KRIS: We've taken the resiliency concept to a different level. This really started when I got several inquiries a couple of years ago. We’ve been working on this now for a while. I think it was fall of 2018, we started working on this. The inquiry was a 30-year-old, very successful businessman approached me and said, “You know, I just broke up with my fiancé. I'm curled up in a corner in a fetal position. I don't know what to do with myself. My life is a wreck.” It was a feeling of helplessness. He was like, “I don't know what to do with myself. I couldn't start a fire. I couldn’t change a tire on my car. I couldn't defend myself.” He just fell into this strange position.

But I think it was a feeling many people are having at this point where we’re living our entire lives on phones and tablets, we’re not interacting with people enough, but we've lost that edge. We feel we're in this false sense of security in our homes and in our cubicles. People approached us and said, “I've never camped out at night.” You're just stunned by that.

We're coming from a world where the government really inoculated us to stress by sending us to the academies that set their employees up for success, whether it’s the farm or whether it's going down to Quantico. We were put through numerous scenarios over and over again with a bunch of variables.

We were inoculated by the time we landed somewhere. How to do certain things in certain environments with confidence, that if things go bad, there are ways to recover and bounce back and move through the mission without failing. Really, our entire nation needs that. We need some individual resiliency on a national scale.

That's where REAL was born—Resiliency for Executives And Leaders. It was going to be about executives. It's going to be about affluent families and their business leaders for the family businesses. Then it evolved into a family leader saying that the next generation of their family is not ready to lead their business. I'm like, that's another whole thing.

Julie is going to come up and take over the business but she's really not had enough experience to do that. That's where they approach us and say, “Let's take the family on a real experience. Let's run this through a series of scenarios which are—call them urgent and have a sense of edge to them.”

There's a lot of artificial stress, but we conduct them in a safe fashion because of where we came from and what we've done. But there's a feeling of exposure for them. They're like, “I don't know if I can do this.” But the reality is, once we're done with them, after two, three, or five days with them in Moab, Utah or Montana, or Colorado, or one of our training partners’ venues, they've got a whole new sense of confidence that they can deal with a medical emergency, a mechanical failure, deal with moving through a house in the dark at night when there's someone at the door.

There's a variety of things I think that can really change our mindset and be more resilient. That's just to get through the day. The bigger planning exercises for civil unrest, for a pandemic, we get into planning for families and planning for businesses, so we get them into longer-term training experiences for them, too.

Question: For people who don't have a Fortune 500 company that they’re passing along to their kids, what are some of those things that people should be doing in terms of, like planning for a pandemic? Everyone should have some masks in their garage at some point. What are some of the more typical things that people should be doing to prepare themselves, just for the everyday challenges that show up in life?

Kris: It's a great delineation. REAL isn't for just the wealthy and it's not just for corporations. There's a whole series of classes for one day and up to five days. They're really simple skills. It's to start a fire, change a tire, find water, filter water, can you navigate through your neighborhood at night safely? Can you move through an area safely? There are elements of mobility there. There are elements of digital privacy there. There are elements around—do you have enough water and food in your garage if a tornado hits your town?

We're in tornado season now. We’re several months into this. It's been a quiet season, but the reality is hurricane season is here. Now what? I think they're forecasting the biggest hurricane season on record this season. Are people ready for that?

I go back to that individual resilience on a national scale. FEMA is only going to be able to do so many things for people in those zones. If we were to rally individuals to be more resilient in neighborhoods that are prone to storms, whether it be hurricanes, tornadoes, look at wildfires we’ve had in the last couple of years out West, same concept.

Enough supplies and planning in place, we talk about a ready bag. If you need to get out of the city and go to a safe place because of a wildfire or some other issue going on, what's in that bag? What does that individual have? What does the child have? What does an elderly parent have? What do you do for the pet? That element of planning is really key to the real experience.

But then you get into, what if we're not going to evacuate? We're going to shelter in place? Now we're going to stay in place with no power for multiple days. Do you have potable water? Do you have food? Do you have what it takes to defend your home in case of a looter or some other issue happening? There's elements around that. There's the food, the water, the navigation, the shelter, the personal defense. Can individuals be ready for that?

Then we take you to the next level for businesses. As a business owner—you, me, others listening—is your business ready to deal with that? We had a continuous operations plan in place when COVID hit. We simply tested it and then the next week executed it. We were great. We were fortunate to run virtually, but what do you do if you're a small grocery store? What do you do if you’re a restaurant? What do you do if you're a different business?

Everybody's got something different, and we can help businesses prepare that way. It can be a small shop. It can be the large enterprise, but there are really key elements. There are five pillars of resiliency that are really important that we use in all of our training, and it's also in the book that I wrote.