Adapting to Challenging Circumstances and Succeeding

4 minute read.

Executive Summary

In this blog post, I will highlight: Part One) why this blog post exists; Part Two) tools that you can use to balance a positive mindset with challenging circumstances.

Part One: Why write this?

As someone still early in my career as a person and salesperson, it is easy to assume that I have more to learn. It is also fair to assume that for any person, then we will always have more to learn as long as we live.

Recently, some coworkers who are role models of mine and I had a thought provoking conversation about what it takes to win a sales cycle during challenging circumstances. Even if your company is far-and-beyond competition and every foundational buying indicator exists (BANT), then in a sales cycle we still must assume that "everything that could go wrong will go wrong" (Murphy's Law). For example, we must still seek to understand, adapt to, and provide support in order to overcome any potential hurdles with pricing, technical implementation, point of contact ("POC") departures, inertia, etc.

Even if your company is far-and-beyond competition and every foundational buying indicator exists (BANT), then in a sales cycle we still must assume that "everything that could go wrong will go wrong" (Murphy's Law).

Taking this a step further, this can apply to our individual lives and businesses as well. For example, before challenging circumstances we may have had a steady cash flow coming in that is no longer there. It then becomes even more important to adapt and find a way to succeed.

Part Two: What tools can I use?

Now, instead of giving you an elongated story, listed here are some tangible tools that you can use.

Adam Grant (my favorite organizational psychologist, author, TED speaker, podcast host, and the youngest ever tenured professor at UPenn’s Wharton School): Leverage defensive pessimism and strategic optimism. If you’re a strategic optimist, you envision the best possible outcome and then eagerly plan to make it happen. If you’re a defensive pessimist, even if you’ve been successful in the past, you know this time could be different. Find the right balance for you of both.

Analogously, for completing a half marathon:

1. Strategic optimism: visualize crossing the finish line.
2. Defensive pessimism: visualize getting injured. Proactively train for endurance, speed, and injury prevention. Interval and distance training, bilateral exercise, yoga, and building muscle memory by practicing proper form all help. "Rest as hard as you run" with RICE after training (rest, ice, compression, elevation) and repeat.
3. In the moment: focus on every lap / mile / breathe… let muscle memory take care of the rest.

Adapted from Charles Darwin: Adapt. "It is not the most intellectual of the species that survives; it is not the strongest that survives; but the species that survives is the one that is able best to adapt and adjust to the changing environment in which it finds itself."

Dwight D. Eisenhower (34th President of the United States): Prioritize.

Microsoft's CEO Satya Nadella: Learn. "The learn-it-all does better than the know-it-all." While Satya certainly did not invent this mindset, he did popularize it.

Ray Dalio: Execute. “The Five Step Process,” walks you through the five things you need to do to be successful, especially in the face of challenges.

1. Know you goals and run after them;
2. Encounter the problems that stand in the way of getting to your goals;
3. Diagnose these problems to get at their root causes;
4. Design a plan to eliminate the problems;
5. Execute those designs. "Harness your inner Nike." Just do it.

School of Life: Confidence. "One of the things that separates confident from diffident people is their approach to history. Broadly-speaking, the unconfident believe that history is over; the confident trust that it is still in the process of being made – one day possibly by themselves." See more on how to be confident here.

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Good luck on your journey! Hope this helps you. Stay steady and stay strong.