This article is an excerpt from the Shortform book guide to "The Happiness Advantage" by Shawn Achor. Shortform has the world's best summaries and analyses of books you should be reading.
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Are you currently facing adversity? Do you want to know how to deal with adversity and overcome it?
It can be particularly difficult to remain optimistic when facing adversity—but the key is to change how you respond to the challenge. The best way is to see adversity as an opportunity for growth and personal development.
Here’s how you can reframe challenges when facing adversity.
Advice for Facing Adversity
When facing adversity, you have three options:
- Keep circling around the problem, which will result in no change.
- Make bad choices that create further negative consequences, thereby putting you in an even worse position than before.
- Take the setback as an opportunity to build resilience, improve your abilities, and increase your fortitude. This is the Third Path, or the act of “falling up.”
Facing adversity is inevitable, but, if you stay positive during challenging times, you will not only carry on, but also learn and grow through the process. In fact, the most traumatic and heart-wrenching experiences can also be the most positive and transformative when people remain optimistic and find ways to rise above their hardships. People who choose to fall up in the face of traumas—such as chronic and life-threatening illnesses, natural disasters, and military combat—experience Post-Traumatic Growth or Adversarial Growth, which results in increased:
- Compassion
- Openness
- Personal strength
- Satisfaction with life
- Self-confidence
- Spirituality
- Appreciation for and intimacy in social relationships
When facing adversity, instead of seeing failure as something to avoid or endure, when you learn to fall up, failure becomes an invaluable opportunity for growth. When you fall down, don’t simply get back up and return to the status quo—take a deliberate approach to your challenge and fall up to greater heights. Successful people and organizations frame failure as a stepping stone to greatness, and one that forces them to face adversity in the following ways:
- Be more creative to work around obstacles
- Accelerate their learning to find alternative routes and solutions
- Increase their competitiveness to avoid getting snagged on the same hurdles in the future
Many companies and organizations highly value failing early and often because those failures provide opportunities to learn before investing too heavily in a particular model, project, or approach. Bearing this in mind is useful when facing adversity. For example, the CEO of Coca-Cola is known for beginning each of his annual investor meetings by talking about all of the products the company created that year but never launched. Rather than a parade of the company’s failures, the presentation serves as an opportunity to highlight lessons learned and to reflect on how those lessons will position Coca-Cola to grow to greater heights.
Avoid Learned Helplessness
Even without knowing the big-picture benefits of the Third Path, anyone could see that moving past an obstacle is better than letting it defeat you. So, why doesn’t everyone choose to fall up? Simply put, when you get knocked down, it’s hard to pick yourself up and carry on. Generally, when faced with the stress of a crisis, most people get so caught up in their misfortune they forget that a Third Path exists.
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Here's what you'll find in our full The Happiness Advantage summary :
- How happiness isn’t the result of success, it’s the cause of it
- The benefits of happiness—from increased creativity to improved health
- Strategies for adopting a positive mindset and raising your happiness baseline
