How to Deal with Challenges and Face Adversity

Hi, I’m Paul Krismer and I’m coming to you again from beautiful Las Vegas, and it has been beautiful ever since I arrived a little more than a month ago. It’s been glorious: the blue sky, the sunshine, it’s been wonderful. I go for a walk in my neighborhood park pretty much every day. But, in this last week, things have changed a little bit. There’s been tumbleweeds blowing and then there were like huge windstorms, and then ultimately it resulted in a big rainstorm last night and today. And bizarrely, it’s the front page news in the local papers today because there’s rain, and you know, the roads are slippery and all those kind of things. There’s some legitimacy to it, but it’s funny how we react sometimes to the adversity that comes into our life. And adversity is real, and sometimes it’s as minor as rainy roads, and sometimes it’s much bigger things too. And this video, this week, is very specifically about some strategies for dealing with adversity in your life, so stay tuned.

As a coach, public speaker, and best-selling author, I teach topics just like this one all around the world. So stay tuned, and I’ll give you practical tools that you can use to make both yourself and those around you both happier and more successful. Look, if you like this kind of content, please subscribe to my channel, and click like on the video. It attracts more viewers to the channel. Look, adversity is so real. We all have it, it’s in our lives, it’s just part of our everyday reality. And of course, in these weird times we’re in economically and from a health crisis perspective, there’s more adversity than we usually have to confront. And there’s ways to cope well with it, and actually hopefully maintain some level of positive emotions as we go through it. So we need to be really clear, like adversity is the worrisome, fearful, anxious emotion we get when there’s some challenge we’re not sure how to deal with it. And it causes us sometimes to doubt ourselves. Are we big enough, good enough, strong enough to overcome the adversity? And if these feelings become overwhelming, it can lead to much worse than just low mood. It can lead us right down into real depression. So we need some basic strategies.

The first strategy I want to recommend to you is simply investing in some time and energy for your own self-care. And I know this one gets said so often in these times that we’re in, and it’s all the self-help stuff is self-care, but it’s really real. Participate in a yoga class, or take a nice warm bath with candlelight and a glass of wine, or put on your favorite movie, or eat your favorite dinner, or whatever. These kinds of things go beyond making ourselves feel good in the moment, they remind us that we ourselves are important and that when the world is giving us hard times, we can take care of ourselves. So, in a real way, in a thoughtful, concrete way, regularly make some self-care part of your daily practice.

Secondly, inventory your strengths. When we’re overcoming adversity, we invariably are going to be required to muster things that help us overcome, help us be strong, help us get things done. And the formula for getting things done is not the same for every person. Typically we know from the positive psychology research that it’s our own individualized strengths that typically lend us the capacity to do the best and most important things in our lives. And so what that means often is that we need to take our own approach to solving our problems. And if we consider the big things that we’ve dealt with in the past, it might not always be hard things, it might be just things that we feel very accomplished in or that we did really well at. What skills did we bring to bear? Yours might be great people skills or it might be a certain amount of determination or discipline. It’s different from every person to every other person. And when we take an inventory of our own highlights from our lives, the things that we did exceptionally well at, then we can see those things that we naturally can draw upon that help us to be our best.

For me, strategy is a big one. Having close teamwork with a very small number of individuals where we have the same sense of mission, this is an important strength of mine. I do well in those situations. And so as I’m looking at the adversity in my life, I might focus on my strategy or my partnerships with close people, and it’s going to be different for each one of us. So, inventory your strengths. And of course, the secondary benefit of that inventory is it just makes you feel good, it reminds you that you’re strong. And that leads to my third strategy, my third tip for you, and that is to get some confident perspective on whatever this adverse situation is.

So often, when we’re caught up in worry and fear, we kind of spiral into this overwhelming sense that I can’t handle what’s in front of me. But there’s probably lots of reasons to think you can. And maybe start with the worst of it. Imagine the very worst case scenario. What’s the worst that could happen with your adverse situation? In the pandemic, it might be that you die, and so that would be the very worst thing and it’s pretty unlikely. And in most other circumstances, if we look at the very worst scenarios, “Oh, that person’s not going to like me anymore” or “Gee, I might not get the promotion that I want” or “My relationship with my mom or my brother or whomever is strained right now” or “My finances are really difficult this month”, these are really real things and I do not want to make light of them at all. But see it all the way to the end. What’s the worst case scenario? And probably, whatever that worst case scenario is, you could handle it. You’d have to. And most often, for most of us, most of the time, it’s just not that big of a deal if you just consider the temporary nature, the changing nature of the world and lives that we live in. Just like that weather, it starts good, and then it goes to blowing wind, and then it goes to rain, and then it’s going to be nice again in the future. And most likely, that’s your circumstance too. And if you can just see it from this big picture, get some perspective, it can give you this confidence that says, “Yeah, I can overcome this.” And along with looking at your strengths and then the sense that the perspective on this thing is just not that big, and if it’s horrible, I still can get through it, the worst that the world’s going to throw at me, one way or another, I’m going to come out the other end, even if it’s I die and then go on to whatever comes after this life. Worst case scenario.

And then, fourthly, get help. Most often, when we’re feeling overwhelmed by some adversity that’s confronted us, we tend to get a little bit stuck. We get frozen in place, like the deer in the headlights, going, “Oh my god, what do I do next?” And the easiest way, the best way to start to grease that sense of stuckness, is to talk it through with another person. They may give you some advice, they may suggest one small action, but as a starting place, it’s a place for you to foresee something small you can do. And even, here’s the real kicker, that asking for help is the beginning of getting unstuck.

You’ve probably seen that in your own life at different times. You’re feeling really down, you’re really worried about something, and just scheduling the appointment to go and talk with your best friend, or with a therapist, or a coach, or your boss, just the beginning stages of reaching out for a little bit of help gives you a little sense of your own power. You have this self-efficacy that says, “Yeah, I’m dealing with this,” and it’s only a tiny little step, but life is only ever a bunch of tiny little steps taken. So go ahead and get some help, just the reaching out is going to start to make you feel more powerful. That’s it for this week.

Hey, wherever you are, the weather’s good or bad, take it for what it is, receive what the world is giving, and be grateful that you’ve got this adversity to learn from. Thanks for watching. Bye for now.