A confession before I start. I was not in the room for this one. I have built it from the practitioner’s own account, from the feedback the participants wrote afterwards, and from a set of photographs that give a surprising amount away. So I have taken a few small liberties with the scene-setting, the way anyone does when they retell a good story they only half-witnessed. If you were actually there, forgive me the details I have filled in. The facts underneath, what was done, what was measured, and what happened next, are exactly as they were reported to me.
Table Of Contents:
- The room, and why it is worth describing
- The practitioner they brought in
- What he actually did, and why the sequence mattered
- The evening it went deeper than anyone planned
- The finding nobody asked for
- What they did next, which is the part that counts
- Why it worked: the instrument and the practitioner together
- Where to take this next
- FAQ
- Can a resilience assessment work with a sceptical, hard-charging team?
- What did measuring resilience reveal that a normal leadership session would not?
- Why would a hard-driving firm invest a day in this at all?
- Who ran this, and how is the PRI delivered?
- How can I work with Robert on my own team’s resilience?
- How do I build resilience across a leadership team, not just one person?
- About the practitioner
- Author bio
The room, and why it is worth describing
Picture a mountain lodge. Timber beams, a stone fireplace, a wall of tall windows looking out onto a deck of empty picnic tables. Inside, a ring of oversized leather sofas, the kind you sink into and lose an afternoon to. And settled across them, notebooks on knees, coffee going cold, one or two with the relaxed sprawl of people who are reserving judgement, sixteen leaders of a private equity firm.
I want to describe the firm accurately, because it makes what follows more impressive, not less. This is not the glass-tower version of finance. They chose to headquarter themselves in a small town rather than a financial capital. They buy and revive real estate and operating businesses, in property, manufacturing, and outdoor and hunting equipment. They run on a set of principles with plain, muscular names. One is Be a Buffalo, after the animal that turns and walks straight into a storm to get through it faster. Another is Extreme Urgency. A third is Radical Candor: say the hard thing, do not dress it up. These are decisive, results-first people who measure their days in deals done.
And they had decided, at their first-ever leadership summit, to spend a day measuring their own resilience.
Sit with how unusual that is. A culture built on charging at problems chose, deliberately, to slow down and examine the internal machinery underneath the charging. That decision did not come from a wellbeing mandate or an HR box to tick. It came from leadership that understood something the best performers in any field understand. You cannot only push. An athlete who only trains and never recovers does not get stronger; they break. Sustained performance is not relentless output. It is output and recovery, held in balance, on purpose. A firm that grasps that, and acts on it before anything has gone wrong, is not a soft firm. It is an unusually clear-headed one.
The practitioner they brought in
The person they brought in to run the resilience day was Robert Erkstam, the founder of Garpen Coaching and Training. His background is the reason he was the right choice, and it is worth knowing.
Robert did not arrive from the world of motivational workshops. He trained and worked as an Occupational Therapist, spending years alongside people managing chronic illness in the later stretches of life. He saw, repeatedly and at close range, how unmanaged stress and neglected health compound quietly over decades until a body and a mind give out. Then he moved to the front of that timeline, to prevention, to reaching high-performing people long before the decline begins. He describes his focus simply: high performance without burnout.
So Robert did not need persuading that resilience belongs in a room full of decisive, hard-driving leaders. He had seen, in slow motion, what happens to capable people who never build the recovery side. His task was not to convince himself. It was to make that truth land with sixteen people who prize action over reflection, and who were, understandably, reserving judgement about a day spent on the inner life. He told me, in his notes, that he wondered how it would go. He did not pretend the scepticism was not there. He designed for it.
What he actually did, and why the sequence mattered
Robert built the day to move from the general and safe to the personal, one deliberate step at a time. The craft was in the sequence.
Everyone completed the PRI quietly in advance, as pre-work, so the summit itself could be spent on meaning rather than mechanics. He opened by grounding what resilience is and why it matters specifically to people who lead under pressure. He introduced the six domains of the Personal Resilience Indicator through the sailboat metaphor the instrument uses: a boat needs a sound hull, a working sail, a rudder, each part standing for a domain, which turns an abstract construct into something you can point at. He ran a live, anonymous group exercise, so the team could watch its own collective pattern appear on the screen without anyone being singled out. Then he handed each leader their individual profile and gave them room to read it and ask questions.
Then came the moment that could have gone either way. Each of these leaders was handed paper and coloured markers and asked to draw their own boat, after which the group walked through the results together like a small gallery.
In a room of self-described buffaloes, that is a bold ask. It worked, and the reason it worked is the whole point. Robert had been clear, from the first minute, about the reason behind every activity and how each one connected to performance and to the firm’s own principles. Nobody was asked to do a reflective exercise for a vague reason. A breakout task then had each group take a domain and map the company’s own values and nine principles onto it, working out loud how Be a Buffalo fed one part of the resilience ship, and how the ship fed the principle back. He did not ask them to set their culture aside. He handed their own language back to them with a new engine inside it. That is what made resilience accessible to a group that would never have gone looking for it: it arrived in their vocabulary, tied to the performance they already cared about.
The evening it went deeper than anyone planned
The turn came after dark, with the chairs pulled into one large circle. One of the leaders volunteered, unprompted, to be coached in front of the group.
He named what he had decided to work on. Robert walked him, gently and in front of everyone, past the goal itself and into the question beneath it: why does this actually matter to you? What began as ordinary goal-setting became something else. The leader spoke, openly, about why the work he did at this company mattered to him, and as he spoke his composure gave a little. By every account I was given, there were a few quiet tears in that circle of leather sofas.
That moment, not any number on a report, is the one participants kept returning to afterwards. One wrote that watching Robert draw out a colleague’s real reason gave him an entirely new understanding of what goal-setting could be, that he had always treated it as a surface exercise, and that it set off a long, genuine conversation with two others about emotional intelligence and where the company was heading. A decisive, plain-spoken group had been given a legitimate reason, and a shared language, to talk about the things they do not usually name. The measurement is what made that conversation permissible. It gave them the structure to go there.
The finding nobody asked for
Two weeks later, Robert met the executive team and the other coaches on a video call to debrief, and he brought a comparison they had not requested.
He had set the leadership group’s resilience results against those of the wider workforce. The gap was large. Notably large. On the numbers, the leaders were considerably more resilient than the people who reported to them.
That is worth pausing on, because resilience tends to travel downward through an organisation. People who report to resilient leaders generally fare better themselves. So a wide gap between this leadership team and its workforce is not a trophy for the leaders. It is a strategic question about the organisation they are building, and about how much of the load is currently being carried at the top. A values workshop could never have surfaced that. It took a measurement, taken across two levels of the company, to place a genuinely useful and slightly uncomfortable question on the table that nobody had walked in holding. That is the difference between talking about resilience and measuring it.
What they did next, which is the part that counts
Feedback forms are easy to wave away. What a results-driven firm chooses to fund afterwards is not.
One leader, whose profile had come back genuinely low, asked for individual coaching on the strength of his debrief. The firm agreed to fund a full six-session programme for him, with a repeat PRI assessment and a personal debrief at the end, the before-and-after loop a state-based instrument is built to support. And it held. Months later, the firm’s CEO said publicly that after the group work this leader had continued with Robert one to one, and that there was a noticeable difference in how he handled pressure, crediting an approach grounded in science rather than theory alone. Separately, the firm set one of its coaches to assemble a roster of specialists its leaders could draw on, and Robert is helping shape a coaching package for people inside the business. A single day at a summit became an ongoing relationship. For the client and for Robert both, that is the outcome that matters.
Why it worked: the instrument and the practitioner together
It would be easy to hand all the credit to the instrument, and it would be wrong.
What the PRI gave this engagement was specific and real. A genuine baseline. A shared, tangible language for capacities this group had no comfortable way to discuss. And a comparison across the company that surfaced a risk nobody had seen. But an instrument cannot read a room. It cannot spend the evening before on the same sofas, earning enough trust to be believed. It cannot sense a sceptic beginning to soften, or know to slow right down when a leader’s voice catches, or hold a silence long enough to let it do its work. Robert did that. The measurement gave the day its structure; the practitioner gave it its judgement. The result came from both, which is exactly why the PRI is never sold as a test you run on yourself from a website. It is delivered by a certified practitioner, because the number is only ever as useful as the conversation a skilled person builds around it.
The leaders, true to their principles, had walked straight into the storm. What they took away was a clearer read of the weather, and the beginnings of a plan for it.
Where to take this next
If you coach or train demanding, results-driven teams, and you want to be the person who can walk into a room like that one and have even the most reserved leaders leaning in by the afternoon, that is what certification in the Personal Resilience Indicator develops.
If you lead an organisation and you are wondering what a resilience gap between your leaders and your people might be costing you, a certified PRI practitioner can show you what a baseline and a debrief would actually look like.
FAQ
Can a resilience assessment work with a sceptical, hard-charging team?
This was a fair test of exactly that, because the team could hardly have been more results-first or more reserved about anything resembling a wellbeing exercise. It worked because it did not ask them to change who they were. Every activity was tied out loud to performance and to the firm’s own values, and the assessment was completed in advance so the day itself could go straight to what the results meant. The lesson is that the most decisive rooms will engage deeply, provided the work is framed in their language and their reasons.
What did measuring resilience reveal that a normal leadership session would not?
Two things. A genuine, individual baseline for each leader, and a shared vocabulary for capacities the group had no natural way to discuss. And then something unplanned: a comparison between the leadership team and the wider workforce that exposed an unusually large resilience gap, a real strategic question the executives had not arrived with. A discussion of values cannot surface that. A measurement, taken across the organisation, can.
Why would a hard-driving firm invest a day in this at all?
Because clear-headed leaders understand what elite performers understand: you cannot only push. Sustained performance is output and recovery held in balance, not relentless output alone. Measuring resilience is how you see whether that balance is actually there, in yourself and across your people, before anything breaks. Doing it proactively, as this firm did, is a mark of confident leadership, not a departure from performance culture.
Who ran this, and how is the PRI delivered?
The engagement was designed and led by Robert Erkstam, founder of Garpen Coaching and Training and a certified PRI practitioner, whose background as an Occupational Therapist shapes his focus on high performance without burnout. Participants completed the PRI as pre-work, then Robert debriefed it in person, individually and as a group, across the summit and a follow-up executive call. It is always delivered this way, by a certified practitioner rather than self-administered, because the value lives in the debrief and the development that follow, not in the score alone.
How can I work with Robert on my own team’s resilience?
Directly. If you want team resilience training, a leadership debrief, or one-to-one coaching of the kind described here, Robert Erkstam works with organisations and individuals through Garpen Coaching and Training. A typical starting point mirrors this case: each person completes the PRI as pre-work, then Robert debriefs the results with the team and, where it helps, with individuals, and builds the development plan from there. You can reach him via Garpen. If you would rather find a certified PRI practitioner nearer to you, or one who specialises in your sector, the practitioner directory lists them by location and focus.
How do I build resilience across a leadership team, not just one person?
Start by measuring it, at both levels. The insight that reframed this engagement came from comparing the leadership team’s resilience against the wider workforce, which is the kind of thing you can only act on once you can see it. A certified practitioner completes the PRI across the group, debriefs the collective pattern alongside individual profiles, then targets the specific domains that are thin rather than running generic resilience content. Because the PRI’s drivers are trainable, you can re-measure later and see whether the work moved anything, which a one-off workshop cannot show you.
About the practitioner
Robert Erkstam is the founder of Garpen Coaching and Training and a certified Personal Resilience Indicator practitioner. An Occupational Therapist by background, he spent years witnessing how unmanaged stress erodes health, then moved his focus to prevention, helping individuals and teams reach high performance without burning out.
Author bio
Dr. Nadine Sinclair is a co-developer of the Personal Resilience Indicator and co-founder and managing director of Mind Matters. A scientist by training, she conducted her doctoral research at the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry and brought that research discipline to the PRI’s development and independent validation. Before founding Mind Matters, she spent 18 years as a management consultant, at McKinsey and independently, advising many of the world’s leading companies, with more than 30,000 hours of hands-on client work. Today she works with coaches, teams and organisations that want to measure resilience rather than guess at it.
