“Sisu is a Finnish word for determination and intestinal fortitude in extreme adversity. Gentle power is to apply sisu with both heart and reason.”

We are diving into these concepts in this week’s session on the show with Elisabet Lahti. Some of you may remember Elisabet from the show’s first season, where we unpacked the Finnish concept of Sisu. On the show today, we talk about why we should apply the attitude of gentle power into our lives and conduct and the impact on humanity when we do so.

Elisabet says that power is fundamental in our lives―we express it in every conversation, relationship, and choice. We often equate force and domination with power, while gentleness and compassion are considered “soft” or “weak.” The destructive nature of this skewed perspective has never been more obvious, yet there is reason to hope.

Elisabet is an international presenter on positive psychology, courage, leadership, and high-performance topics. She is also a transformational mindset coach supporting individuals committed to cultivating compassionate leadership and integrity daily.

She conducted her PhD research for the Finland-based Aalto University School of Science and Technology, in which she pioneered the research on the ancient Finnish construct of sisu, which denotes courage and determination in the face of extreme adversity and the ability to unlock hidden inner strength when it is needed (find the research paper on embodied fortitude here and its press release here). Elisabet´s work has been featured by The New Yorker, Business Insider, Scientific American, BBC, and Forbes. Elisabet has given talks at Fortune500 companies such as Facebook and Salesforce, as well as Stanford University, The International World Congress on Positive Psychology, The Consciousness Summit, TEDx, and Singularity University at NASA Ames in Mountain View, California, where she also studied futurism and exponential technologies while attending their Global Solutions Programme.

Elisabet has a master’s degree in social psychology from the University of Tampere in Finland and a master’s degree in applied positive psychology from the University of Pennsylvania, USA. She is a former student of Dr Martin Seligman and began research professor Dr Angela Duckworth advised her master’s thesis work on sisu in 2013.