“Barn’s burnt down. Now I can see the moon.” This 17th century wisdom brought by way of Mizuta Masahide’s haiku, is a classic example of how we can shift our perspective on hardships themselves and utilize them as potentially the catalyst to our greatest strength. Do you look at the rubble of your life, relationship, career, etc. and think, “I can’t believe this is happening to me” or can we broaden our vision and perhaps ask “How is this happening for me” or, “What is the very best way to build from exactly where I am?”
A perspective shift on adversity itself, is a cornerstone of resilience. One can then build from the ground up, in this case beginning with our beliefs. Our beliefs shape our thoughts, which then have the power to change the way we feel and these feelings eventually can influence our behaviors. Changing our behaviors and taking pride in them creates Agency, the second cornerstone in building strategy through adversity.
As Viktor Frankl taught us in Man’s Search for Meaning, “suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds a meaning”. The moment we choose to become the creators of our experience and stop asking, “Why me?”, the adversities we experience can be redeemed. We do this by changing our perspective, then taking agency. When researchers first started looking at trauma, they thought that people came out on the other side in one of two ways – debilitating depression and anxiety, or some people bounced back. They were curious what the key contributors were to the differentiation.
The most interesting part is that when the researchers began to dive in, they realized there was a third option – some people not only bounced back, they bounced forward, and the researchers titled this forward movement, Post-Traumatic Growth. Simply knowing it exists allows us to claim the belief that Post-Traumatic Growth is possible, shift our perspective of adversity itself and utilize our individual agency to turn hardship into the catalyst to our greatest strength.
