PEAK SPEAK

As a boy, Paul G. Stoltz endured a lot of ribbing because he was smaller and weaker than most of his peers. The teasing drove him at age 12 to buy his first barbell. Now 38, he climbs the red rocks of Arizona and peaks such as California’s Mt. Whitney for fun, often carrying a 50-pound pack.

“I learned that if I worked really hard at something, I could make significant change in myself,” Stoltz said. “It became a defining truth.”

Through PEAK Learning Inc., his performance-consulting firm in Flagstaff, Ariz., Stoltz has consulted with thousands of employees and executives to help them make changes in their lives. His aim is to help people learn how to thrive on white-water chaos, an ability he contends will be “the core competency of the 21st century.”

The ability to deal with adversity, Stoltz said, is far more important than how intelligent you are.

Current clients include Deloitte & Touche and Levi Strauss; he has also consulted with Abbott Labs, Coopers & Lybrand, Sun Microsystems and MotorolA: Stoltz, author of “Adversity Quotient: Turning Obstacles Into Opportunities” (John Wiley & Sons, $24.95), talked recently about how he learned to deal with life’s setbacks and how workers can gain more control over their fates by developing a “high AQ,” or adversity quotient.

Question: What do you mean by adversity?

Answer: When things don’t work out the way you want them to. When the stuff hits the fan.

Q: How is that different from the stresses and strains of everyday life?

A: It’s not. Adversity can mean everything from a bad hair day to a catastrophe. Other words for it are “setbacks,” “challenges” and “obstacles.”

Q: What was it in terms of personal adversity that steered you into this field?

A: I’ve been in a variety of situations where I’ve been told that I couldn’t [accomplish something], where people tried to hold me down. All my life, people have told me I’m a wild dreamer and a nonconformist, and they have worked, even out of love, to put my feet back on the ground. When I first worked for Honeywell as an intern in 1984, I walked in the front door and said I’d like to design and deliver management programs for the company. They laughed and said, “There, there, that takes an awful lot of years.” By the next year, I was in charge of developing their major program. When I started my own consulting firm in 1987 and told people I wanted to be a source of real wisdom and change, a lot of consultants said: “There, there, that’s not the way it works. You’re too young.” Again, out of sheer relentlessness, I was able to develop a viable firm within a year.

Q: What has being a nonconformist meant in your life?

A: Since I was very young, I was driven not to live a mundane life and to contribute significantly to the people around me, to have a real impact on the planet. My parents gave me the gift of telling me I could do anything I set my mind to. But it really came from inside me. I define my mountain as helping people to create positive, meaningful and enduring change.

Q: You often use mountains and mountain climbing as a metaphor. Why?

A: People have a core human drive to move forward and up in their lives. The best metaphor is a mountain. Mountains are considered to be inspirational, if not spiritual.

Q: Describe the three philosophies of life, as you see them.

A: There are quitters, campers and climbers. Quitters simply give up in the face of adversity, abandoning their mountain. Campers are a bit more ambitious; they work hard for a time but tire out and tend to set up camp. It then becomes a comfortable prison, a place where they will inevitably atrophy over time. They never attempt to go any farther, preferring to stay comfortable and hang out with all the other campers. Climbers take the risk of relentlessly pursuing their goal, despite the problems they encounter. They live with a sense of ongoing purpose. Successful entrepreneurs thrive on the constant onslaught of challenges and setbacks. The difference between success and failure often is a matter of raw tenacity.

Q: How can your program help entrepreneurs?

A: Since they are so out there on the edge, entrepreneurs face an unusual degree of adversity. Every day they face rejection, cash flow squeezes, customer problems, employee problems, plus a lot of people saying: “It won’t work. You’re crazy.” We help them pinpoint their sense of purpose, which helps sustain them. We teach the skills to endure.

Q: What about the cubicle grunts of the world? What can you do for them?

A: Helplessness and hopelessness make up one of the most pervasive conditions among the “Dilberts” of the world. [A Dilbert believes that] he has no significance and nothing he does has any significance. We ignite and reawaken the sense of significance. It gives them the courage and tools to persevere. Most people in the cubicle set have forgotten or compromised their dreams. This gives them the permission and strength to pursue them once again, to the benefit of all.

Q: How did the situation--this helplessness among the ranks--get so bad in corporate America?

A: It happened gradually over a long period of time. A big piece of it has been things like the obsession with improvement. Global competition and the restructuring/re-engineering craze have taught us to do more with less. [As a result,] the pressure in our daily lives has become unbearable for many people. On top of that we face the pressures of changes in society that have made our lives outside the workplace more challenging. For example, being a parent today is more challenging.

Q: How can employers recruit and retain “high AQ” people?

A: Our tool, the Adversity Response Profile, is the only one of its kind. [The profile is based on 35 years of scientific research, including 19 years of Stoltz’s own studies in the area, and more than 1,000 studies of human and organizational performance.] There is also a very popular approach called behavioral interviewing. [With these,] you can start to get a picture of one’s AQ and anecdotal evidence of how people have dealt with adversity. Then, by teaching workers how to strengthen their AQ, you strengthen the company’s retention rate. What we have experienced [with clients] is that turnover goes down. In an earlier-generation study, a University of Pennsylvania researcher did a study with West Point and showed that low-AQ cadets were more likely to quit.

Q: How do companies unintentionally keep workers from dealing well with adversity?

A: By providing responsibility without authority. By giving lip service to empowerment and rewarding people who don’t rock the boat while asking them to be top performers. So the real topperformers say, “Hey, you don’t really mean it.” It’s a misalignment between what you say and what you do.

Q: For which careers is adversity quotient training most valuable?

A: Originally, we worked with salespeople and executives. Since then, we’ve discovered that people at all levels want to apply these concepts, from support staff to chief executives.

Q: A new buzzword is making the rounds and appears in your book: “catastrophizing.” What’s that?

A: Catastrophizing is about people who take adversity in one area of life and let it bleed over into other areas. If you ever want to feel like a victim, the quickest path is catastrophizing. If people understand the DNA of human fortitude, they can begin to control their response to adversity. We teach people how to keep it “in the box,” no matter how bad it is. You isolate it, like a virus or a wildfire.