00:00 

Hey there, you're listening to Intentional Living with Tanya Hale and this is episode number 24, "The Blessing of Adversity." Welcome to your place for finding greater happiness through intentional growth, because we don't just fall into the life of our dreams...we choose to create it. This is Tanya Hale and I'm your host for Intentional Living. 

00:21 

Well hey there, I am so glad to be with you today. So we're just going to jump right in today. Now I know a lot of you probably saw the title of this and were like, "yeah, I'm not going there. I don't even want to talk about how adversity is a blessing," and I get that. It can be really challenging to work through adversity for sure and yet when we see it for what it is, adversity truly is a blessing. I just want to give you a different viewpoint today if you struggle with that idea that adversity is a blessing. I'm not saying that it's easy, but I am saying that it is a blessing. 

01:04 

This is the deal: people have a natural tendency toward inertia or to settle into a place where they do nothing or they remain unchanged. We're kind of like water. It can be so easy to just gravitate toward the lowest resting place and we don't want to get up and work. We don't want to do these things because it's hard and it requires that we move and we do things that we may not want to do. But this is why adversity is so important, because adversity steps in to keep us from settling at our lowest levels of existence. Adversity gives us the nudge we need to move forward and to grow and sometimes not just a nudge, sometimes a shove, right? But adversity also makes us reset, reevaluate, readjust, restart, and then refocus. The prefix "re" means "to do again," right? So we're doing all this again, it's a do-over. It's a chance for us to become a better person. 

02:08 

However, when adversity strikes, we don't always think about this process of growth, but we do have a choice by what we choose to think about the experience we are going through, alright? Some people choose to come out the other side of adversity an angry and a bitter person. They wonder why such a thing would happen to them and what did I do to deserve this? They question their worth in God's eyes and they wonder why He's punishing them. They may feel that the whole world is against them and they can't figure out why their life is always so much harder than everyone else's that they know. That's one option of how to deal with adversity. 

02:48 

A second way that people work through adversity is some just are trying to endure to the end, and not in a good way. They're just hanging out in the tent, waiting for the storm to pass, and they come through adversity, not bitter and angry about it, but also not better. They come through feeling a little blasé. They're just glad that it's over. They might wonder why they have such bad luck or why this sort of thing always happens to them. They might be a little bit annoyed that they were previously sidetracked with what they were doing. Mostly, they're just in it for survival, and they come out, like I said, the other end kind of the same person, just glad to be through it. 

03:30 

But to really find the blessing in adversity, we have to turn our backs on being both bitter and blasé, and we have to really start seeking to become better. The people who do this, hopefully us, have really learned to embrace adversity, which means also embracing failure and finding the benefit of every bad or difficult experience. Now, I don't think this means that we go out and we get involved in all sorts of nefarious acts to create adversity in our lives. For sure not. Adversity has an amazing way of finding us just at the right time when we're ready for growth and when we've been given the tools or we're ready to accept the tools to work through it. I am definitely a firm believer that God, and sometimes just life, gives us the challenges we need for our next step of growth. 

04:22 

Remember the podcast we did a little bit ago on mindset? Failure is part of the growth mindset. It is necessary for us to  move forward in life. That's what the growth mindset is, realizing that failure is just a part of the process. Dr. Joyce Brothers said, "The person interested in success has to learn to view failure as a healthy, inevitable part of the process of getting to the top.'" Success, however we determine is going to require failure. It's an inevitable part. It is going to happen regardless. Regardless of what success means to you, getting there is a process of going through failure. 

05:11 

In his book Failing Forward, John Maxwell talks about seven benefits that we gain from adversity and I love these. So we're going to talk about these seven benefits. 

05:20 

The first benefit: adversity creates resilience. So as you read things, as you look at things, resilience is often spoken of as the most important quality of successful people. So resilience is the ability to bounce back or to stand strong in the face of adversity, but it's definitely not just surviving the challenge. It's way more than that. Resilience is thriving, not just surviving. In overwhelming, tumultuous conditions, a resilient person will become better and stronger. They will thrive. Resilient people also have an amazing way of turning potential disasters into growth opportunities. They have a way of looking at any situation and seeing what they can learn, seeing what they can understand, and how this particular challenge is helping them to grow into a better person. 

06:19 

A resilient person is a hopeful person. They're an optimistic person. And nothing creates the perfect storm for learning resilience as much as adversity. Those tough tough challenges can create in us the very quality that leads to greater success, that quality being resilience. And again this goes right back to the thought model. How am I choosing to think about this particular challenge or this adversity in my life? Guess that's singular right? 

06:50 

Alright, the second thing that adversity gives us is that adversity develops maturity. So an American playwright, William Saroyan, had this to say about adversity. "Good people are good because they've come to wisdom through failure. We get very little wisdom from success." Alright, that's the end of the quote. So maturity comes as we grow up... and here, maturity and wisdom kind of grow together. Haven't you seen that as as we get older? There's a difference between book smart and life smart, right? The wisdom that comes from that. And that's a piece of maturity. The maturity that can be developed through adversity is a huge blessing. 

07:32 

I know that for me the struggles of my marriage and my subsequent divorce, through that I started to develop an emotional maturity that did not exist in me before. Especially since my divorce when I went on a quest to really start understanding my role in what happened and my weaknesses and my shortcomings, all the things that help to contribute to the divorce. And as I learned to stop blaming and to start taking responsibility for my situation, I found that my emotional maturity has multiplied immeasurably. I've heard it said that taking responsibility is a huge sign of maturity. 

08:14 

And we definitely see that in our children, don't we? Once they start taking responsibility for their laundry, once they start getting themselves up on time and taking care of their schoolwork without constant monitoring from us, and once they start doing their chores without constant reminders from us, that's when we start to see them as maturing, right? That's when we start to look at them a little bit different and we start to see that they are becoming adults. It's the same for us, not only in these types of physical tasks, but also very importantly in our emotional growth. Once we start taking responsibility for our own thoughts and feelings and actions, rather than blaming other people for these things, then we are becoming emotionally mature. Tough challenges, adversity, provides us with opportunities to take responsibility for ourselves, to become mature. And someone who can come through a huge failure with a stronger constitution is a more mature person. 

09:19 

Alright, the third benefit of adversity. Adversity pushes the envelope of accepted performance. Overcoming adversity helps us to see how strong and capable we really are, something we often didn't see before. It is always amazing to me how people look back at challenges, beating cancer or another serious illness, maybe the death of a spouse or a child, a divorce, losing your job, and they're always amazed that they had the strength to get through it. But the thing is, we really do have the strength. And every time we realize we've made it through something really tough, we now have higher expectations of ourselves. We've pushed the envelope of accepted performance. 

10:07 

And once we've made it through, other tough situations don't terrify us so much. Not that most of us will go looking for another trial right away, but we realize what we're really made of and we're not so scared anymore of the tough things that are gonna happen. Surviving a failure and working through it helps us to rethink what we're really capable of and so we're not so afraid to put ourselves out there in a way previously unthought of. It's a great benefit. There's another blessing of adversity is that it provides greater opportunities. As soon as we start living a life without adversity, we start living a life with limited potential. Adversity opens the door to our potential. Adversity puts us in a situation to start looking outside of our comfortable box to see what other options are out there. We very well may not have looked had the adversity not forced our hand. 

11:08 

So I have a friend who has a child who was born with Down Syndrome. I have another friend whose child has severe cerebral palsy. So at first, both of these friends were overwhelmed by the challenge and the thoughts of how this child would alter their lives. It was seen as a huge dose of adversity. And yet, it didn't take long for them to realize that these children are one of their greatest blessings. Both families have found that this adversity has actually provided their lives with greater opportunities to love and to serve. And they both talk about how their love and their compassion have increased and the connectedness in their home has multiplied because of the amazing influence of this child. Something that was originally thought to be a challenge and brought with it some overwhelming thoughts even fearful thoughts has provided greater opportunities. 

12:05 

Many people I know who've been laid off from jobs or fired from a job have found over time that this adversity actually turned into a great blessing because they found a better job. Once it was all over, there was a better opportunity waiting at the end of the struggle, if we can just remember that there are greater opportunities waiting on the other side of that adversity. 

12:28 

The fifth way that our lives are blessed from adversity is that it helps to prompt innovation and creativity. Difficult situations push us to look outside the box for solutions to our problems. Adversity creates failing opportunities, which throws us into the realm of needing to evaluate and make adjustments. And these adjustments very likely are the things we wouldn't have thought of right up front, but rather they come after we see what has and what hasn't worked. Going through the process of having something not work the first time around and then reworking it almost always brings us to a bitter bigger and a better place a place we could never have gotten to without the adversity of failing all the previous times. 

13:15 

I know at school I've learned this. I had a policy in place once that I thought was good and reasonable. I am NOT a fan of my students treating a substitute poorly. I do not allow that at all. I'm pretty strict with that and so with that I had a policy that if a student's name got written down by a sub that automatically their citizenship would get marked down to a U, which is unsatisfactory. That's the lowest. Now the next time I had a sub if their name did not get written down, then I would move it up to an N, which means needs improvement. And then after that if it happened again, I would move it up to an S. So they could dig themselves out of that. But I just don't have patience for students who are going to treat subs poorly. And I tend to be a little bit unreasonable sometimes when it comes to these things because I feel so strongly about it. 

14:07 

Well one time last year I had a sub come and afterwards I had several names written down and I was just like "what is up with these kids? Why would they do this?" And some of them were some really good kids and I just couldn't understand it. But just came back and I ooh was not happy. I was so frustrated with that and so I submitted a referral, which was the policy of the school, and I sent their parents an email and told them what was going on and I moved their citizenship grades down to a U. I immediately started getting some emails from some parents who were pretty angry and I ended up with having parents come in and talk to me. The the adversity for me was huge. It was so big and frustrating. 

14:55 

So I went back to the students and started talking to them more individually. At first I had talked to them and just said "hey wanted to let you know that your name got written down so this is the deal," but as I was getting so much pushback I decided to pull the students out one at a time, not talking with the other ones that were involved, and asking them about the situation. Well come to find out the sub had never even warned them. The sub had never even say "hey, you need to keep it  down, you need to stop talking and get to work," so these kids were kind of blindsided by this situation. They were thinking that they were within the the bounds of what was okay because the sub had not even asked them. And all of the kids that I pulled out, different class periods and totally different groups of kids you know some edgy kids, some of athletic kind of kids, some bookworm, all different kinds of kids were written up this day. Every one of them was like "no, she didn't even tell us," and so I realized that I needed to make some changes in that. 

15:46 

So since then I work really hard... if a name gets written down, I always pull the student out first before I go through any of those processes and I say "hey, you know, tell me what went on with the sub yesterday that your name was written down." And I always get a better side of the story and it's just interesting to me how that worked. But I eventually ended up with better relationships with my students and a better policy. I still am pretty tough with what I expect with them with a sub, but I'm pulling the kids out first and talking to them. I have a better relationship with them and I have more respect for my students and I believe that they have more respect for me. So the innovation that that created in me going through that... that was a really tough week because I had parents who were super not happy and calling me and and probably with, you know, very rightfully so. But there there were some things that I needed to understand better. 

15:46 

So here we go, number six: adversity brings about unexpected benefits. Can you believe that? Adversity has benefits here. Some of the greatest inventions in the world have come because what the scientists were originally trying to do didn't work out. They failed at what they were trying to do. For example in 1968, that was the year I was born by the way, Dr. Silver Spencer was trying to create a super strong glue, but it just wasn't working for him. He was getting so frustrated the glue he invented just wasn't strong enough, and it would come off easily. And so he shelved it, and years later, he had an idea, and he went back to that formula, and he used it to create what we now call sticky notes or post-it notes. Something that I know is found in abundance in my house and at school. It's one of those things that I'm like, "ooh, sticky notes, I need some of those," right? And so I've got loads of sticky notes at my house. I use it all the time. And it became something very successful from something that originally started off as a failure. 

18:12 

And you know that stuff we all played with as kids, that Play-Doh stuff? That was originally intended to be wallpaper cleaner. And I'm sure the inventor was super frustrated with the adversity of inventing something that didn't work how he intended. But the unexpected benefit was that he or she created a childhood experience that so many of us connect to. I mean, who doesn't remember sticking it and having the hair grow out through that little guy, right, with the Play-Doh. And the thing is, Play-Doh is still making money today where wallpaper cleaner is probably not doing so well, right, but Play-Doh's still a big ticket item out there. 

18:56 

So I love that Horace Walpole said that, "in science, mistakes always precede the truth." Isn't that a great quote? If we're gonna get where we wanna go, we have to make mistakes, that's part of it. And I know that for me, the unexpected benefits of my divorce have been a greater emotional awareness and growth into a place that I didn't even know existed before I went through the process. 

19:24 

Alright, the last one: adversity motivates. Alright, Oprah Winfrey is a name that most of us in America are familiar with. She had a multi-award winning talk show, the Oprah Winfrey Show, which was the highest rated program of its kind in history, and it ran for 25 years. She's been ranking the richest African-American of the 20th century, the greatest black philanthropist in American history, and for a while was the world's only black billionaire. Many people also say that she is the most influential woman in the world and we're all amazed by who she is and what she has achieved. 

20:05 

But here's some things that some of you may not know about Oprah. She was born into extreme poverty in rural Mississippi to a teenage single mother and was raised in an inner city neighborhood. She was raped at age nine and she became pregnant at age 14 and her son died as an infant. She was sexually abused by several male relatives and friends of her mother. And yet all of these challenges motivated her to become the icon that she is today. And I love this what she said, "challenges are gifts that force us to search for a new center of gravity. Don't fight them. Just find a new way to stand." Isn't that amazing? After all those challenges that she went through, and probably the mental and emotional challenges of overcoming those things, she says that gifts force us to search for a new center of gravity. A center of gravity keeps us  upright. It keeps us from falling over. And she says, don't fight the challenges. Just find a new way to stand. That new center of gravity means we have to shift things around. It means that we have to lean forward or lean back or to the side or we have to do or get down closer. We have to do something, but we have to find a new way to stand. And this is where the thought model really comes into play. 

21:33 

When we have circumstances come up in our lives, it's important to remember that the circumstances are neutral. They only become positive or negative when we attach a thought to them. Now, I'm not saying that what Oprah went through as a child wasn't horrific. I can't even imagine. Can't even imagine what that created in her and what she went through. But somehow she found a way to take that adversity and use it to motivate her to move forward. Her thought process now is that challenges are a gift. How can that be? Because they present us with an opportunity to grow if we will choose. Or can I say they present us with an opportunity to grow? They present us growth. And growth is the greatest gift that we can give ourselves. It's a new way to stand, right? It brings us more contentment and purpose and direction than almost anything else. 

22:41 

So adversity, it's a good thing. Actually, it's not just a good thing, adversity is a great thing. We just need to check our thoughts and remember that we have a choice to believe either that we are in a horrible place that will ruin our lives or that there are some great opportunities for us as we work our way through the current challenges. This is a process of getting to this point where we think positively instead of negatively when challenges come up, but the more we bring it to our awareness, the more we bring it to the forefront of our minds and think this is a blessing, this is an opportunity to grow. What can I learn from this? What can I do? How can I move forward here? The more that this adversity becomes a place of growth for us. Coaching can help us get our head in the game of growth. 

23:38 

So, whether you're coaching yourself or whether you're working with a coach, we need to take a look at where we are, where we want to go, and figure out how to navigate the space between those two places. That the space between those two places, where I am and where I want to go, is sometimes called the river of misery and we'll talk about that probably in another podcast, but that's the space between those two places. River of misery sounds pleasant doesn't it? I know you're like "oh great, more things to do." It is a challenging place to be, but it's what it takes to get us to where we need to be. 

24:20 

Alright, I love growing up don't you? I love getting to a place that all these things start to make sense and they start to fit in place. It starts to make my life make sense. So here we go, if you would love some personal help from me to learn how to rethink your adversity or just navigate some tough situations with more clarity, contact me at tanyahale.com. On my site you can book a free 20 minute coaching session to help get you started in this process. I would love to help you see your adversity from a more positive point of view. 

24:55 

So if you feel this podcast is helping you out you can subscribe, you can leave me a review, and you can share it with those around you who you think would also benefit from this. So thank you, thank you, thank you for joining me here today. I'm so glad to share this information with you. It is changing my life and I hope that it's changing yours as well. Have an awesome day and I will talk to you next time. Bye! 

25:22 

Thank you so much for joining me today. If you would love to receive some weekend motivation be sure to sign up for my free "weekend win" Friday email: a short and quick message to help you have a better weekend and position yourself for a more productive week. Go to tanyahale.com to sign up and learn more about life coaching and how it can help you get to your best self ever. See ya!