The Four Pillars of Resilience: Never Giving Up
Reflections on Bear Grylls’ keynote at the Gartner Symposium Barcelona 2025 — exploring how failure, fear, fire and faith shape the way we lead, grow and endure.
Introduction
Barcelona. Day three of the Gartner Symposium 2025.
After two days of technology forecasts, AI roadmaps and digital strategy debates, the room felt heavy with intellect but short on oxygen. Then Bear Grylls walked on stage.
The session was titled “Never Give Up”. It wasn’t about systems or frameworks. It was about the human core beneath them — the courage to fail, to fear, to keep going, and to believe in something when everything else has been stripped away.
As leaders, we often talk about resilience as a business capability, agility, adaptability, recovery. But Grylls reframed it as something far deeper: a personal covenant with ourselves. His four pillars — Failure, Fear, Fire and Faith — felt less like a model and more like a mirror.
I didn’t take notes in that session; I listened. And I left reflecting on my own relationship with those same four words.
Pillar One: Failure — The Doorway, Not the End
Bear began where most people end: failure.
He described standing in the rain at the start of SAS selection in the Brecon Beacons, surrounded by men who looked stronger, tougher, more qualified. He failed the first time. Not “almost made it” failed. Sent home.
It hit me how rare it is to hear failure told without embellishment. In our professional worlds, we disguise it as “lessons learned”, “iteration”, “pivot”. But what he described was a raw, personal defeat.
The line that stayed with me: “Failure isn’t the end; it’s where the journey begins.”
He told how, months later, he returned to selection, terrified but resolute. This time he passed. Of the four who finished, three had failed before. The test wasn’t strength. It was persistence.
That afternoon, I wrote a note to myself: failure is feedback, from the frontier.
The projects that hurt most, the digital transformations that stall, the investments that go sideways. They leave the deepest scar tissue, but also the strongest connective tissue.
I’ve often found that when things unravel, the easy instinct is to retreat into competence, double down on what you know. Yet growth only happens when we step back into discomfort.
Self-Reflection Moment:
Where have you quietly carried a professional failure you never reframed? What doorway might it still be waiting to open?
Pillar Two: Fear — The Constant Companion
When Bear moved on to fear, the room grew still. He spoke about his parachuting accident in Africa; canopy tangled, impact shattering his spine in three places.
He described the silence that followed: the silence of falling, then the silence of hospital rooms and the long, slow crawl of recovery.
He said something simple: “Fear never goes away. The answer is to face it.”
He admitted he still feels fear, before jumps, before speeches, in rooms full of strangers. “The irony isn’t lost on me,” he smiled.
It was strangely liberating to hear someone whose life is built on survival, talk about vulnerability.
He called fear a compass, not a verdict. It points to where we need to grow.
In leadership, fear often hides behind performance language; risk aversion, reputational concern, data confidence. But underneath, it’s the same pulse: what if I’m not enough?
The trick, perhaps, is to reframe fear as a signal that you’re on the edge of expansion. Courage isn’t the absence of fear; it’s the quiet decision to continue while your knees shake.
When I reflect on my own career, the most meaningful shifts came when I walked straight into what scared me, from leading through crises to stepping onto unfamiliar stages. Each time, the fear remained, but my relationship with it changed.
Grylls’s line — “Light can only shine through cracked vessels” — reminded me that people follow authenticity, not invulnerability.
Self-Reflection Moment:
What do you fear most in your current chapter; failure, exposure, loss of control? How might you walk towards it, rather than around it?
Pillar Three: Fire — The Will to Endure
Then came fire, the energy to go “a little further” when the body, or the organisation, is spent.
He told the story of Everest; 28,000 feet, temperatures below minus forty, every step a negotiation with gravity and exhaustion. He spoke of hearing a voice in his head saying, “You don’t belong here — give up.”
That moment resonated more deeply than any triumph could. Because we’ve all heard that voice. The one that says: this is too much, you’re out of your depth, you’ve given everything.
He said: “Sometimes an ember is all it takes.”
That’s leadership. Not charisma or strategy, but the refusal to extinguish your own pilot light.
It reminded me of something I once heard in the military context: resilience is the art of getting up one more time than you fall. But in corporate life, the falls are emotional; restructures, rejections, failed change efforts, fatigue.
We often underestimate how long, people can carry on, if they believe their effort still matters.
Bear’s story reframed that belief as fire, not the roaring blaze of motivation posters, but a small, stubborn flame that survives through wind and doubt.
Professionally, I’ve seen that fire reignite teams during hard transformation phases, not through slogans, but through shared purpose and trust. People will walk further when they feel seen and valued.
“Always a little further,” Grylls repeated, quoting the Special Forces motto. It’s become shorthand for those moments when you need to stretch one inch more.
Self-Reflection Moment:
Where in your work or life has the fire dimmed? What could reignite it; purpose, gratitude, rest, or reconnection?
Pillar Four: Faith — The Quiet Strength
The final pillar, faith, carried the weight of everything before it.
Bear described the last stretch to the summit of Everest, 600 feet from the top. His body almost giving in. And then, for the first time, hearing a better voice “keep going.”
He said faith wasn’t about religion; it was belief, in yourself, in others, and in the quiet goodness of the world.
I think many leaders misunderstand faith as certainty. It isn’t. It’s the strength to act in uncertainty; to keep moving when you can’t see the summit.
In the professional world, faith might mean trusting your team when the data is incomplete. Trusting your instincts when the path is fogged. Trusting that effort, done with integrity, compounds even when results lag.
Grylls shared that his father died soon after his Everest ascent, but not before hearing about it and sharing a symbolic bottle of melted snow; their “magic potion for strength.” It wasn’t about the water, he said, but about shared purpose and love.
That struck me. So much of leadership, at its core, is about relationships; the invisible faith that connects people through belief, gratitude and kindness.
He closed with humility: “I’m no hero. I struggle often. But I know the weapons that serve me best; they come from within.”
Those final moments felt less like a keynote and more like a conversation with our collective humanity.
I realised then, that resilience isn’t an event or an outcome. It’s a way of seeing. It’s the acceptance that storms are inevitable, but so is dawn.
Self-Reflection Moment:
What do you believe in when the summit disappears — your team, your purpose, your values, or something deeper?
Beyond the Four Pillars: Gratitude and Kindness
After the applause, Grylls stayed on stage for a moment longer. He spoke about kindness and gratitude as the foundation beneath all four pillars.
He described climbing with amputee veterans who never stopped smiling, Scouts helping dementia patients, and the simple discipline of being thankful for the ordinary.
He said: “Look at all we have. Gratitude every day for the good stuff.”
That stayed with me longer than the stories of survival. Because resilience isn’t just about enduring hardship; it’s about noticing joy in the midst of it.
When I reflect on organisational culture, I think this is often the missing piece. We design for performance, but not for gratitude. We optimise for delivery, but not for kindness. Yet both are performance multipliers.
The teams that endure aren’t the ones that never fail; they’re the ones that never forget to look out for each other.
Self-Reflection Moment:
How can you embed gratitude and kindness into your daily leadership practice — not as sentiment, but as structure?
Closing Reflections — Resilience as a Way of Being
When Bear Grylls ended his keynote, I walked out of that Barcelona hall thinking less about climbing mountains and more about living with intention.
His four pillars — Failure, Fear, Fire, Faith — are really about integrity. They remind us that success isn’t about credentials, but character.
As technology accelerates and uncertainty compounds, these are the qualities that will matter most. The capacity to fall and rise. To stand in fear. To give more when spent. To believe when evidence is thin.
The message of “Never Give Up” isn’t about endurance for its own sake. It’s about discovering what’s worth enduring for.
For me, that keynote wasn’t a motivational talk. It was a recalibration, a reminder that resilience begins in the quiet decisions we make each day. The decision to try again. To speak kindly. To keep moving forward when it would be easier not to.
That’s the work of leadership and the work of being human.
Publication Note:
This article represents personal reflections on publicly delivered remarks by Bear Grylls at the Gartner Symposium Barcelona 2025. All interpretations are subjective reflections; factual accounts are drawn from verified public material.
In your life or career right now — which pillar feels most alive for you?
Failure — learning and adapting
Fear — facing what’s next
Fire — keeping the spark alive
Faith — believing when outcomes aren’t clear
Which one word resonates with you right now?
Regarding the article's perspective on resilience, I find the re-framing of it as a personal covenant exeptionally insightful. The point about failure being a doorway rather than an end, presented without embellishment, resonates deeply. It is a powerful analytical approach to an often oversimplified concept in business.