Welcome to Part 2 of our conversation with Glenn Cohen, former head of psychology for the Mossad.
In Part 1, we explored how resilience is built and how to prepare yourself before the pressure hits. Today, we take it further. Building resilience is one thing. But most leaders struggle to make clear, effective decisions when everything is on the line, and they’re facing uncertainty, risk, and real consequences.
In this episode, Glen explains how elite performers think and act under pressure, how they navigate uncertainty when there are no clear answers, and what you, as a business owner or leader, need to do differently when the stakes are high.
Post-Traumatic Growth
Trauma does not have to lead to PTSD. Around 70% of people will encounter a traumatic event, but only about 10–15% develop PTSD. Trauma can shake core beliefs or involve extreme threat, but it can also be an opportunity for growth. Knowing this creates strength and shifts expectations.
Resilience vs Growth
Resilience is the ability to bounce back. Growth is the ability to bounce forward. Rather than simply recovering from a traumatic event and returning to their previous level of functioning, people can develop new meaning, discover capabilities they did not know they had, and build a stronger sense of self. Real transformation happens when you shift from simply recovering to actually growing.
Coping
Even in extreme situations like captivity, people demonstrate an inherent ability to cope. Some individuals can survive severe physical and psychological trauma and still move forward. Many prove to themselves that they are capable of far more than they imagined, reinforcing a new sense of strength and resilience.
Meaning
A clear sense of meaning keeps you moving forward, even when everything else is gone. As Viktor Frankl describes in Man’s Search for Meaning, those who hold onto a strong why, or something bigger than themselves, are far more able to endure extreme hardship. That sense of purpose does not remove the suffering, but it gives it direction, and, in many cases, that direction becomes more powerful than the physical conditions themselves.
Small Wins
Small actions build psychological stability and help individuals function under extreme pressure. Finding small wins in uncontrollable situations restores a sense of control. When business leaders track time, create routines, or follow daily patterns, it anchors their identity and reduces chaos.
Belief Is the Foundation
Belief in oneself, in others, and in something greater is the most important coping mechanism. It drives action, endurance, and recovery. When belief is strong, other capabilities follow.
The Stockdale Paradox
Balancing realism with hope is essential. Facing brutal facts while maintaining belief in a positive outcome prevents disillusionment. Leaders must avoid unexamined optimism and instead operate with grounded confidence and openness to uncertainty.
EQ Over IQ in Leadership
Emotional intelligence consistently outweighs IQ in leadership and performance. High EQ enables connection, trust, and motivation. Leaders who rely only on logic and data tend to create disengaged teams, while those who lead with EQ generate commitment and energy.
Togetherness and Trust
Build togetherness on trust and psychological safety, a concept popularized by Amy Edmondson. Teams perform best when individuals can show vulnerability, admit mistakes, and rely on each other. That level of trust unlocks creativity, collaboration, and resilience.
Facing Reality
Life includes joy and suffering at the same time. Accepting this duality prepares individuals to handle adversity without becoming destabilized, allowing them to move forward without denial or false expectations.
Collective Strength and Resilience
Amplify strength through unity. Facing adversity together builds resilience at both the individual and collective levels. Shared belief and connection enable not just survival, but the ability to continue and thrive.
BIO: Glenn Cohen
Hostage Debrief team leader and former Mossad Chief Psychologist.
Born and raised in NYC, he moved to Israel after high school and served for over 30 years as an air force pilot, Mossad officer, special forces psychologist, and IDF hostage negotiator.
Since retiring with the equivalent rank of Colonel, Glenn has trained top business and military brass in the five “E.L.I.T.E.” keys to resilience and peak performance, which he pioneered during his tenure at Mossad.
Glenn Cohen immigrated to Israel from the United States and, as a college basketball player, gave up a scholarship to enlist in the IDF during the 1982 Lebanon War. Against all odds, he fulfilled his dream, and despite a 90% attrition rate, he graduated from the prestigious Israel Air Force Academy and earned his wings as a pilot.
After serving for 7 years as a helicopter pilot in the Lebanon war zone, Glenn was recruited into the Mossad and served for over 25 years in various positions, reaching the equivalent rank of colonel as Chief psychologist. In this capacity, he was responsible for selecting and training the elite operatives to believe that there is no such thing as an impossible mission.
Glenn accompanied and advised commanders from the cutting-edge units of the defense establishment – Mossad, Shin Bet, “Yamam” SWAT teams in all matters related to resilience and peak performance under extreme conditions. Based on thousands of hours of mentoring combatants and commanders from the most elite units of the defense establishment, Glenn developed the ELITE method for leadership and team building.
Since he retired from the Mossad in 2015, Glenn has shared the ELITE method, mentoring and training CEOs and their teams from leading organizations around the world, enabling them to reach their full potential and execute like an ELITE team.
Since October 7th, Glenn served for over five months in emergency reserve duty in the IDF Hostage Negotiation Unit, where he was designated to be the first mental health professional to meet the released hostages upon their return to Israel. Subsequently, he wrote the protocol for recovering the returned hostages and led a team of psychologists who debriefed the 168 hostages upon their release.
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“You can bounce forward and you can actually grow from it.”
Glenn Cohen
Full transcript of episode 320 of The Business of Meetings podcast, Eric Rozenberg with Glenn Cohen. Lightly edited for readability.
Eric Rozenberg: Welcome back. In part one, we talked about how resilience is built, what it really takes to prepare yourself before the pressure hits. Today, we’re taking it a step further. Because building resilience is one thing, making the right decisions when everything is on the line, when there’s uncertainty, risk, and real consequences, that’s where most leaders struggle. And that’s exactly where Glenn operates, former head of psychology for the Mossad, working in environments where hesitation, bias, or emotional reaction can have immediate and serious outcomes.
So in this part of the conversation, we’re getting into how elite performers think and act under pressure, how they manage uncertainty when there are no clear answers, and what you as a business owner or leader need to do differently when the stakes are high. This is part two of my conversation with Glenn Cohen.
You’ve been now speaking about, and apparently going to also have a book about, the concept of the post-traumatic growth. And the first time I heard you saying this, I thought, post-traumatic growth, growth is not necessarily the word I would have used in post-traumatic. So can you elaborate on that?
Glenn Cohen: Sure. I think it’s really amazing because the concept, the term post-traumatic growth, PTG, was developed by two researchers, Tedeschi and Calhoun, from North Carolina about 30 years ago. But what’s amazing is that it hasn’t really infiltrated enough into our psyche and for us to really buy into that. And so I feel like I have a mission to help continue their work and their message to convince people that trauma is traumatic. Yes. But it doesn’t necessarily have to lead to PTSD, to post-traumatic stress disorder. It is also possible to grow from trauma, and that is called PTG. So it doesn’t have to be PTSD. It can be PTG. And knowing that is really incredible because that gives you so much strength.
But the way I would explain it is that also, numbers-wise, about 70% of people will at some point in their life encounter a traumatic event. And so that’s the bad news. But the good news is that we can cope even with traumatic events. And of those people who encounter traumatic events, a traumatic event is any event where you feel there is some kind of extreme threat to your well-being. Usually physically, it’s usually life-threatening. But not only, it could be an event that shakes your core beliefs. Let’s say when I lost my father when I was six. It wasn’t life-threatening to me, but I saw somebody else die, there was death involved there, and it shattered my core belief of, wow, I can trust parental figures and they’ll be there for me and I’m taken care of. So a traumatic event is something that shakes your core belief. It makes you realize that we’re mortal.
And after encountering a traumatic event, depends on the type of event, but usually about 10 to 15% of those people will develop PTSD. And I say 10 to 15 without saying only 10 to 15. That’s the number. Now you can decide whether that’s a lot or a little. Most people, from my experience, will say, wow, that’s not as much as I thought, because we have in our minds, again, what you seek is what you find. People think trauma, oh my god, that’s a trauma, that’s the end. If you’re traumatized and that’s it, you’re going to develop PTSD. No. Most people, the vast majority of people who experience a traumatic event will not develop PTSD. So that’s already something important to know. And that gives you strength to believe that, okay, I can cope if and when I am in a traumatic situation.
I have the private practice and I treat mainly people after a trauma, and I’ll tell them in the first, maximum second meeting, yes, this is traumatic, but you should know that this is also an opportunity for growth. And they usually look at me in disbelief, but they usually come back about six months later and say, hmm, now I get what you were saying, Glenn. Now I feel that growth.
Eric Rozenberg: And you’ve seen that with the hostages.
Glenn Cohen: So even with the hostages, out of the 168 hostages who came back, they coped incredibly and they lived through this experience. And not only did they survive it, but some of them are continuing to move on with their lives, and quite a few of them are not suffering from PTSD. Quite a few are. I have to be very careful when I describe that because, God forbid, that I make light of that. My point is that it was incredibly traumatic, and all different types of abuse. We discussed earlier whether it’s physical, sexual, psychological, very traumatic. It was hell, but they went to hell and came back to tell the tale.
And many people in their minds think about captivity and they think better off being dead than being in captivity, right? Because again, we think it’s so terrible. But my point is we as human beings have the capability of coping even with this worst-case scenario of captivity, and they coped, and they did things that I teach our commandos in POW training, and they did these things without any training. So what does that mean? It means that they have this inherent resilience and ability to cope even with the worst-case scenario of captivity, which we thought better off being dead than being there. And so not only did they survive that, but some of them even thrived as a result of that, which is, I know, mind-boggling. And again, I have to be very careful the way I describe this because, again, they all suffered terribly. It was traumatic for all of them, and some of them are still suffering terribly afterwards with PTSD. But at the same time, quite a few of them have proven their resilience, and not just to cope with that situation with resilience, which means the ability to bounce back.
Resilience. The Oxford definition of resilience is the ability of material to be crushed and to return to its original shape. That’s resilience. What I would call to bounce back, which is amazing and it’s great and it’s really important. And most people stop there and say, oh, we have to have resilience. And leaders will say, I do a lot of resilience workshops and leadership training and everybody wants resilience, which is important and great, and I teach that. But I want to take people to another level. Not just to bounce back from trauma or from adversity, but to realize that you can bounce forward and you can actually grow from it.
And that’s what I see even with quite a few of the hostages, that they have found new meaning in their lives. They have discovered things about themselves as a result of this trauma that they had no idea existed. They had no idea. I’m talking about 80-year-old ladies, 10-year-old boys, 30-year-old executives. They proved to themselves something that they had no idea that they were capable of, of coping with this incredibly difficult and traumatic experience. And now they feel a new sense of self-efficacy and a sense of strength. If I survive that, I can survive anything, which is quite amazing.
And of course, I’m on a different level. I mean, I don’t want to compare myself to the hostages from their amazing coping, but in a small dosage, I went through POW training as a pilot in the event I would be taken into captivity. And I’ll never forget that experience afterwards, saying to myself, wow, if I got through that successfully, through that training, I’m ready for anything. And so that was just a simulation. They went through the real thing, and so imagine their sense of self-efficacy is exponentially greater. So that’s growth, because they feel it. I am so much more capable now. Many of them experience even more deeper relationships as a result of that.
Eric Rozenberg: Deeper relationships.
Glenn Cohen: Yeah, because the people who are their family and friends who are looking out for them, and we talked about before, one of the themes is that you can’t go through it alone. Just like, how did I get through flight school? It wasn’t just me. I had the doctor who believed in me. And so they came out and they felt their friends and family who were rooting for them and fighting for them for months, and some for even two years, that caused an even more strong bond between them.
And so if I give credit to Tedeschi and Calhoun, they describe five different areas of potential growth after trauma. The way they describe PTG, it can manifest itself in five different areas. And we saw those five areas of growth even with the survivors of captivity, whether it’s a sense of self-efficacy, deeper relationships, a new appreciation for life, a new direction. Some people, one guy was an engineer and now he decides, I want to be a therapist. And the fifth area is the spiritual growth. Many people who discovered God or discovered their karma or had a spiritual experience. So we saw all of these things manifest themselves in post-traumatic growth even with the survivors of captivity.
Eric Rozenberg: So you were mentioning at some stage, I heard you talk about the hope that they have that somebody will come one day, but in the meantime those barbarians from Hamas were telling them nobody’s coming, you’ve been forgotten. How did they cope at that moment? What did they tell you about the way they were taking one day after the other?
Glenn Cohen: Yeah. Well, that’s, yeah, it was very, very challenging. It was more a mind game than a physical game, even though they were physically starved, many of them, and beaten, and left 50 yards underground in a dark tunnel. So physically they were really on the brink. And the images that we saw, it was similar to the Holocaust. But a lot of them drew strength from Viktor Frankl, who was a Holocaust survivor and wrote his seminal book, Man’s Search for Meaning, and he describes things there that they actually adopted, which is amazing, because a lot of the hostages actually read Viktor Frankl’s book and they remembered it, as opposed to me. I also read it. It was mandatory reading in high school, but I didn’t remember anything. But I spoke to these hostages and they said, yeah, we thought about Frankl and what he spoke about, how people there in the Holocaust coped.
And it was all about finding this balance and finding a sense. There were a few things, but one of them was having a sense of meaning. And Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning, one of his main points was that the most important thing is having belief in something bigger than yourself and having a sense of meaning, and if you have that sense of meaning, then you can really get through anything. And he borrowed Nietzsche’s saying, if you have a why, you can bear any how. And what’s amazing about that is, I’ll give a couple of examples of meaning, and it could be your meaning. For them, a lot of them, their sense of meaning there, they’re having a why, their why was to survive so that I can meet my family members, or my why was to take care of a younger or weaker hostage. Someone else’s why would be, okay, I believe in God. As long as you have something bigger than yourself and a higher meaning, Frankl’s point was that is enough. You can figure everything else out. And so a lot of the hostages adopted that.
And what’s amazing, if I compare it to saying how physically beaten they were, and they were on the brink of death, Frankl’s statement says that sense of meaning is even more important than what Maslow talked about with his hierarchy of needs. Maslow talked about first and most important is having physical needs, security, food, water, shelter, and only after, high up in the hierarchy, he talked about having a sense of meaning. But Frankl claimed the opposite, and he’s actually flipping Maslow’s pyramid upside down. And one of the things that amazed me and I learned as a psychologist from these 168 hostages is that they proved Frankl right, that a sense of meaning is even more important than food or water.
Some of these hostages decided to fast on Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the year. Fasting in a tunnel when you’re starving, and they decide to fast. Or on the Passover, which we’re now, it’s April 5th and we’re in the Passover holiday. Nobody here in this convention hall is allowed to have chametz, but they also, they’re in the tunnels, and if their captor would offer them half a pita as their meal, they said, no, I’m not going to eat it because it’s Passover. And they got through it. It’s incredible.
Eric Rozenberg: That’s amazing.
Glenn Cohen: And so these are things that help them with their mind, and it became mind over matter. Literally. And so that is also one of the really powerful messages that I take from this, and the lessons.
Eric Rozenberg: How are they keeping track of time?
Glenn Cohen: Well, that’s also amazing, how they found a sense of control in a seemingly controlless situation. And this is also what we teach in POW training, that no matter, and this is very relevant for leadership, because there are situations where you feel you have no control. Again, we talk about a chaotic situation, pandemic, the market, whatever is going on, you feel like you’re losing control. But the point is, no matter what, you can always find some sense of control. Even in captivity, where you seemingly have no control of anything, because they decide for you if you’re going to eat, what you’re going to eat, when you’re going to eat, when you’re going to go to the bathroom. So that seems as if you have zero control.
But even in this situation where it seems like you have zero control, what we teach our commandos in POW training, and what the hostages did without any training, is they found what we call in training small wins. The concept of small wins also goes a long way in leadership and in any situation of adversity. No matter what, find a small way of feeling like you have a sense of control. And one of those examples is in your sense of orientation and a sense of time, which is a very important thing to have control of. You’ve got a watch and you know exactly what time it is. We’re obsessed with what time it is, what day it is. It gives us a sense of control, like who we are, where we are. It gives us an anchor. If you don’t know, never mind what time it is, but what day it is, you are like lost. And I don’t even know my birthday, the Jewish holidays, or whatever landmarks of the year. You get lost.
So these hostages intuitively realized that. They were fighting for their lives, fighting for control, because they knew that, and they were obsessive about it. Most of the day they were trying to figure out what day it was and what time it was. And they did incredible things to help them do this. And one of the ways that helped them was they figured out the system. They figured out the schedule of captivity and of the captors. And this is also something that Viktor Frankl talked about in the camps. He talked about the three stages. And the first stage was shock. Shocked. Yeah, which is terrible. The second stage was adjustment, and the third stage was being released. And so that adjustment is surprising to a lot of people. But even in the camps in the Holocaust, and the same thing in the tunnels deep underground, they managed to adjust and they figured out the system. And one of the things that helped them a lot was they figured out the captor’s system and the captor’s praying schedule.
Eric Rozenberg: Ah, in Islam you pray five times a day.
Glenn Cohen: Yeah. And each prayer is a little bit of a different prayer, and they figured out which prayer is when. So you already have five events, and then you’ve got two meals. I mean, it could be half a pita and three chickpeas, but they were given at a certain point in the day. So you already have seven events.
Eric Rozenberg: Amazing.
Glenn Cohen: And then you know when the captor goes to sleep, so you know that that’s night, even if it’s complete darkness. So they figured it out so much so that even at some point, some of them would go to their captor and say, it’s 3:15, right? And the captor, how the hell do you know that? Figured it out.
Eric Rozenberg: One of the things that you were mentioning as well. So I had this story and legend of Masada. It’s better to die than being taken hostage. Now there’s also the Stockholm syndrome, for those who don’t, nothing against Swedish people. But the Stockholm syndrome, now you said, no, it’s not making friends or having like a deep friendship relationship with your captor. You call it captivity bonding reaction. That was also one of the small wins. Can you explain that?
Glenn Cohen: Yeah, that was one of the coping mechanisms. I put that in the category of, it’s also part of EQ and the emotional world, to understand that even in captivity. I reframe it, and I call captivity, when I train our commandos for POW training, I reframe it and say captivity is an extremely stressful and even traumatic interpersonal situation. Traumatic, they agree, but interpersonal? What’s interpersonal about captivity? People don’t understand it. And I think especially with the Hamas, the barbarism, what we saw they did on the 7th of October, people find it hard to accept that there’s a person there in captivity. But my point is that there is a person underneath that monster. There’s a person, not a good person, but a person who you can influence. And once you realize that, if you have the emotional intelligence to understand that there’s a person there, and what I talked about beforehand about the E factor, to understand his needs and what makes him tick, and if you can figure that out and actually bond with him, then you will improve your conditions and you will get through captivity better.
And so there’s a lot of talk about Stockholm syndrome, and I refuse to call it a syndrome because that has a negative pathological connotation. And I suggest to call this captivity bonding reaction and to reframe it as a healthy survival mechanism in any abusive situation. It can also be in domestic abuse. There’s the same type of connection and bonding that happens there. It seems shocking. How could you be bonding and connecting and having positive feelings towards your tormentor, right? But there’s something healthy about that because it helps you survive. Instead of seeing them as a monster who’s going to kill you, to perceive them as somebody who can help you, that psychologically helps you get through it better. And that’s a subconscious process.
But there’s also the option for a conscious process and a decision to say, huh, this person, it’s a person, and I’m going to now do things consciously to try to bond with him actively, to even befriend him, even though we’re not really friends, but to get on his good side and to be able to interact with him and for him to be less sadistic towards me as a result of that, and maybe even once in a while throw me an extra pita to get through this. And that’s what happened. Many, many, many of the hostages managed to, they had that emotional intelligence and they connected and bonded with their hostages.
And by the way, it’s a phenomenon known around the world. Even Nelson Mandela, after he was released after years in imprisonment, do you know what he did? He had a meal, a festive meal together with his captors. He invited them for a festive meal because they actually managed to forge a relationship of even mutual respect, even though there was so much animosity and they were considered enemies. So it’s a universal concept that even in a situation where you’re being abused, you can find the way out of it by connecting to the person. And so it just shows, and this is the takeaway also for leadership and for anybody in the corporate world, that every situation is interpersonal. If captivity is interpersonal, every situation is. But that’s how you have to approach any situation and not think, okay, execution and that’s it, or think about IQ and that’s it. No, it all starts with the emotional side of things and interpersonal connection.
Eric Rozenberg: Now, Glenn, you mentioned that I do have a watch, and I watched my watch and I’m thinking, oh my goodness, you’re so gracious with your time, but I only have 30 minutes left and I have questions for another five days. So let me look into that. There’s one question I wanted to ask you, especially. I remember Gilad Shalit, there was an exchange with over 1,000 terrorists, including Sinwar, by the way. So Israel has a long documented history of trading large numbers of prisoners for a single soldier or hostage, and the Hamas knows this and they’ve built their entire strategy around it. As a psychologist and former Mossad officer, what is the psychological cost to Israeli society of maintaining that policy, and also what is the psychological cost of not having and abandoning it?
Glenn Cohen: Right. Yeah. It’s a very complex situation, and at the same time it’s our biggest strength and it’s also our biggest weakness. The enemy knows that we sanctify life. Our enemies unfortunately sanctify death. It’s a death culture. And we are the opposite. We sanctify life and we will do everything to bring our boys and girls back home. Maimonides, the Rambam, states that the number one most important commandment out of all the 613 commandments in the Torah. He said the number one most important commandment is redemption of captives. And that goes way back to the Bible, to Abraham, who went to war with four kings in order to save his nephew Lot. And it goes on and on and on in Jewish history. That is what we do. We bring our boys and girls back home.
And the question is, at what price? Yeah. And it’s a real dilemma. And the rabbis grapple with that also ethically, because you’re saving a life, but you’re potentially going to be paying the price of lives, because when you release terrorists like was released, he ended up slaughtering 1,200 people. And so the way the rabbis solve that is that they say it is okay to save a life even though you’re releasing terrorists who may potentially take lives, even if it’s only 99%. It’s not, the fact is you are saving a person, because here you just got him back. You saved his life. Most probably the terrorist will take a life, but it’s not 100% sure. And that’s the way they solve that rabbinically.
But I would relate to it on a deeper level, psychologically. What I would say is that I know from firsthand experience, not only also myself as a pilot who had to fly missions, and to read at the end of our operational order, when you have a mission, it always says what the mission is. At the end it says, if you should fall in enemy hands in enemy territory, know that your commanders and the country will do everything possible to bring you back home safely. And that’s the last thing you read before you go off and cross into enemy territory. And knowing that, that is what I call our secret sauce in general, the IDF values and the way we operate like no other army in the world, of what we call purity of arms and sanctifying life and knowing that we will redeem our captives. Those are the values, and that’s the secret sauce. That’s what gets the pilot to get in the plane and fly it. It’s not the F-15 or the F-35 that’s winning the war. It’s the pilot flying it, knowing that he can trust the commanders and the government and of course God to take care of him.
And so I saw it over and over again, because when Ron Arad was the first downed airman who still, unfortunately, has not returned from captivity, but then there were five years that Gilad Shalit was also still in captivity. During those five years, when both of them were still in captivity, I would see the trainees in the POW training program. They would say, you said the country will do everything to bring us back, we don’t believe it. But after Gilad was released, I saw immediately their reaction. You know what, now we believe it. So that contributes incredibly to our morale. And I think the morale is our resilience, and our soldiers’ resilience, and our country’s national resilience. That’s what’s going to win our wars. So as opposed to the price, if we would abandon that policy, we may save some potential lives, but it will take a huge toll as far as the morale and our resilience.
Eric Rozenberg: Thank you. I want to end with one more question, of course related to what you’ve done and linking that as well to your program. But let me ask you one last question on this part, if you don’t mind. You’ve said publicly that October 7 was a wakeup call and that antisemitism was never back because it never left. As someone who left America as a young man, chose Israel, and has now watched this play out globally, and I can testify to that as well from Belgium and Europe, what do you want Jewish communities in the diaspora, and particularly in the United States, to understand that they are still refusing to accept?
Glenn Cohen: Well, I think this is really a wakeup call, and like you talked about your bokeh bubble. So I think it’s important that people in a bokeh bubble, and whatever American bubble people are living in, to realize that life is not a bubble. It’s an illusion. Life is about good and bad together. October 7th taught me that big time, understanding that life is, it’s an incredible gift and joy, but there’s also so much pain and grief at any given moment. Now, as we speak, there are so many people around the world suffering. And there are also so many people around the world, and here within a 100-yard radius of us, who are having the time of their lives on the golf course here. And it’s hard to understand both. We see things either black or white. But the idea is to see things in an integrated way, to understand, like the yin-yang, good and bad, pain and enjoyment. That’s what life is about.
And so that may be hard to swallow. But once you accept that, then it makes it easier to move on. And then you won’t be surprised by that upsetting event. You’ll be better equipped. So I would say that’s the first thing, understand that that’s what life is about. And the second thing is to understand, specifically for the Jewish community, to understand that, not to be worried about the pain and suffering and trauma that you may encounter and most probably will, and most of us have already since the 7th of October, because as I said before, we are capable of so much more than we imagine. And we are capable of not just surviving, and that’s what the Jewish people have been doing for thousands of years, including last time 80 years ago in the Holocaust. And now October 7th is another proof of that. And it’s not just the Israelis who survived October 7th. This is world Jewry there. The Israelis are fighting seven fronts simultaneously. But there’s an eighth front which world Jewry is fighting on, and that’s the front of antisemitism. And we have to be aware of that, it’s here. But to know that we have the strength and the resilience. It’s in our collective consciousness, and we can not just survive this. We will fight it, and we will survive and continue to thrive. And knowing that, and as long as we do it together, united, that’s the way we’re going to survive and thrive.
Eric Rozenberg: Absolutely. The united is extremely important. My favorite joke is a Democrat Jew and a Republican Jew walk into a bar, and the bartender looks at them and says, we don’t serve Jews here. And instead of dividing ourselves, we should more come back together.
Now, let’s end this amazing conversation. And if you don’t mind, talking about also the content of your future book, talking about your ELITE program. You mentioned at some stage Admiral Stockdale, and five years ago when I started this podcast and I did a first webinar, you’re not alone, for the people in the industry as the world was shutting down with COVID, and I talked about the Stockdale principle to face the brutal fact and in the meantime to take one day after the other. Stockdale survived years in a Vietnamese prison by holding honesty, brutal honesty about his situation alongside unshakable faith in the outcome. The optimists die first. So you’ve observed that too much optimism can lead to crushing depression when hopes are not met, but hopeful certainty that they’ll be released was a core thread among survivors, as we discussed. How do you help a leader hold that line between vision and delusion?
Glenn Cohen: Yeah. Well, what’s amazing is that it’s not just Stockdale who described that the optimists died because they were so sure and so optimistic that they’d be released Christmas time, and Christmas came and went and they weren’t released, and they died heartbroken. But also Viktor Frankl described the exact same thing in the camps. Literally Christmas time, he said the highest amount of deaths were between Christmas and New Year’s, because people died heartbroken that they weren’t released, and they were so sure they’d be released Christmas time. So, and we saw that also, the hostages applied that technique to have a balanced approach.
And so first of all, just to know that, and we call it Stockdale’s paradox. We teach that in leadership training. And so I think to know that principle, that that’s the way to go, we have to train ourselves as human beings and as leaders not to think black and white, and to understand, and to practice speaking and saying this and that. And it’s something we can actually practice, because people think that we should be speaking, especially as a leader, with exclamation points. But no, what I teach leaders is that it’s fine to speak with a question mark and to ask questions and not just to be so solid and sure about yourself, but also have, at the same time, a doubt. And that’s what it’s about, and you can actually practice it.
And so leaders need to first of all buy into this and understand that this is the way to go. And then even if it’s not natural to them, because it’s usually not natural, to start practicing that in a mechanical way and see what happens, and to practice what I call authentic vulnerability also to your people and to say, yeah, I don’t know everything. I need you guys. And to admit that you made a mistake, to admit that, yeah, the market is in trouble, we’re in trouble. To be vulnerable and not to say, like, we have a tendency as parents to small children, oh, everything’s going to be fine. Everything is fine and everything will be fine. To practice that and to see that it’s okay, and people will actually react better than you think, because they’ll actually respect you more because they say, okay, this guy has the guts and the courage and the self-confidence to show some type of vulnerability and also ask questions and not just to bark out commands with an exclamation point. And then they will also themselves feel more at ease to talk about their needs. So that’s the way to go about practicing Stockdale’s paradox.
Eric Rozenberg: Moving from Belgium and coming to the US, I think it’s also cultural, the way I look at it, because I would ask for direction and the person will tell me, I’m not sure. I said, okay, you’re not sure, but would you go left or right? I’m not sure. And I was like very frustrated. Don’t give me the I’m not sure. Say I don’t know, but it’s not in the vocabulary. I don’t know.
Glenn Cohen: Right. That’s a great example there. There are other cultures, I won’t mention which, where they will give you the answer even though they have no clue, and they will give you directions. They will make it up in order to save face.
Eric Rozenberg: Yeah, which is even worse. Now you’ve identified the five core coping mechanisms we spoke about. You have belief, you have the Stockdale paradox, you have EQ and interpersonal bonding, small wins, and togetherness. If a hostage or a leader in crisis could only have one, which one keeps people alive, and which one do most leaders completely neglect until it’s too late?
Glenn Cohen: I would say belief is most important. That’s also, I start my book with that, because that is, like I described earlier as far as the hierarchy, I go with Frankl on this. Maslow talked about belief being nice to have. But I go with Frankl, who flips it up and says it starts with belief. Everything, if you have belief, everything else will work itself out. And that is your mission as a leader. First of all, for you to have belief in a greater cause, in yourself, in your, I talk about the three circles of belief: believing in yourself, your surroundings, your teammates, and in something greater than yourself. You first and foremost have to have those three circles of belief. And then you have to pass that on to your team and help them develop that belief. And if you have that, then that’s 80% of the way.
Eric Rozenberg: So that’s wonderful. Another question I had is about the hostage who connected emotionally even with the captors, as we mentioned. Those that were doing that fared much better. In your corporate work, you see the opposite: leaders who pride themselves on being analytical, data-driven, unreadable. What’s the hidden cost of emotional disconnection that those leaders never see on their own?
Glenn Cohen: Well, there’s a huge miscalculation regarding the importance of different leadership qualities and qualities that are needed for success and for peak performance, and there’s a bias towards IQ. People think that somebody with a high IQ will be successful and will be a better leader. That’s what people need. And people think, think rationally and high IQ, that’s what’s going to be 80% of the solution and success. My experience has taught me the opposite. I’m talking about my experience from 30 years of experience working with the elite teams and leadership, and even with the hostages: EQ is more important than IQ. Give me somebody with an average IQ but high EQ. He will get further and lead his team further than somebody with high IQ and an average EQ any day.
The cost of not having that EQ is that you will be working with robots. You think that you just tell somebody what to do, you bark out an order, and then he’s going to do it. But no, that’s not how it works. I mean, management, people used to talk about management. And a manager being a manager means you push somebody from A to B, and it has a certain value and they’ll get you to a certain distance. But these days nobody but advanced leaders talk about management, they talk about leadership. Harvard has a leadership program, and everybody should have leadership programs, not management programs. The difference between a leader and a manager: a manager pushes somebody from A to B. A leader will generate the inner engine within his team for them to want to run from A to B for him. And that’s the difference. And the way to generate that engine is with your EQ, not with IQ. That’s the price. If you don’t go that path.
Eric Rozenberg: You spend your life selecting the rare few who have what it takes. So let’s raise a straight question. Do you actually believe anyone can grow into leadership? Is that something we tell people because the alternative is too uncomfortable to say out loud?
Glenn Cohen: I firmly believe that, and I am an example of that myself. I wasn’t a born leader. I grew into it. Not that I’m this big leader today, but I lead in my own way, and I grew into it, and I for sure believe that. And it’s about thinking differently and realizing, like I said before, the importance of emotional intelligence and authentic vulnerability, and many, many things are actually paradoxical. I’m 61 years old now. It took me many years to understand many things about life. So many things about life and leadership are paradoxical. And as kids we grow up thinking that things are a certain way, and education systems try to teach us what’s the right way to do things, and this is the way the world operates and how things work. And in this world of chaos and uncertainty, we cling on to that and want to have these exclamation points and understand things. But it’s a much, much higher level to say, you know what, I don’t know. I really don’t know. This world is so much more complicated. And to admit that and to say that with strength and say, I don’t know. And to say that with confidence and to still feel okay about going on with life and leading others even though you’re not really sure of the solutions, that is the highest level. And if you can reach that level with that emotional intelligence, to show people, yeah, I’m not afraid of admitting my weaknesses, that will take yourself and your team much, much further.
Eric Rozenberg: Especially today, when you add everything that’s going on in the world and the revolution with AI, I don’t know which leaders in a company could say, I know exactly what we’re going to be doing. Have to navigate that.
My two last questions, unfortunately. Oh, it pains me to say that. I’d love to stay another 5 hours at least. As the former chief psychologist of the Mossad, your job was to select and train the elite operatives, instilling a mindset that no mission is impossible. What are the two or three qualities that most people think predict elite performance but actually don’t? And what predicts it that most people overlook?
Glenn Cohen: Yeah. Well, I would say one of the most overrated qualities is intelligence. IQ, that is. People assume that if you’re intelligent, you have a high IQ, then you will be a good leader. And that’s wrong. I’ll tell you what I think instead in a second. The second thing I would say, what’s overrated is also talent, like raw talent. People think that if you have this inherent raw talent, that will make you successful. And I would say instead of those two things, what I have discovered is that instead of IQ, EQ is much more important. Somebody who has a high IQ and a low EQ will only get a certain distance, as opposed to somebody with a high EQ and an average IQ, who will get further.
And the second thing, as far as raw talent, you can overcome that and compensate for that if you really work hard and if you have that grit and that motivation. And like I said about my story with the Air Force, what gave me that motivation is, part of it is an inner engine, but so much more is also a question of the outside assurance you get, not to do it alone, and to understand that there are other people out there who trust you. And so I think those are, if I would say, the three things that people overrate, being IQ, raw talent, and doing it on my own. That’s not what will bring people to peak performance. As opposed to that, I would say EQ and working hard and knowing that there’s somebody out there believing in you, and doing it together, not doing it alone.
Eric Rozenberg: Thank you. The hostages held alone suffered differently than those held in groups. And togetherness wasn’t just comfort. It was a functional coping system. In a business context, most teams think that they have togetherness because they have Slack or a daily huddle or a weekly meeting. What does real togetherness actually require, and how do you build it before you need it?
Glenn Cohen: Well, I would say one of the most important things in a team for them to be high performers is trust. And the trust is built by togetherness, but not just togetherness by Slack, or not even just togetherness by going bowling together or going on an offsite and bungee jumping together, which is, well, depends how you bungee jump, and I’ll explain why. Doing fun things together is nice, and that’s bonding, and that’s important. That’s one level of togetherness. But to really take it to the next level, you have to have a high level of trust. And that trust means to trust others. Military teams is trusting them with your life.
And why did I mention bungee? If you just do bungee on your own, but if you’re the guy, as a team, one guy is running the bungee cord and holding it, and you have to trust him, then that’s a different story. Yeah. That will contribute to trust. And so doing, being vulnerable, and this is something I work with teams to build that trust, is about showing vulnerability to others. Letting your guard down, peeling that layer of armor that we talked about, to show someone something that you don’t show everybody. Not by flashing them, but to actually show vulnerability and to trust them that they won’t hurt you. And that could be sitting in a circle and sharing stories about myself, discussing mistakes, discussing where I feel less confident.
And if you can orchestrate a situation like that where people in a team feel comfortable sharing like that and showing authentic vulnerability, that creates what we call, I’m borrowing the term from Professor Amy Edmondson, she coined the term, psychological safety. And so if you have psychological safety in a team, it means that that team feels that they have enough trust that they can let their guard down, be themselves, make mistakes, admit them, talk about it, and without fearing repercussions that either the boss will fire them or their colleagues will laugh at them. So that is the togetherness that we really need, to be together in a way that creates psychological safety, and therefore we will have trust, and therefore our entire culture will be a culture of feeling together, like we can trust each other, we can let our guard down, and that way we will really get through this together. And it helps people dare so much more. Otherwise, if you don’t trust and you’re worried about what you’re going to say and the way you’re going to act, you’re going to be very constricted, and you will have a lot less creativity, productivity, and less brainstorming, less ideas will come up.
So all of that, the concept of togetherness, it’s not just being physically together. It’s about knowing that everyone is there for each other to watch my back, and I can be vulnerable with them and I can trust them. That’s the most important part of togetherness, psychological safety, and therefore we trust each other, and therefore we’ll be able to do anything.
Eric Rozenberg: Wonderful. Glenn, this has been fascinating. I’m so honored and glad that my first in-person recording was with you. But we always have this joke about the Jewish goodbye, then you say goodbye and you keep talking. So let me ask two additional questions.
Glenn Cohen: Two more last questions, but we’ve had about 10 of these so far. That’s great. Go ahead.
Eric Rozenberg: The first one, you’ve started an amazing speaking career. You’re writing a book. You have an ELITE program that you are helping corporations with. How do people get in touch with you?
Glenn Cohen: Well, they can contact me on my website, glenn-cohen.com, and there’s all the information there for whether it’s a lecture or a workshop or executive coaching. I’d be happy to be in touch.
Eric Rozenberg: Wonderful. Thank you. And my last question, when we meet again in a year from now with a bottle of champagne, what are we going to celebrate?
Glenn Cohen: We will be celebrating not just the fact that my book has been out and has touched, moved, and inspired many, many people around the world to make them believe that they are capable of so much more than they imagine and that they can cope, survive, and even thrive from trauma. But we will also celebrate that there will be peace in the Middle East, and looking for prosperity in the region, and we will celebrate that and look forward to a bright future for the world.
Eric Rozenberg: Amen. Glenn Cohen, thank you very much.
Glenn Cohen: My pleasure. Thank you.
Eric Rozenberg: If you step back and look at these two parts of my conversation with Glenn Cohen, here is what it comes down to. In part one, we talked about building resilience, doing the work before the pressure hits. In part two, we went into what really matters, how you think, decide, and lead when the stakes are high and there are no easy answers. Most people want the outcome. Very few are willing to build a foundation and then operate at that level when it counts. That’s the difference. Because pressure doesn’t create character. It reveals it. And in business, just like in life, there will be moments where you don’t get more time, more data, or more certainty. You just get a decision. So the real question is, are you preparing yourself to handle those moments, or are you hoping you’ll figure it out when they come? That’s a dangerous strategy.
What Glenn Cohen shared here isn’t theory. It’s built from real-world experience in environments where performance actually matters. And I’m so grateful for him taking the time to share those insights with me. The opportunity for you is really simple. Take what you’ve heard and start building the systems, the mindset, and the discipline now so that when pressure shows up, you’re not reacting. You’re ready. Thank you again, Glenn Cohen, for taking the time to speak with me. And thank you to all of you for listening.
Thank you for tuning in to the Business of Meetings podcast. I hope you found today’s episode valuable. If you enjoy the show, the most important thing you can do is leave a review and share it with your colleagues. It really helps spread the word. I truly appreciate your support. And if you’re ready to take your business to the next level, don’t forget to visit eventbusinessformula.com to learn more about how we are helping event business owners like you. Thanks again for listening and I’ll see you next time.
