keep seeing again and again is that people with relative ease can point out and they can notice and celebrate other people’s fortitude and resolve and sisu, but they find it often harder to see it and notice it in themselves.
So it starts with this awareness that we have it, and one way to do it is to do this little journaling exercise that I call simply just “Stories of Sisu,” to take a moment to just start noting down those moments in our lives where we have overcome something that we thought, in the moment, that we cannot overcome and endure. So by doing that exercise, we start to see those moments. What were they? Because so far, we’re right now here, all of us, we’re speaking here and who are listening, and our track record of overcoming is hundred. We are all here. We are doing this. We’re staying with the tasks that we need to do, and we are holding on to life and life force. So having a chance to really honor ourselves for the journey that we have walked and giving ourselves a little pat on the back, too.
And then secondly, when we write down those moments that we thought we couldn’t endure, then the second layer is to write down what was the key thing that allowed you to overcome? What was something that you did? What changed the narrative in that moment? Was it some kind of an activity or an action, or was it another human?
And, again, write down those things. What were they? Because the purpose of this exercise is to bring awareness to this capacity within us. Until we do this, it will kind of be in the periphery, and we have a harder time consciously accessing our sisu because, at the same time, because it is a quality of every human, we will kind of hit sisu, hit a home run of sisu randomly here and there because it is interwoven into us as humans. But in order to make sisu a little bit more accessible and systematic in our lives, not random, that is when we bring this awareness to our lives and we start to move on from that place. So I’ll just give that as a little beginning for that search.
Tami Simon: What if, in reflecting on these stories of sisu in our life, we say, “Yes, I made it through, but God, that was messy. It wasn’t very elegant, and I left a kind of trail of tears of my own or other people’s.” Or, “Yes, I got here, but that was sure a mess.”
Elisabet Lahti: Yes, I can resonate with that. For sure. Well, that is a very good moment to exercise a bit of gentleness toward ourselves, because gentleness is always… There’s a beautiful way how André Comte-Sponville, who’s a French historian and a philosopher, how he describes gentleness. And he says that it is “courage without violence. It is strength without harshness.” And, finally, I’ll read, “It’s love without anger.” So when we give this gift of gentleness to ourselves, it also means that we forgive ourselves when we weren’t so gracious and graceful and we didn’t do so well, because what is in the past, it’s in the past. It is part of sisu, also, to be able to leave the weight of past mistakes that we’ve all done, we’ve all been there, and be able to look into the future with this action mindset that’s also part of sisu. So that’s a chance to be gentle with ourselves.
Tami Simon: What do you mean by an “action mindset”?
Elisabet Lahti: So one of the three essences of sisu that is also it’s in the research paper—so I describe sisu as “extraordinary perseverance,” which is this experience of going beyond our preconceived capacities that we have. So there’s something that we unearth that we weren’t previously familiar, which is very classic sisu. And then the second one is what I call “action mindset.” So those people who are high on sisu, who have a lot of it, what they tend to display is this kind of courage to take challenges that seem to far exceed their reserves in that particular moment. So it’s kind of the ability to see beyond the limitations of this moment. And then thirdly, sisu is this embodied fortitude, which is the somatic quality that is in us.
Tami Simon: And this notion of being someone who’s high on sisu, how do I become such a person? How does the listener become such a person?
Elisabet Lahti: So it really starts with, in addition to recognizing and having the awareness of this idea of this life force in sisu, but it’s using those moments in our lives when it’s a little bit easier, when we are not fighting the fires and we don’t have to run around putting them down and life is a little bit easier, I would say that it’s very important to use those opportunities as a chance to start practicing our sisu already before something really difficult happens. Because just like with anything, when I went to run in New Zealand, I was training for it for two and a half years. And I was not a runner before, so I started then. And so I practiced for that time of adversity. Say someone is a boxer. You have to put a lot of effort in stimulating every possible single thing that could go wrong and people practice, practice, practice.
So then when this moment of sisu and the adversity is upon us, we don’t come to that moment unprepared, but we’ve done our homework, we know our sisu, in a way, inside out. What can happen in that moment is that we can even, how would I say, depending on the adversity, but with things that little bit test us in a way that they make us “constructively uncomfortable.” Like Rhadi Ferguson, who was a judo Olympian, puts it.
So we even expect those adversities and we can even enjoy them a little bit, which is something that happened when I was defending my dissertation on sisu and we had a fire alarm go off one hour into the defense, which it’s definitely under that kind of a situation that’s high stress. It adds a little bit more to it that’s kind of needed. But because I had been practicing and training sisu for so long, and I look at the whole world around me in a way as a bit of a dojo, so every adversity that comes my way is a chance for me to learn something about myself, about life, and see that, “Well, how do I react in that? How could I respond a bit better next time?”
So all of that experience that I was carrying with me allowed me to go very smoothly through this fire alarm situation when we had to evacuate and go outside the building and just pick up the defense there. So it is all this effort that we put in the now that will contribute and, shortly, it’s practice. Like with anything in life, it is about practice.
Tami Simon: Now, one of the things I’m really curious about is this notion—it’s an aspect of sisu that you write about—that we can actually turn adversity into fuel. So it’s one thing to kind of get through it somewhat gracefully and learn a couple things from it, not be in resistance to adversity, but how do we turn a challenge, adversity, into fuel?
Elisabet Lahti: So yes, I have to say that to do anything gracefully, that is a long journey, and I just want to mention that because it is a lifelong thing that we do, and it’s very important to be merciful with ourselves, because part of sisu and part of life is that we do get smacked down, and it’s not easy. To turn adversity into fuel, what I mean with that is this idea that every single encounter with adversity, whether it’s in some kind of an interpersonal conflict or something else, it is a chance for us to learn about ourselves.
There’s a diamond hidden in every single encounter we have with life. And to a point that I kind of view obstacles as a way to see that, “Where am I right now, as a human?” Because it’s really easy to be amazing and awesome when everything is going smoothly and well. Then we can all give our best and it’s all good, but then when something comes that challenges us more or less, it kind of shows us how much we are able to remain relaxed when those things happen.
Because being able to be relaxed, being able to function from a place where our parasympathetic nervous system is still active, so we’re able to be restful, means that we have bigger access to our cognitive reserves, we’re able to make better decisions, we’re able to handle stress better, and that is really power. Restfulness is power.
Tami Simon: Now, you mentioned, Elisabet, that sisu is something that’s visceral not cognitive, and that even the word itself is referring to our guts or our insides, or you write that it’s a reference, sisu, to our intestines. And I thought, “Huh, that’s interesting.” Intestinal fortitude. So tell me a little bit more about why that’s particularly meaningful to you, this notion of sisu residing in our guts.
Elisabet Lahti: Yes, so sisu itself—I mentioned this in the book too—it comes from a word originally that is “sisus.” So you add an “s” to the end. Sisus. And literally the etymology means that it comes from the word that denotes our intestines, the inside, or the interior. So that is the original meaning of this word. Why I think it’s especially interesting in this time and age is—well, this is my personal hope—that now that we’ve such a long time as a humanity, we have been kind of worshiping the mind. And unfortunately we’ve done it at the expense of the body that is this vessel that does carry us.
And it has a long history, and you can pinpoint it to one moment in history with Rene Descartes’s idea that “I think, therefore I am.” And we have definitely paid the toll, because when we only use the mind without respect to what the body is doing, we’re really ignoring a massive reserve that we have to access this power, simply by paying attention to the very simplest things in our physical being.
And we all know what these things are, and I mentioned them in the book too, because clearly we all need that reminder, but really to pay attention to our self-care. So sisu also is self-care. One way to cultivate our sisu is by paying attention to how we’re treating ourselves as these living-being bodies. Are we getting sufficient sleep? Are we nourishing ourselves with the kind of nutrition that is good and needed for us? Do we give ourselves enough exercise? So part of putting our sisu in place, it has to come with this acknowledgement to our physical dimension.
Tami Simon: Now, I know you also have been trained in martial arts, that you’ve done work in aikido, and knowing just a little bit that I know about martial arts, the lower belly center is an important source of our power. And I wonder how you connect that with sisu.
Elisabet Lahti: Yes, indeed. So it’s called “lower dantian” in the Chinese tradition, and it is this idea that all the energy that we have, it is its birthplace and it was already—the ancient Greeks used to call the stomach as the seed of our energy and our power. So it has really long roots, this understanding that it is truly in the physical side of our life where we start to manufacture this power. And in the Eastern philosophy that is the basis of the Eastern martial arts, the route that one must take is to have the ability to quiet the mind. So the body gets to do its best when the mind, in a way, steps out of the way. So the effort there is through meditation, for example, or breathing exercises, is to quiet the mind. And one way to practice this is to really go through these rigorous martial arts practices, because in those moments, you have to be completely fully present and the body is always in the present moment. It’s not in the past, it is not in the future, but it has to be exactly where the action is happening.
And, to me, as a person who’s been an overthinker all my life because of the research background and all of that, it’s been extremely healthy and healing. And I really encourage those people who recognize themselves from this overthinking to find a physical practice that feels right to you and allow that to be a vehicle to make that journey back to our bodies. And it’s really a journey worth taking.
Tami Simon: As a recovering overthinker, I hear what you’re saying. Yes, indeed.
Elisabet Lahti: Yes.
Tami Simon: Now, you take the whole principle of what you call “warm sisu,” which is one way of describing this gentle power, and you apply it to leadership, leadership in organizations and communities. What makes a warm sisu leader?
Elisabet Lahti: Well, some piece of research that comes to my mind and that I would love to mention here is by Amy Edmondson, who’s a Harvard researcher who’s really pioneered this massive body of research, with her team, of course, on psychological safety, which is this ability to relate to people, be receptive, reciprocate. To have this mindset, how I would say, that we have to be tough with the tasks that we do, with the goals that we have, so we really go after those. But we need to be soft with people. We need to be soft with ourselves too. And that doesn’t mean that we don’t have the hard conversations, because we do need to do that in life as well. I speak about this difference between “nice” and “kind” in the book, where “nice” is us acting from fear and not from our truth, and “kind” is where that’s an empowering quality actually, because we use that as the ability to also ask the hard questions and be truthful to what we’re actually seeing.
And so in leadership, we must have this combination of having the toughness, but in order to not lose the connection to the people that we ultimately are working with, we need to be very mindful of keeping the humanness in that equation. And one reason for it is, too, that when we are going through extremely tough times and we are in crisis, we can’t afford to lose this power that comes from the ability of humans to come and collaborate, because sisu lives not only in you or in me, but sisu is in this space between us. It’s almost like it’s this third entity, and it relies on my ability to relate to you, and it relies on you feeling that I am actually there for you. So we are, first and foremost, we’re all humans no matter what kind of strategy and what kind of business we do, but it needs to be backed with this ability to relate to one another.
Tami Simon: Just to take an example, many companies at this point in time, at the end of last year and the first quarter of this year, are going through massive layoffs. How would a warm sisu leader handle, in your view, an adversity like that within their organization?
Elisabet Lahti: Well, that’s a very tough question, because in some moments when we have to have those hard conversations—let’s say that you have to lay people off—it might be that kind of a crucible that you can’t simply do such decisions that it would make everyone happy. So you’re kind of in this complete paradox, what to do. What I would do is to, no matter what the decisions are that have to be made, is to try as best as one can to keep our heart open.
That is one of the core, core qualities of sisu, that no matter how tough we are, no matter the challenges that we’re going through, in order to transform our sisu to its higher-octave version, which is gentle power, it goes through the heart. So experimenting in our lives and in our leadership is that, “How do I communicate, and how do I do my leadership? What does it look like when I do it with my heart open?” And what it looks like for different people, I don’t really know. And these are the super tough crucibles that we have to go through in this time that we’re currently in.
Tami Simon: You mentioned towards the beginning of our conversation that, in some ways, you didn’t pick sisu as your research topic and to focus your professional life on, it picked you. And I can see how that’s true, as a woman born in Finland with the both intelligence and embodied focus that you have and good heart. I can see that. We can just pretend here that sisu picked you. I’m curious, in your own view, for what purpose? Why do you think sisu picked you? In order to do what?
Elisabet Lahti: That’s a really tricky question. I think I want to first say that because of the nature of life and as we earlier discussed how adversity spares no one—so in a way, I’m in really good company, because it really looks like that sisu didn’t just pick me, it has picked all of us. And I don’t know. Maybe life will show me. Maybe it’s a narrative that I tell myself so that I keep on this road and I keep unearthing those diamonds that are there to be picked on this journey of understanding how to transform adversities and how to transform barriers into frontiers in my own life. Let’s see. Maybe the future will show me.
Tami Simon: It seems that you’re also—this is what it looks like to me from the outside—that you have a type of calling to help us at this time in our collective evolution to learn more about sisu and to develop into more high-sisu individuals at a time when these kinds of capacities are really needed, when we face so much collective adversity. I’m wondering what your thoughts are about that.
Elisabet Lahti: Yes, you’re really touching the core of my work when you say that. What I feel is that to develop gentle power, it’s not just something that’s good to have or nice to have, but we as a humanity, it seems, we’ve really come to a point where it’s a necessity to find a way how we, first of all, tap into our life force and our inner fortitude, but in addition to that, that we ask the question not just what we do, but how do we do everything we do?
Can we do it in a way that it allows us to lead by example so that we build that future that we want to see? Are we able to do what we need to do in a way that creates more harmony to life? Because every single action we do, because we are all embedded into this systemic network, and we’re all interconnected and interdependent, so our actions reverberate and they ripple, now because we’re so connected—because of the digital era—that they ripple across the planet, actually. So it comes with a very significant responsibility to work on ourselves, so that whatever we put out there, of course while being gentle toward our flaws and our immaturities, but that ultimately the direction would be such that it becomes life giving, because we really need that as a humanity, that we come together and we all lead by example.
Tami Simon: I’ve been speaking with Emilia Elisabet Lahti. She’s the founder of the Sisu Lab and the Gentle Power Academy, and with Sounds True she’s the author of the new book Gentle Power: A Revolution in How We Think, Lead, and Succeed Using the Finnish Art of Sisu. Elisabet, thank you so much. Thank you so much for being such an integrity-fueled human. Thank you.
Elisabet Lahti: Thank you. It’s truly my honor.
Tami Simon: And if you’d like to watch Insights at the Edge on video and participate in after-the-show Q&A conversations with featured presenters, and have the chance to ask your questions, come join us on Sounds True One, a new membership community that features premium shows, live classes, and community events. Let’s learn and grow together. Come join us at join.soundstrue.com. Sounds True: waking up the world.
