Date: January 29, 2021

Time: Noon EST

Free Ticket: Shannon Polson

Questions: Chat

At age nineteen, Shannon Huffman Polson became the youngest woman ever to climb Denali, the highest mountain in North America. She went on to reach the summits of Mt. Rainier and Mt. Kilimanjaro and spent more than a decade traveling the world. Yet it was during her experience serving as one of the Army's first female attack helicopter pilots, and eventually leading an Apache flight platoon on deployment to Bosnia-Herzegovina, that she learned the lessons of leadership that forever changed her life.

Where did these insights come from? From her own crucibles of experience—and from other women. In writing The Grit Factor, Polson made it her mission to connect with an elite pack of tough, impressive female iconoclasts who shared with her their candid stories of combat and career. This slate of decorated leaders includes Heather Penney, one of the first female F-16 pilots, who was put on a suicide mission for 9/11; General Ann Dunwoody, the first female four-star general in the Army; Amy McGrath, the first female Marine to fly the F/A-18 in combat and a 2020 candidate for the US Senate—and dozens of other unstoppable women who got there first, including Polson herself.

These women led at the highest levels in the most complicated, challenging, and male-dominated organization in the world. Now, in the post–#MeToo era, when positive role models of women leading are needed as never before, Polson brings these voices together, sharing her own life lessons and theirs with storytelling flair, keen insight, and incisive analysis of current research.

With its gripping narrative and relatable takeaways, The Grit Factor is both inspiring and pragmatic, a book that will energize and enlighten current and aspiring leaders everywhere—whether male or female.

Author

Shannon Huffman Polson is the author of The Grit Factor: Courage, Resilience and Leadership in the Most Male Dominated Organization in the World (Harvard Business Review Press 2020), as well as a memoir, North of Hope: A Daughter's Arctic Journey (2013, Zondervan/Harper Collins).

Polson's leadership writing has appeared in Business Insider, MarketWatch, Huffington Post and Forbes among others. Polson is founder of The Grit Institute, providing whole leader training with an emphasis on resilience. She is also a leadership speaker, focusing on leadership and grit based on her years wearing the uniform as well as her time in the corporate world, speaking to thousands of people in audiences around the country every year.

After a childhood in Alaska, Polson studied English Literature and art history at Duke University. At graduation she was commissioned as a 2LT in Army Aviation and became one of the first women to fly Apache helicopters, serving on three continents and leading two flight platoons and a line company. In the midst of school and flying, she pursued skydiving, scuba diving, big-mountain climbing and long-course triathlons. Polson earned her MBA at the Tuck School at Dartmouth, and then worked at Guidant Corporation (later Boston Scientific) and Microsoft.

Polson founded and chairs the board of the Friends of the Winthrop Public Library, funding and building a new library in a rural community. She and her husband are co-founders of Methow Episcopal. Occasionally she procrastinates by reading, painting, classical choral performance, playing piano or heading out in the mountains with the greatest adventure of her life, her husband Peter and two young boys.

Polson released a short book of essays, The Way the Wild gets Inside, in December 2015. Her essays and articles have won recognition including honorable mention in the 2015 VanderMey Nonfiction Prize, and appear in River Teeth Journal, Ruminate Journal, Huffington Post, High Country News, Seattle and Alaska Magazines, as well as other literary magazines and periodicals. Her work is anthologized in "The Road Ahead," "More Than 85 Broads" and "Be There Now: Travel Stories From Around the World."

In 2009 Polson was awarded the Trailblazer Woman of Valor award by Senator Maria Cantwell. She also holds her MFA from Seattle Pacific University.