Make Adversity Your Friend

Adversity is part and parcel of life. Sooner or later unfavourable fortune or fate strikes. How you deal with hardship determines the quality of your life.

You can either choose to slump and get weighed down under its burden or ricochet in its rebound.

The people who have learned to look at challenges as valuable teaching moments are the wisest and strongest.

Here are a few ways to deal with adversity at the workplace:

1. Learn how to convert pain into personal value:
Understand that pain is always a temporary condition and view it as an opportunity to learn.

Do not hesitate to inquire into the predicament that you are in. Ask how you got where you are? What caused this to happen?

Be proactive and choose curiosity over self-pity or anger and remorse. Make the most of your learnings and experiences and share them with your friends family and colleagues, you never know when your sharing might bring forth an epiphany for someone else.

2.  Constantly keep reinventing your future:
Typically when faced with failure and adversity, one becomes paralysed with fear and a sense of disappointment. The moment that you realise that you have a choice, fear flies out of the window. When you have choices, you don’t feel trapped by your circumstances.

Don’t allow the fear to cripple you. Ask yourself about the outcome you most want. Which alternate outcomes would be workable? What are the roadblocks? Who else expert opinion can you seek?

When you begin envisioning a different future for yourself, half the battle is one.

3.  Create a routine to strengthen your mind:
Wake up in the morning and take a few minutes to meditate, pray, contemplate, or just sit quietly in a chair and sip your tea. The idea is to centre yourself so that when adversity does strike, you are closer to your centre, and minimal vascilation happens. Exercise, meditate, pray and eat well regularly.

4. Do some volunteer work
Helping people with problems larger than yours helps to put your life in perspective. Once you zoom out, your issues seem minuscule. Giving is known to give more joy than receiving.

5. Make a list of things in your life which you have control over
When you get into the zone of helplessness it can be draining. Identifying areas where you do have influence can be tremendously empowering.

6. Identify people who make you feel happier, stronger and more capable
Seek them out and spend time with them. Do not hesitate to cut toxic people out of your life. When you surround yourself with positivity, dealing with adversity doesn’t seem as challenging.

7. Make a gratitude list
One of the most empowering practices to do is to make a list of things that you are grateful for. Counting your blessings will make you feel content. When you are a stuck in a difficult situation you tend to lose sight of what all you have going for you, making such a list is helpful to reflect on and refer to.

8. Imagine that you are on the outside:
Visualise a close friend in a similar situation with the same problem, and think of the advice you would give them. Also, imagine the wisest person that you know and invite your higher better self to give you guidance. Tap into your inner wisdom. It is there and infinite, it just has to be unravelled.

9. Don’t get angry get curious:
Think of the challenge as a fascinating situation. If you add the lense of humour it will add a whole different dimension.

Humour brings in an element of creativity and allows you to think more broadly. Fear constrains you. It is absolutely essential for the best problem solving, so work not to take yourself, or your situation, too seriously.

Eventually, ask yourself how much this issue will bother you years from now and you will see the futility of it all.