Leadership & Resilience Development

Build people who don't quit when it gets hard.

Keynotes, leadership training and team building for organizations whose people carry real weight — and have to keep going anyway. Led by Joshua Peterson: retired Army Staff Sergeant, three deployments, and nearly twenty years of building people who had every reason to walk away.

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Joshua Peterson speaking to a seated audience during a leadership session

Every organization hits the same wall.

It's not a skills problem. It's a staying-power problem.

The team that had momentum until one bad quarter. The supervisor who got promoted for being good at the job and was never taught how to lead people through a hard one. The talented staff member who was one rough stretch from walking out — and did.

Resilience isn't something people are born with. It's built — and it's built the same way in a boardroom that it's built in a squad.

By teaching people how to think under pressure. By giving them leaders worth following. By making a team that holds together instead of scattering.

That's what this is.

What this is — and what it isn't

This is leadership development and performance training. Motivation with a method behind it. Team building that isn't a trust fall. Practical tools for staying in the fight when the work gets hard.

Every session is built for the room it's walking into. Nothing here comes off a shelf.

This is not therapy, counseling, or clinical mental health treatment. We don't diagnose and we don't treat. When someone needs clinical support, we say so and we point them to it. What we do is the development side — building capability, confidence, and the leadership that carries a team.

Programs

Booked as a keynote, a workshop, or a multi-session track.

Keynote

Keynote & Speaking

For conferences, all-staff meetings, kickoffs, graduations and retreats. A talk that leaves people with something they can use on Monday — built from a real story, not borrowed material.

Workshop

Building Resilient Leaders

For supervisors, managers and emerging leaders. How to hold a standard without losing the room. How to develop people instead of just directing them. How to lead a team through a stretch nobody enjoys — and keep them.

Workshop

Resilience Under Pressure

For full teams and frontline staff. What stress actually does to focus, judgment and communication, and the practical habits that keep people steady. Built on how people really respond, not on slogans.

Experiential

Team Building & Cohesion

Not icebreakers. Structured sessions that build the trust and communication a team needs before it gets tested — adapted from small-unit leadership and made to work in a civilian workplace.

Train the trainer

Coaching the Coaches

We build the capability inside your own supervisors and staff, so it stays after we leave.

Ages 14–24

Youth & Emerging Adults

Leadership, resilience and workforce readiness for young people — built and delivered by someone who does this work every day.

Signature Talk

Run Through Walls —
But Open the Door First

On knowing the difference between grit and stubbornness, and why the best people learn both. A talk about what it actually costs to keep going, who taught him to, and what he got wrong along the way.

30 to 60 minutes. Adapted to your audience, every time.

How it's delivered

On-site — the standard, and the most effective
Virtual — for distributed or multi-site teams
Keynote — 30 to 60 minutes
Workshop — half-day, full-day, or a multi-session track
Train-the-trainer — built into your own staff

Who this is for

Employers who want supervisors who can actually lead
Nonprofits and human services — teams doing hard work with thin resources
Schools, colleges and youth programs — staff and students

Municipalities and public agencies
Athletic programs and teams
Conferences and association events looking for a keynote with substance

Why Joshua

He isn't a speaker who researched resilience.

Joshua Peterson was raised by his grandmother, below the poverty line. He spent ten years in the U.S. Army as an infantryman and retired as a Staff Sergeant with three deployments behind him. As an Operations Training NCO he owned the training of 127 soldiers. He led Connecticut's element of the FEMA Region I Homeland Response Force.

When his military career ended, he had to rebuild. The place that rebuild took hold was working with inner-city young people who'd been written off.

Today he directs a Hartford leadership and workforce program serving young adults, coaches youth football, and runs EDS Training.

He had to build it first. Then he spent a career teaching other people how.

Bachelor of Arts in Psychology, forensic psychology focus · FEMA ICS & NIMS certified · OSHA 30 · CPR, AED, First Aid & Stop the Bleed® certified

Tell us what your team is up against.

Pricing depends on format, group size and scope. Start with a conversation — no cost, no obligation.

A 20-minute call gets you:
Clear scope · Written next steps · A straight answer on fit

Request a Conversation

Prefer to reach out directly?

joshuapeterson@edstraining.org
(959) 599-1629

Leadership & Resilience Development is a service of EDS Training LLC — Granby, Connecticut.