High Adversity Resilience Training (HART)

In my first OPI post, I wrote: The privilege of saving lives comes with the inevitable burden of rescue efforts that result in lives lost, causing rescuers to be intimately involved in significant trauma and tragedy. While the negative psychological repercussions of such events are typically addressed after the fact, we must build the resilience ahead of those experiences. 

Over time, I realized I had not done enough in terms of resilience training. 

Although I brought significant life experience, having been part of healthy team cultures and having observed both effective and ineffective approaches to resilience in individuals and organizations, I had received very little formal training—at least none that I found particularly effective. Because of that, I was hesitant to offer guidance. I didn’t want to provide advice that was incomplete or poorly grounded. 

Recently, however, I was introduced to High Adversity Resilience Training (HART). 

HART is an evidence-based program that provides a structured framework for building the mental, physical, and social systems that allow professionals to sustain performance in environments where adversity is unavoidable.  It aligns closely with my operational values and reflects many lessons I have learned through experience.  

Resilience training is better understood as performance training. 

By shifting perspective, resilience training enables you to harness adversity and use it as a catalyst for growth rather than merely surviving it. Increased resilience allows you to recover faster from challenges moment-to-moment during an event, improving day-to-day performance. Over years and seasons of life, it also helps sustain performance across an entire career. 

In the late 1990s, when I was playing football, our strength coach used to brag that he could make us puke in a phone booth. Part of his program involved short, high-intensity circuits—simple movements performed with maximum effort- which strengthened our ability to sustain performance when fatigue became a factor late in games. 

Although coaches had been refining that type of training for decades, CrossFit in the early 2000s, smartly packaged those concepts into a system that people could easily understand and apply. 

Similarly, HART combines decades of neuroscience research, psychology, and operational experience into a framework specifically designed for people working in high-adversity occupations. 

Why Resilience Training? 

To operate from a position of integrity (OPI)—to use your gifts and talents in service to others in emergency services, acute healthcare, or other high-adversity professions—you must be resilient. 

If you spend enough time serving others in high-adversity environments, you will see things you cannot unsee. You will be involved in events you cannot undo. If those moments haven’t already given you pause or crept back into your consciousness—sometimes dominating it—stand by. They will. 

First responders routinely encounter situations most people experience only once or twice in their lives: serious accidents, critical medical emergencies, distraught family members and death.  

Because firefighters, paramedics, rescue crews, police officers, certain segments of physicians and nurses, and military personnel, accumulate these acute events over years and decades, they warrant attention both individually and collectively to mitigate any adverse impacts on mental health and future performance.  

The greatest risk to first responders’ performance may not be a single traumatic event but, more likely, cumulative stress. 

Historically, resilience programs have been reactive, focused on counseling or debriefing after difficult events. 

HART represents a shift toward proactive resilience training, strengthening the mental, physical, and social systems that allow individuals and organizations to operate continuously and effectively in high-stress environments. 

Over the next several Spiral Up posts, we’ll explore the core ideas behind HART and how they apply to first responders and rescue professionals. 

The goal isn’t simply to endure adversity. 

The goal is to grow stronger through it. 

Actionable Items 

• View resilience as performance training, not just trauma recovery. 
• Begin building systems that support mental, physical, and relational resilience before adversity occurs. 
• Recognize that cumulative stress—not just traumatic events—must be actively managed.