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Adversity - VIP Audio

Hello, welcome VIP members to kind of a new season of lessons. We’re on the Island of Maui in Hawaii and we are going to film a lot of lessons right now. So over the next several months you’ll be getting all of these new lessons, one new lesson set each month. So I thought I would start this new season with the topic of ‘Adversity.’ This is a topic we’ve talked about before and I like to return to it again and again because it’s important and it’s difficult.

Recently I was reading a book by a guy named John Wooden who is like an old basketball coach, really famous basketball coach. He has a book about leadership and coaching, things like that and it’s really good. He talks about this word ‘adversity’. So what does this mean? What is adversity?

Adversity means like a difficulty. It’s something that is challenging, tough, not easy, an obstacle, that kind of idea. You might use the word ‘challenge’, a challenge or a difficulty. It’s kind of a similar meaning. So again, it’s adversity. That’s how you pronounce it, adversity. John Wooden talked about this word adversity and how it’s very important. He talked about how his players needed adversity in order to become better.

So, the opposite of adversity would be maybe ‘ease’ or ‘comfort’. Most of the time we want comfort and ease, right? I know I do. I think all of us do. We want things to be easy. We want things to be effortless. That’s why I named it Effortless English, right? I know if I’d named it Adversity English no one would buy it. That sounds difficult, tough and, yet, we also know that in our life we need adversity, that to get stronger we have to actually face something that’s difficult and get through it and overcome it.

Coach Wooden talked about this in his book – adversity – and how one of his jobs as a coach was to give his players just enough adversity to make them stronger, but not too much where they would break down and get injured or lose their confidence. So, I want to talk about this idea and have you think about this idea this month of actually seeking adversity and welcoming adversity.

We all know that in life we’re going to have adversity. We’re going to have difficulties and challenges. It will come to us even when we don’t want it. So the hard part though is not fighting against it because, as Coach Wooden was talking about in his book, when we fight against adversity, when we resist it, then we don’t learn from it as quickly and we don’t get stronger.

His quote in the book was “tough times make you tougher.” So that we actually need to create tough times if they’re not happening to us already and, of course, if they are happening to us, if something in the outside world comes to us that’s tough, that’s difficult, that we need to try to cultivate an attitude of welcoming it, of not resisting it.

So ‘to cultivate’ means to grow, really. It’s comes from farming. If you have some plants or a garden you cultivate your garden. It means you take care of it. You give it water and maybe some plant food, fertilizer and you help it grow. So to cultivate an attitude is the same thing. It means that in your mind you try to change your beliefs, change your way of thinking so that you grow, you develop a certain kind of attitude.

So the attitude we want to cultivate this month is an attitude of welcoming adversity, of using adversity, of seeing it as something useful and good instead of something to complain about and fight against. This is the hard part. We all know tough times make you tougher. We all know if you want to get stronger you have to lift heavy weights.

We’ve talked about this idea many times. The hard part is that when it’s actually happening to still a kind of positive attitude about it and to see it as something possibly good. That’s the really tough part.

So when I’m reading this part in the book about John Wooden talking about welcome adversity, be happy that it’s here. So it sounds really good and we all can really feel motivated. Yes, that’s great! Adversity, it’s going to make me stronger. But, of course, we really kind of fight this idea when we’re actually in it, especially if it happens to us in a surprising way. We’re not expecting it. We don’t want it. Then we tend to kind of complain and resist. So how, specifically, can we change our attitude when something tough is happening.

For example, right now economically things are tough for a lot of people. Most people when they lose their job they’re not cheering oh good, adversity! This will make me feel better. This will make me stronger in the future. It’s very hard to think that way. Usually we get upset, depressed. We complain. We feel like we’re a victim, all of these things.

Or maybe a relationship problem, someone breaks up with you. Same thing, right? Our natural reaction is to focus on all of the bad things.

So this month, again, I want to try to just help you and remind you, kind of as a coach again, to try to shift your attitude when difficult things happen. This is a theme, an idea, a principle that I’ll talk about many, many, many times in many of our lessons because it’s so important and it’s also very, very tough. So, let’s imagine something tough happens to you. You experience adversity. What can you do to shift your attitude? How can you change from complaining and feeling weaker in order to feel stronger?

Well, the first thing, one thing that I try to do, is I’ll try to remember the past. So I’ll sit down and I’m feeling bad let’s say and I’ll try to remember tough times in the past, some adversity from my past. So let’s say with my business. Let’s say something bad happens. Well, for example, last year something very bad happened with our business We had a problem with Google. We were advertising a lot on Google and then our ads got dropped and it was very stressful. So at that time I was super stressed and for a while I only focused on how bad it was and how terrible it was and it was hard for me to get out of that.

The first step that helped me change that was that I sat down and I started remembering like all of the times in the past in my life where things felt terrible and bad and hopeless, maybe a relationship ended or maybe something difficult happened with a job, like I lost a job or I quit a job. Maybe in the beginning of the business some other huge problem happened.

So I just sat down and I remembered this and I really tried to remember with detail how I felt at that time, how miserable I felt in the past, how I felt totally hopeless and that really helped because I could connect that to the present and how I felt the same. Then, because I have the benefit of time, I could look then and see how that actually helped me get stronger and make improvements in my life and how my life was now better because of that past adversity.

It’s much easier to do this about something that happened five years ago, 10 years ago.

Then you can look back and there’s no really emotion any more and you can say oh, yeah, very logically, that problem in the past helped me now and that’s why I’m so successful in some area of my life. That’s why things are good now. When you do this and you kind of review the past and then you see how things got better you can kind of see the present in a different way.

Yes, you’re going to still struggle and feel bad, but at least you can see this pattern in the past. I felt hopeless, then things got better and now I’m much better and stronger and smarter because of what happened. So it’s really important to sit down and just review your past adversity and all these past struggles and see how they helped you.

So that’s step one.

Another step then is to focus on opportunities. This is a theme I talk about a lot too. So if things are tough you want to focus on all the things that are bad, what you’ve lost, all the things that are getting worse and it’s really hard, but it’s important to shift and say where are the opportunities, because somewhere in here there’s an opportunity.

For example, last year our Google ads dropped, our sales dropped, everything was going down. It was really, really horrible and I had to struggle again and again and again. What’s the opportunity? What’s the opportunity? I saw it as an opportunity to build our business in a way that was not dependent on just one advertising company, one advertising channel. I was totally dependent on Google and then I had to learn how to find other ways of reaching people and now a year later we have done that and the business is actually much strong and much better as a result.

So I had to look for those opportunities and it was tough and I had to ask myself again and again how will this make us better? How can this make us stronger? Where are the opportunities? And I didn’t just ask the question one time, because the first time my first answer is oh, it’s not going to help us. This is terrible! I had to keep asking myself again and again every day, every day and writing down answers and thinking of answers and eventually the answers came. So using these kinds of questions is also important. It’s another technique we’ve talked about in the past.

So, again, the topic this month is adversity, struggle, difficulty and how you can welcome it and use it and change your attitude about it. I’ll talk more about this in the commentary about what you can specifically do this month to use this idea.

All right, I hope you enjoy this month’s lesson and all the future lessons coming up. See you again, bye-bye.