Best damn thing to ever happen to me

I’ve been thinking a lot about the knocks we get in life, and how we choose to face them.?

Once, in a presentation, I had talked about how we should always be learning, from our wins and our fails. And I received the feedback from a colleague, “I don’t think we should use the word ‘fails’. It makes people feel bad.”

It made me wonder to myself, when did we lose the courage to be honest about when things go wrong???

And more importantly, as I look back on the ups and downs of life, it’s always been the failures that helped me grow. It’s the adversity and the challenges that opened new windows, revealed inner strengths, and showed me new possibilities I hadn't known before.?

• Being let go from a job, and it turning into launching my coaching practice.?
• Getting all our money stolen in Nepal when traveling on a shoestring budget, and ending up seeing spectacular parts of the country because we had to go camping.?
• Going to physical therapy for a sprained ankle, and having the therapist align my entire posture that solved knee pains that had been plaguing me for years.
• The devastation of my father’s death, resulting in bringing my mom and me much closer together than we’d ever been.

Each and every one of these challenges opened new pathways and possibilities. Adversity is an inevitable part of life. It’s how we choose to experience it that counts. Are you going to let it keep you down? Or can you figure out a way to cope? Or better yet, can you embrace it as a window to new possibilities???

For most of us, we grow far more from our failures than our successes. In his incredible motivational video, Kobe Bryant talks about his rise to the top, and the interviewer asks him, "how do you feel when you lose?" And he answers, "excited." The interviewer is clearly puzzled, and Kobe elaborates. "When I lose, someone has exposed in me a vulnerability that I didn't know of. Someone has given me the opportunity of learning."

We all have the power to choose to make this true, and to shorten the transition from “oh, crap!” to “how can I grow from this?”. The question is only, how quickly can you make this happen for yourself??

Commit. We can make the commitment together, right here, right now, to experience each moment of adversity as an opportunity for new possibilities. Not minimizing the hardship, or just a superficial re-framing, but truly knowing that challenge begets opportunity, and doing the work to make it so. As mental toughness coach Chris Dorris says about each of life’s knocks, “it’s the best damn thing to ever happen to me.”

I have no doubt that 2023 will bring its own share of challenges, mountains and pitfalls that test our strength and conviction. And I’m equally sure they'll help us grow and learn, and come out stronger for them in the end. How? I don’t know yet. But just by making the commitment, I know it will be.?

How does this show up for you?

You don’t have to do this alone, let's walk together, side by side, shoulder to shoulder.?

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