How to Handle Adversity

Imagine going to the gym and finding no weights.

No heavy things to lift. No resistance. Just pillows and a comfortable place to lie down.

It would be easier. But it would not give you what you came for.

We understand that resistance helps us develop our bodies. Yet in our lives, we often treat every challenge as evidence that something has gone wrong.

I want to offer a different way to think about adversity: expect it, use it to become stronger, and decide consciously who you want to be within it.

Expect adversity as part of life

I believe life is 50:50. Positive and negative. Happy and unhappy. Easy and hard.

There is contrast, and that contrast is part of being human.

But many of us compare our real lives with an ideal life we think we should have had.

Our parents should have behaved differently. Our childhood should have been different. People should have treated us better. The difficulties should not have happened.

We look at the negative half and make it more negative by judging its existence.

Expecting adversity does not mean walking around with a negative attitude. It means recognizing that the weights belong in the gym.

You can stop being surprised that being alive includes challenges.

Your current ability is not your full capacity

Think of your current skills and accomplishments as having a border around them.

That border describes what you can do now. It does not necessarily describe everything you could ever do.

How much more could you love? How much more could you create? How patient, kind, successful, or connected could you become?

You do not know until you explore beyond your current ability.

If you avoid anything that might involve judgment, failure, doubt, or discomfort, you also avoid finding out.

Sometimes we try to lift the heaviest weight before we have practiced lifting anything. Then we decide we have no capacity for it.

But developing the ability is part of the process. The challenge is not proof you cannot do it.

Ask who you want to be

When you face a difficult circumstance, ask yourself how you want to handle it.

Who do you want to be as you go through this? Who do you want to be when it is done?

I ask those questions when coaching people through illness, loss, financial challenges, and relationship changes.

The questions bring your attention back to the part you can direct.

When the pandemic began, I could not control the virus or the shutdowns. I could decide how I wanted to use that time.

I started recording podcasts and thinking about how to help my students. Deciding who I wanted to be changed how I showed up.

Turn adversity into an asset

We tend to think of adversity as a liability: something that will cost us.

There may be a factual cost. But there can also be an opportunity to create an asset within yourself.

Lifting a weight develops a muscle. Facing an emotional challenge can help you develop the skill of processing emotion.

I think of that experience as psychological soreness. It is part of developing an ability.

If you become willing to process negative emotion, you become less afraid of experiencing it.

Much of what we avoid in life is the feeling we expect to have: humiliation, grief, anger, shame, or disappointment.

Practicing how to feel those emotions gives you skills you can use again. You begin stacking those skills.

Ask how this challenge could help you become stronger or smarter. You may need to think differently, solve a new problem, or stay more aware of yourself.

Identify what kind of adversity you are facing

Before responding, separate circumstances from stories about circumstances.

Some adversity is a past event you are bringing into the present through your thinking. The event is over, but the story you tell now is creating a feeling now.

Some is internal: a belief about your worth or capacity, self-doubt, procrastination, or deciding to fail ahead of time.

Some is a projection into the future. You are imagining something that has not happened and suffering over the possibility.

For those, look at the current thought, feeling, and action combination. The Self-Coaching Model helps you see what you are creating with your mind.

Then there are factual circumstances happening now. A loss, a job change, or another event you are actually facing.

Make room for those circumstances. Process the emotion. Decide who you will be and how you can use the experience to develop yourself.

Watch for the ways you avoid the work

One pitfall is not making decisions. You stay in maybe because a decision might create a challenge.

Another is mismanaging your actions: yelling, hiding, buffering, or not doing what would serve you.

You may stop consciously choosing your thoughts. You may stop questioning what is possible or dismiss the idea that you could use the experience to grow.

You may also check out through overeating, overdrinking, scrolling, or procrastinating.

Then you beat yourself up for checking out. That weakens you and makes you want to hide even more.

There is enough real adversity in the world. We do not need to add an attack on ourselves.

Separate value from worthiness

In the webinar behind this episode, I coached a woman who had lost several jobs in marketing.

Some employers had given budget reasons. Others had raised performance concerns. She was making the history mean she had not done things correctly, and she felt deflated.

We separated what the employers had said from what she thought about herself.

There can be useful information in understanding why a job did not work out. You can learn what an employer needed and carry that knowledge into the next role.

That is different from questioning your worth as a person.

I asked what value the next employer needed and how she could overdeliver on that value. I did not mean working endless hours. I meant understanding what they actually cared about.

Focusing on the value she could create gave her a different direction from staying focused on whether she was worthy.

Compassion does not require agreement

I also coached a general contractor whose project had ended after costs increased and the client did not accept a revised proposal.

The client had said things about her that she began believing. She worried about her reputation and doubted herself.

First, we got specific about the facts, including the words the client had actually said.

Then we looked at what she was making those words mean about herself.

I asked whether the criticism was true. Sometimes we have made a mistake and can learn from it. In this situation, she did not believe she had bullied or mistreated the client.

She could allow someone to be wrong about her with compassion.

We considered that the client might be scared about the kitchen, the money, and the outcome. Understanding that did not mean accepting the client's opinion as truth.

It helped the contractor move out of defensiveness and decide how she wanted to finish the relationship: respectfully, regardless of how the client behaved.

Choose a sentence you can believe

Your thoughts create feelings, which drive actions and results. Pay attention to the sentences you repeat.

A thought can sound useful and still create inadequacy. Ask how it feels when you think it.

Then try on a different sentence as you would try on clothing. Can you believe it? What feeling does it create?

These are sentences I use: adversity helps me explore my capacity; I am strong and this can make me stronger; I was built powerfully for this; I embrace all challenges.

You do not have to borrow every one. Notice which helps you approach your life consciously.

The gap between your current ability and your goal is not a reason to beat yourself up. It is the mountain to climb, the weight to lift, the work that can develop you.

Decide who you will be as you do that work. Your challenge can become an asset in the life you are creating.