Where Adversity Can Lead

In December 2019 I felt like I was just starting to catch a break.

The previous 13 months had been tough, and our family were just picking ourselves up from a devastating health diagnosis for our daughter.

I remember ringing in 2020 with a fresh sense of optimism I hadn’t felt for what seemed like ages. I also remember a few weeks later hearing about Wuhan, China and a flu-like virus.

If you’d never been knocked off course in life before then, March 2020 was your likely your debut.

As a consultant, the months that followed seemed brutal. All of my half-dozen or so clients called me within a few days of each other with versions of the same advice: "we don’t know what’s going to happen". "We suggest you make other plans". "We can’t guarantee you anything, because we just don’t know".

Here we go again.

Only this time the whole world was in the same boat.

It’s only on reflection two years on that I’ve started to see the good that can come from life’s tough knocks. It’s taken a while but I think provided we can pick ourselves up, there’s actually some real advantages to adversity.

The first advantage to being knocked off course is we find we are probably stronger than we think.

Being knocked down tests, and reveals, our strength. Yes, it may hurt more than we like or imagine, but at least we know something of our own resolve.

I did not know I had the strength I had in November 2018. Like you, I found a resilience in 2020 I probably didn’t know I possessed.

Knowing we are stronger than we think will help to grow our confidence for future challenges.

The other thing being knocked off course helps us realise is that there is more than one way to have the life we want.

In fact there’s probably far more paths than we can ever imagine to take us where we want to go.

I’ve come to see that when things are going well, I tend to get ‘path-centric’. It’s this path that’s taking me to this destination. This is the plan. When things are easy I’m more inclined to narrow my focus, not open my mind. I tend to fixate on fewer options and I become more rigid.

When adversity strikes, I’m forced once again to take my focus off the particular path I’m on, and to stop, and refocus instead on where it is I’m headed.

It reminds me to distinguish between my journey and my destination. Between means and ends. It reminds me again about what’s important. And what is really not.

When I refocus it helps me open up to the possibility of a whole lot of different ways to get to where it is I’m wanting to go.

It turns out my March 2020 client conversations didn’t really amount to much. The one client I did lose was quickly replaced and my business ended up growing more than I could have imagined.

I’m not saying I like being knocked off course. I’m certainly not hoping it happens again. And I’m not naive enough to think that sometimes a knock may be too much for us to bear.

But what I can say is, if we can pick ourselves up, at least we know how strong we are.

And we will know it’s where we’re headed that matters to us more than the path we tread to get there. We will be a whole lot less concerned about how we get to where it is we want our life to take us.

And in the end that may actually be a very good thing. Because we may just discover a far more interesting path to take us there.

I am an experienced CEO, business strategist and communications specialist who loves helping great people and organisations grow.

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