I love practicing law but I have made the shift to coach service professionals by helping them understand how to face the many challenges of existing professionally in our current world.
We talk about adversity, often at length because every professional faces adversity. How you handle that adversity can make or break you not only professionally but also personally.
And that’s a critical point. Often, how we have been conditioned to respond to adversity affects our actual ability to deal with it.
This is a function of our addiction to the status quo. We’ve been conditioned to immediately think that if something goes wrong, it’s because we need to work harder, or smarter, or that aren’t enough.
So we, because of this status quo, have placed yet another obstacle in the way of resolving the adversity facing us. And typically, there’s no reason we need to do that to ourselves.
What we also discover often is that the “adversity” isn’t a major problem. In many cases, it’s not something that directly impacts crucial operations. Instead, it’s something that we perceive to be a threat but in reality isn’t – we’ve just made it to be a threat in our mind.
Once we look at it that way, and more importantly, once we overcome the adversity, we discover that nothing has suffered and things are still on track.
Then, we realize that we personally feel better. We’re no longer obsessing over things that we had been taught to think were important, but in the real world, aren’t.
When we as service professionals start to think in these terms, we discover that focusing on the real problems we face, without these self-imposed obstacles, means we have more energy and confidence in dealing with actual adversity. That can be not only a revelation but also tremendous amount of freedom that allows us to live a more balanced work/life existence.
I go into more detail about these kinds of issues in my book, presentation, interviews, and in my professional coaching. I also welcome questions you may have about how to deal with adversity in your professional and personal life. I’m always available to help others handle difficulties and learn how they affect long-term happiness.
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