Many
people who in the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, died simply
because they told themselves that everything was going to be all right.
Others panicked. Panic doesn't necessarily mean screaming and running
around. Often it means simply doing nothing. Survivors don't candy-coat
the truth, but they also don't give in to hopelessness in the face of
it.

    Survivors
see opportunity, even good, in their situation, however grim. After the
ordeal is over, people may be surprised to hear them say it was the
best thing that ever happened to them. Viktor Frankl, who spent three
years in Auschwitz and other Nazi concentration camps, describes
comforting a woman who was dying. She told him, “I am grateful that
fate has hit me so hard. In m former life I was spoiled and did not
take spiritual accomplishments seriously.”

    The
phases of the survival journey roughly parallel the five stages of
death once described by Elizabeth Kubler Ross in her book On Death and
Dying: Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. In dire
circumstances, a survivor moves through those stages rapidly to
acceptance of his situation, then resolves to do something to save
himself. Survival depends on telling yourself, “Okay, I'm here. This is
really happening. Now I'm going to do the next right thing to get
myself out.” Whether you succeed or not ultimately becomes irrelevant.
It is in acting well–even suffering well–that you give meaning to
whatever life you have to live.

2. Stay Calm – Use Your Anger
    In
the initial crisis, survivors are not ruled by fear; instead, they make
use of it. Their fear often feels like (and turns into) anger, which
motivates them and makes them feel sharper. Aron Ralston, the hiker who
had to cut off his hand to free himself from a stone that had trapped
him in a slot canyon in Utah, initially panicked and began slamming
himself over and over against the boulder that had caught his hand. But
very quickly, he stopped himself, did some deep breathing, and began
thinking about his options. He eventually spent five days progressing
through the stages necessary to convince him of what decisive action he
had to take to save his own life.

    When
Lance Armstrong, six-time winner of the Tour de France, awoke from
brain surgery for his cancer, he first felt gratitude. “But then I felt
a second wave, of anger... I was alive, and I was mad.” When friends
asked him how he was doing, he responded, “I'm doing great... I like it
like this. I like the odds stacked against me... I donÕt know any other
way.” That's survivor thinking.

    Survivors
also manage pain well. As a bike racer, Armstrong had had long training
in enduring pain, even learning to love it. James Stockdale, a fighter
pilot who was shot down in Vietnam and spent eight years in the Hanoi
Hilton, as his prison camp was known, advised those who would learn to
survive: “One should include a course of familiarization with pain. You
have to practice hurting. There is no question about it.”

3. Think, Analyze, and Plan

    Survivors quickly organize, set up routines, and institute discipline.

    When Lance Armstrong was diagnosed
with cancer, he organized his fight against it the way he would
organize his training for a race. He read everything he could about it,
put himself on a training schedule, and put together a team from among
friends, family, and doctors to support his efforts. Such conscious,
organized effort in the face of grave danger requires a split between
reason and emotion in which reason gives direction and emotion provides
the power source. Survivors often report experiencing reason as an
audible “voice.”

    Steve
Callahan, a sailor and boat designer, was rammed by a whale and sunk
while on a solo voyage in 1982. Adrift in the Atlantic for 76 days in a
five-and-a-half-foot raft, he experienced his survival voyage as taking
place under the command of a “captain,” who gave him his orders and
kept him on his water ration, even as his own mutinous (emotional)
spirit complained. His captain routinely lectured “the crew.” Thus
under strict control, he was able to push away thoughts that his
situation was hopeless and take the necessary first steps of the
survival journey: to think clearly, analyze his situation, and
formulate a plan.

4. Take Correct, Decisive Action
    Survivors
are willing to take risks to save themselves and others. But they are
simultaneously bold and cautious in what they will do. Lauren Elder was
the only survivor of a light plane crash in high sierra. Stranded on a
peak above 12,000 feet, one arm broken, she could see the San Joaquin
Valley in California below, but a vast wilderness and sheer and icy
cliffs separated her from it. Wearing a wrap-around skirt and blouse,
with two-inch heeled boots and not even wearing underwear, she crawled
“on all fours, doing a kind of sideways spiderwalk,” as she put it
later, “balancing myself on the ice crust, punching through it with my
hands and feet.”

    She
had 36 hours of climbing ahead of her–a seemingly impossible task. But
Elder allowed herself to think only as far as the next big rock.
Survivors break down large jobs into small, manageable tasks. They set
attainable goals and develop short-term plans to reach them. They are
meticulous about doing those tasks well. Elder tested each hold before
moving forward and stopped frequently to rest. They make very few
mistakes. They handle what is within their power to deal with from
moment to moment, hour to hour, day to day.

5. Celebrate your success
    Survivors
take great joy from even their smallest successes. This helps keep
motivation high and prevents a lethal plunge into hopelessness. It also
provides relief from the unspeakable strain of a life-threatening
situation. Elder said that once she had completed her descent of the
first pitch, she looked up at the impossibly steep slope and thought,
“Look what you've done...Exhilarated, I gave a whoop that echoed down
the silent pass.” Even with a broken arm, joy was Elder's constant
companion. A good survivor always tells herself: count your
blessings–you're alive. Viktor Frankl wrote of how he felt at times in
Auschwitz: “How content we were; happy in spite of everything.”

6. Be a Rescuer, Not a Victim
    Survivors
are always doing what they do for someone else, even if that someone is
thousands of miles away. There are numerous strategies for doing this.
When Antoine Saint-Exupery was stranded in the Lybian desert after his
mail plane suffered an engine failure, he thought of how his wife would
suffer if he gave up and didn't return. Yossi Ghinsberg, a young
Israeli hiker, was lost in the Bolivian jungle for more than two weeks
after becoming separated from his friends. He hallucinated a beautiful
companion with whom he slept each night as he traveled. Everything he
did, he did for her. People cannot survive for themselves alone; their
must be a higher motive.

    Viktor
Frankl put it this way: “Don't aim at success–the more you aim at it
and make it a target,the more you are going to miss it.” He suggests
taking it as “the unintended side-effect of one's personal dedication
to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one's surrender
to a person other than oneself.”

    Survivors
also use the intellect to stimulate, calm, and entertain the mind.
While moving across a near-vertical cliff face in Peru, Joe Simpson
developed a rhythmic pattern of placing his ax, plunging his other arm
into the snow face, and then making a frightening little hop with his
good leg. “I meticulously repeated the pattern,” he wrote later. “I
began to feel detached from everything around me.”

    Singing,
playing mind games, reciting poetry, counting anything, and doing
mathematical problems in your head can make waiting possible and even
pleasant, even while heightening perception and quieting fear.
Stockdale wrote, “The person who came into this experiment with reams
of already memorized poetry was the bearer of great gifts.”

    When
Lance Armstrong was undergoing horrible chemotherapy, his mantra became
his blood count: “Those numbers became the highlight of each day; they
were my motivation... I would concentrate on that number, as if I could
make the counts by mentally willing it.”

    Lost
in the Bolivian jungle, Yossi Ghinsberg reported, “When I found myself
feeling hopeless, I whispered my mantra, ‘Man of action, man of
action.’ I don't know where I had gotten the phrase... I repeated it
over and over: A man of action does whatever he must, isn't afraid, and
doesn't worry.”

    Survivors
engage their crisis almost as an athlete engages a sport. They cling to
talismans. They discover the sense of flow of the expert performer, the
“zone” in which emotion and thought balance each other in producing
fluid action. A playful approach to a critical situation also leads to
invention, and invention may lead to a new technique, strategy, or
design that could save you.

8. See the Beauty
    Survivors
are attuned to the wonder of their world, especially in the face of
mortal danger. The appreciation of beauty, the feeling of awe, opens
the senses to the environment. (When you see something beautiful, your
pupils actually dilate.) Debbie Kiley and four others were adrift in
the Atlantic after their boat sank in a hurricane in 1982. They had no
supplies, no water, and would die without rescue. Two of the crew
members drank sea water and went mad. When one of them jumped overboard
and was being eaten by sharks directly under their dinghy, Kiley felt
as if she, too, were going mad, and told herself, “Focus on the sky, on
the beauty there.”

    When
Saint-Exupery's plane went down in the Lybian Desert, he was certain
that he was doomed, but he carried on in this spirit: “Here we are,
condemned to death, and still the certainty of dying cannot compare
with the pleasure I am feeling. The joy I take from this half an orange
which I am holding in my hand is one of the greatest joys I have ever
known.” At no time did he stop to bemoan his fate, or if he did, it was
only to laugh at himself.

9. Believe That You Will Succeed
    It
is at this point, following what I call “the vision,” that the
survivor's will to live becomes firmly fixed. Fear of dying falls away,
and a new strength fills them with the power to go on. “During the
final two days of my entrapment,” Ralston recalled, “I felt an
increasing reserve of energy, even though I had run out of food and
water.” Elder said, “I felt rested and filled with a peculiar energy.”
And: “It was as if I had been granted an unlimited supply of energy.”

10. Surrender
    Yes
you might die. In fact, you wil die–we all do. But perhaps it doesn't
have to be today. Don't let it worry you. Forget about rescue.
Everything you need is inside you already. Dougal Robertson, a sailor
who was cast away at sea for thirty-eight days after his boat sank,
advised thinking of survival this way: “Rescue will come as a welcome
interruption of... the survival voyage.” One survival psychologist
calls that “resignation without giving up. It is survival by
surrender.”

    Simpson
reported, “I would probably die out there amid those boulders. The
thought didn't alarm me... the horror of dying no longer affected me.”
The Tao Te Ching explains how this surrender leads to survival:

The rhinoceros has no place to jab its horn,

The tiger has no place to fasten its claws,

Weapons have no place to admit their blades.

Now,

What is the reason for this?

Because on him there are no mortal spots.

11. Do Whatever Is Necessary

    Elder down-climbed vertical ice and rock faces with no experience
and no equipment. In the black of night, Callahan dove into the flooded
saloon of his sinking boat, at once risking and saving his life. Aron
Ralston cut off his own arm to free himself. A cancer patient allows
herself to be nearly killed by chemotherapy in order to live.

    Survivors
have a reason to live and are willing to bet everything on themselves.
They have what psychologists call meta-knowledge: They know their
abilities and do not over–or underestimate them. They believe that
anything is possible and act accordingly.

12. Never Give Up
    When
Apollo 13's oxygen tank exploded, apparently dooming the crew,
Commander Jim Lovell chose to keep on transmitting whatever data he
could back to mission control, even as they burned up on re-entry.
Simpson, Elder, Callahan, Kiley, Stockdale, Ghinsberg–were all equally
determined and knew this final truth: If you're still alive, there is
always one more thing that you can do.

    Survivors
are not easily discouraged by setbacks. They accept that the
environment is constantly changing and know that they must adapt. When
they fall, they pick themselves up and start the entire process over
again, breaking it down into manageable bits.

    Survivors
always have a clear reason for going on. They keep their spirits up by
developing an alternate world, created from rich memories, into which
they can escape. They see opportunity in adversity. In the aftermath,
survivors learn from and are grateful for the experiences that they've
had. As Elder told me once, “I wouldn't trade that experience for
anything. And sometimes I even miss it. I miss the clarity of knowing
exactly what you have to do next.”

    Those
who would survive the hazards of our world, whether at play or in
business or at war, through illness or financial calamity, will do so
through a journey of transformation. But that transcendent state
doesn't miraculously appear when it is needed. It wells up from a
lifetime of experiences, attitudes, and practices form one's
personality, a core from which the necessary strength is drawn. A
survival experience is an incomparable gift: It will tell you who you
really are.