What is your ultimate responsibility towards your life? What is your responsibility when adversity hits you? What I believe is most important, is using our ability to choose healthy responses to the events that occur in it. So that instead of blaming outside forces for what happens to you, the focus is on how you can take constructive action right now.
Unfortunately, like the journey we’re all on – your journey someday is going to end. I know that this certainly is not pleasant to think about. But if you don’t think about it now, someday down the line, you’ll regret that you didn’t start thinking about it sooner. So think about this for a moment and realize that It’s time to get serious about your journey. One day, you and I will die. We can’t control the inevitable, but that doesn’t mean that we have to be screwed on the journey to it. No, quite the opposite. We’re blessed. So, blessed that we cannot afford to waste another day in denial of the precious gift that is our life.
Looking back, I can count many years that could easily be described as ‘wasted’ (in more ways than one), but they were not. The experiences I received from those years, has led me to a place now where I clearly see the value of every minute of life left to me. I have also learned new ways to live that are moving me to get the most out of it - both from the good, but especially from the bad.
The gift that we all share, at this moment, is that we have the rest of our lives ahead of us. Don’t ever discount that. Don’t ever throw away that precious gift. It’s ours. Cherish it. Make it so worth it. I know, sometimes it can be so easy to forget this. Some days are hard. Sometimes nothing makes sense. The pain can sometimes be so overwhelming that it drowns out everything else. That’s part of life, but it’s only part of life.
So how do you use each and every single experience as a catalyst for greater growth, healing, success, and even compassion?
I try to follow these three steps:
1. Decide on what your goals and values are – which you use to measure
success, define growth and healing, and contextualize compassion.
2. Express gratitude for your positive experiences, and do what you can to invite similar experiences into your life.
3. Assign value to your negative experiences, by transforming adversity into a positive force for growth, healing, compassion (when appropriate), and success.
The first step is pretty straightforward. Although, it is a lifelong process, because you grow wiser through experience and thus your thinking evolves over time. The second step is also pretty straightforward, although it can be easy to forget, when you become overloaded with stress, or lose sight of your true goals and values. Furthermore, you can deviate from Step 2 when you’re bogged down by
negative emotions that you fail to constructively work with. The third step isn’t as straightforward as 1 and 2, so let’s explore it in more detail.
What is adversity? To me it’s any time you experience a negative emotion, because there is some adversity present in your life. It may be physically present, or it may be mentally-emotionally present - lingering in memory from your past and/or manifested in your current thinking.
How do we define adversity here? An adversity is any thing, person, situation, place, event or activity that prevents you from working toward your goals and values, or creating a sense of contentment, or happy moments. At the minimum, adversity is anything that poses a challenge to you in your journey in life. As you have probably already figured out, you can’t control your life; you can only choose how to respond to what happens to you. And you can’t prevent adversity from entering your life either; you can only choose how to respond to your encounter with adversity. Turning adversity into a positive force for growth, healing, compassion and success – requires that you respond to it in constructive ways that further promote your goals and values.
Be aware that your journey in life is marked by your personal goals and values. As we’ve already discussed, you’re on a journey in life. The final destination does not define this journey – it’s the journey itself that counts. It’s each and every moment you have – right now – to make the best of your life, create happy memories, and spend time doing the things that count and being with the people who matter most. However, even though it’s the journey itself that counts, you do still have various destinations along the way. What are they? They are your personal goals and values. No human being lives without either of these. We all have our own notions of goals and values, even if they are entirely unconscious to us. For instance, we all have unconscious biological drives built into us.
Our values and goals are the construct that define the meaning and worth of our lives. Values are those ideals, morals, principles, modes of conduct, and attitudes that you aspire to – that you continually work to embody in your day-to-day life. When you embody your values, you feel satisfied, at peace with yourself, proud of yourself, and excited to take on each new day. Goals are those concrete steps and specific courses of action that help you embody your values, and pursue relationships, accomplish things, or partake in activities that align with your values. When you’re devoted to your goals, you feel a sense of purpose, you’re grateful for every inkling of opportunity that comes your way, and you truly feel the crunch of time – as if there’s never enough time to do all that you want to do. Having clear goals also allows you to see that you must do your absolute best with what time you’ve got.
Time always keeps things moving forward. In your journey in life, you continually work toward your goals and values, even if those goals and values are not mindfully chosen – but drummed into your mind through years of harmful conditioning. Those dysfunctional goals and values are actually detrimental to you, because they’re not really coming from you – but furthering someone else’s agenda. That’s why it’s crucial to mindfully choose your goals and values.
Sometimes your goals aren’t always so tangible. At times you may reach a particular destination, like landing a dream job, getting a relationship with someone you really care about, successfully paying all of your bills for a particular month, or finishing the first draft of your science fiction novel. Other times, there isn’t really a physical ‘destination’, or benchmark, but you can still measure your success by how you feel. For example, you might learn how to avoid arguing with a verbally abusive jerk-off, instead of falling for the bait and trying to defend yourself. That kind of success isn’t really a destination, but it represents your success at working toward your goals (e.g., not arguing back) and values (e.g., maintaining self-confidence and tact when under verbal attack).
How do you respond to adversity when it gets in the way of moving towards your goals and values? At first glance, adversity stops you in your tracks – it halts your progress, or even makes you take a few steps backwards. In that regard, adversity is bad. It interrupts your journey and prevents you from actualizing your goals and values. However, it’s important to note that it’s not the adversity per say that does the stopping. It’s you who does the stopping. It’s you who chooses to respond to adversity in a way that gets you off track.
You have to first realize that your response to adversity is what knocks you off course. Yes, adversity can be and often is very painful. But, who’s to say that adversity gets to be in charge of your life? It’s not, and it never can be. So if you choose to get off track because of adversity – that’s your choice, conscious or not. If you choose to use adversity as a motivation to get back on track – and possibly get even better at staying on track – that’s also your choice. It also happens to be the more powerful choice. The more productive choice. The more self-loving choice. The smartest, most resilient, and most resourceful choice. The responsible choice.
Adversity can actually energize you to more successfully work toward your goals and values. You already know that pain can be a great catalyst for change. Pain is designed to alert us that something is wrong (by our own standards of “wrong,” of course) so that we can then fix a problem. It’s those situations that didn’t work, after all, which drive you to “get it right” the next time around. When things are comfortable, we have no drive to change (it’s more sensible to maintain the status quo for continual comfort). When we get burned, we learn to adapt, fast.
Adversity can be a great catalyst for making changes in the world around you, but it can also be a great catalyst for personal growth. It can energize you to make or strengthen your lifelong commitment to your goals and values. Why? It’s very simple. Your goals and values are completely arbitrary. You choose them (except when they’re unconsciously programmed, but you can re-wire them nonetheless). And, you can change them whenever you want. You have the freedom to do so. So any time you work toward your goals and values – you exercise your freedom. Your goals and values absolutely have to come from you, in order for them to be worth anything.
Whenever adversity knocks you off-track, realize that it is your inadequate responses to it that will make you want to just lie there and wallow. I have been an expert in all of these poor responses in the past - trust me! Having had enough ‘lying down’, I finally decided to make sense of what many have told me over and over - adversity can be a blessing in disguise! Remember, it’s how you choose to respond to adversity that gets you off track. If you’ve gotten off track, it’s for some reason that is independent of the adversity. It’s for some reason that is about you.
Maybe it has to do with:
• Fear
• Unresolved conflict
• A wound from the past
• A dysfunctional belief
• Dysfunctional behavior
• An unhealthy relationship
• Lack of identity
• Lack of resolve
• Lack of emotional honesty
The greatest gift in adversity is that it exposes your weaknesses. Adversity just so happens to exacerbate whatever that ‘problem about you’ is. Adversity just so happens to bring it out into the open, or make it such that you can no longer ignore the problem. Just because people often falter in the face of adversity doesn’t mean that it’s a ‘natural’ or ‘normal’ human thing to do. It just means that we’ve been conditioned to:
• Blame outside forces for our problems, instead of taking ownership for our co-creations and our responses to life, and
• Retreat from hardship rather than overcome it, or rather than find ways
around or through it (remember, you can always change, modify, or update your goals and values – that’s the beauty in human freedom). ‘Giving up’ is learned behavior. So is ‘succeeding despite the odds’.
If your life has encountered adversity, like mine has, and your still sucking air, you must want to succeed. Things may have reached a point where you’re tired of giving up on yourself when things get hard, or making lame excuses, or placing blame when you know that gets you nowhere. Now is the time to find a way to handle life’s hardships in a way that can create a better future. You’re ready to learn how to succeed despite the odds. You are willing to persevere, no matter what life throws your way.
Always remember that your goals and values are far too important to abandon. That if you give up on them, your life loses its meaning, and you slowly but steadily lose the passion to wake up and face each new day. You also know that one day you are going to die, yes you are getting old, and that your time here is limited. You also know that because of that, your time is also a precious commodity that you can’t afford to waste. You must spend as much time as you can doing the things you love and being with the people you love (and yes, that includes yourself).
You cannot afford to fail! In order to maximize your time here on Earth, you can’t afford to let adversity get you down.
• Don’t be a wimp.
• Or whine.
• Or give up.
Okay, well you can afford to do so some of time, or at least temporarily. We are human after all. You may have to feel vulnerable and take things personally, before you can locate your weaknesses and heal them, so that you can eventually pick yourself back up and carry on even stronger. But allowing yourself to be vulnerable is a conscious decision. In the back of your mind, remember that you allow for it so that you can learn more about yourself and ultimately get back in the fight.
Here are 5 steps that I use when confronting adversity -
1. Get emotionally raw in response to the adversity.
2. Own up to your true feelings.
3. Identify how you are “blocking” your goals and values.
4. Re-focus on your goals and values.
5. Transform negative emotion into positive action.
1. Get Emotionally Raw in Your Response to Your Adversity
Raw emotions are powerful! Make sure that you confront them with great self-awareness. You must handle them with complete honesty. The first and most crucial step in constructively responding to adversity is to emotionally register your encounter with the adversity. If you aren’t emotionally honest about some particular adversity, then you have little to no chance of actually responding to it. In other words: don’t fudge your feelings. Don’t delude yourself into thinking that you can wish, suppress/repress, or meditate them away (in any successful long-term sense). If you’re pissed off, jealous, feeling whiney, or really want to go hide under a rock – admit that to yourself. Don’t lie to yourself. It gets you nowhere but behind in life. You know that.
2. Own Up to Your True Feelings
After you’ve vented your raw emotional response to adversity in a safe and constructive way, it’s time to own up to your feelings. This is not easy, but it’s necessary. You feel the way you do in response to adversity because of how you view your life, your world, your place in the world, and the relationship between adversity and you. Your views are so incredibly important and powerful, because they shape your experience of reality - moment to moment. People don’t like to admit this, because it kills their license to complain, bitch and moan about life all the time. You need to admit it though, because it puts you in the role of resourceful co-creator rather than helpless victim.
Although blame is a dangerous response, it isn’t always counter-productive. Now, it’s perfectly natural to want to blame your adversity for your problems in the short term. It is so easy to just say “You did this to me!” In the long run, however, blame only hurts you, and keeps you locked in victim mode. This can only perpetuate learned helplessness - which means you can say goodbye to your goals and values! So the final step in expressing your negative emotions about your adversity is to get clear on how you feel. This is distinct from ruminating about how “horrible” or “unfair” your adversity is, because that’s blaming, which means it’s not owning up to your feelings.
For example, you might initially make a statement like: “I’m so hurt because my adversity judged me unfairly.” That’s fine, but only in the short term. This will do you no good with respect to your long-term emotional health.
Realize that too much blame hurts you. You have to turn the blame statement into one of ownership, which directly speaks to how you feel. You might think : “I feel hurt that my adversity judged me unfairly because I felt that they broke the trust that existed between us, and that makes me feel vulnerable.” If you’re really honest with yourself, you might take it a step further: “I feel hurt because I’m judging myself in the way that I accused my adversity of judging me unfairly, and when I judge myself in this way it makes me feel lost and like a failure.” The two previous statements demonstrate an ownership of feelings. They don’t place the blame on adversity, but explain a particular response to adversity, which happens to be painful.
3. Identify How You Are Blocking Your Goals & Values
Why Is Your Encounter with Adversity Bad? Once you complete step 2, and are honest about how adversity rubbed you the wrong way, it’s time to get to the root of the problem. The problem is that you’re “blocked” from working toward your goals and values.
So ask yourself:
"Which goals are being blocked?"
"Which values are being compromised?"
Then remember that the root of the problem is that you are “blocking” your goals and values – through your response to the adversity.
Take the time to reframe the focus on your role in your life. If you’ve done the work with steps 1 and 2, “Adversity is blocking this goal” or “Adversity is compromising that value” – reword your answers. Cut “adversity” out – replace it with an “I” statement:
• “I’m allowing this goal to be blocked.”
• “I’m not actively pursuing alternative ways to reach this goal, or choosing a new
goal altogether.”
• “I’m not replacing a particularly unreasonable goal with a more sensible, or attainable one.”
• “I’m allowing this value to be compromised.”
• “I’m holding myself to a standard that is unrealistic or unhealthy for me.”
• “I’m failing to make sure that my values come from me, and that they make sense for me.”
• “I’m judging myself too harshly for not upholding a value; all I can do is the best given the situation. Values guide my behavior and I am the one who chooses them; they aren’t licenses for self-scrutiny and condemnation.”
Remember, adversity can’t “make” you do anything. You choose how you respond to adversity. If you respond to adversity by abandoning your goals and values – you have to take full responsibility for that. It is much better to take responsibility now, rather than later, when more damage is done.
4. Re-Focus on Your Goals & Values
Encountering adversity isn’t fun, you already know that, but do you know what else? When you express your raw feelings, own up to them, and get to the root of the problem, you won’t care about the adversity anymore. If you don’t get to that point, then you haven’t fully expressed your emotions yet. So get back to work and stop sugar-coating, making excuses for others, minimizing your pain, or judging yourself negatively for having the courage to be emotional and take things damn personally. What you’ll care about is yourself. Your journey, remember? That’s why adversity sucked in the first place – it interrupted your journey!
How do you overcome adversity such that it helps you on your journey in life?
You use it as a good excuse to get re-focused on your journey! You must assess which goals and values have been compromised, and you determine:
• How you can reinstate them
• How you can work toward them right now
• Whether you need to update them, or replace certain ones altogether
• How you can avoid sabotaging yourself
• How you can learn a lesson from your encounter with adversity, such that you find out how to better work toward your goals and values – starting right now.
If you can re-focus on your goals and values – in spite of adversity – then you’ve actually become more committed to your goals and values, because of that adversity! How self-empowering is that?
5. Transform Negative Emotion into Positive Action.
You have to ensure that you continually use your negative emotions to work toward greater success. So whenever you find yourself feeling bad in response to thinking about or interacting with something even remotely related to your adversity, you need to: repeat the four previous steps. Find any way that you can learn from your negative emotion so that you feel energized, motivated, and mobilized to get back to your goals and values. Getting back to your goals and values is a conscious commitment. If you don’t make the commitment, or only make it half-heartedly, you’ll suffer the price. The price will be your long-term emotional health and well-being, as well as your effectiveness in life.
Facing your emotions head on can be intense. Don’t let your emotions steer you away from your goals and values. If you ditch them – your happiness, not to mention vitality, falls by the wayside. So be sure to get increasingly in touch with your negative, and of course your positive emotions. Fashion negative emotions into positive action. Counter to what culture tells you, emotion itself does not have to dictate action. You can’t forget your will to act, or your will to commit – despite feeling scared, uncertain, or whatever else you might be tempted to use an excuse for inaction, or the wrong kind of action. Negatively regarded
emotions either inform you about danger in your environment, or your dangerously skewed perceptions of your environment. Either way, they’re nifty tools at your disposal. Use them.
I hope that I have been able to give you some new ways of looking at and responding to the hardships that will come up as your journey in life continues.
Encountering adversity often initially impairs your ability to succeed (or rather your dysfunctional response to adversity compromises your success in life).
However, taking responsibility for adversity positions you to:
• Work toward your goals and values with newfound strength and vigor,
• Refine your notions of success by appropriately realigning your goals and values, and/or
• Become increasingly mindful of your true goals and values so that you can more consciously and more fully commit to them
Hopefully you can now recognize that encountering adversity can and eventually should be an experience that you use to enhance your quality of life. Your attitudes and perceptions are far more powerful than you might think. They co-construct your life in myriad ways and you need to become increasingly aware of how that process works, so that you can better focus and direct them in positive ways.
I also hope that can take the time to reflect and embrace the idea of how important every moment that we have left to live is.
STM 10/30/11
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