Grateful for Hard

Being in corporate finance is hard. Especially when you face the stressful, difficult times…your PE firm is screaming for Budgets that are due next week…your staff is underperforming and missing deadlines…your CEO relationship resembles train brakes grinding…this brings limiting beliefs, stress, and feelings of inadequacy.

The top successful executives look at “hard” in a completely unique way that I believe sets them apart with a mindset that the unsuccessful do not use. It’s the phrase “Grateful for Hard.” Life is going to get hard at times. So be grateful for hard!

I coach my clients that we need to reframe this and tell ourselves, “I'm so grateful that this is hard right now.” Why? Because this tells us we are at the precipice of becoming amazing and transformational.

We have these patterns of stopping ourselves before we step into our greatness. Hard happens before greatness. In every hard moment, tell yourself, “Damn, this is difficult. Thank you. I'm so glad it's difficult. This is what sets me above the rest. This is what gives me the opportunity to be drastically more successful than I ever dreamed of being.”

Consider the story of Admiral James Stockdale, who was the highest-ranking U.S. military officer in the Hanoi Hilton POW camp in Vietnam. Stockdale was constantly tortured during his 8 years in captivity by the enemy in a war without any prisoner rights, with no set release date and with no certainty of survival. He didn't know if he would ever see his family again. Yet he remained a steadfast leader with his prison inmates.

So how on Earth did he deal with all this?

He said, “I never lost faith in the end of the story. I never doubted not only that I would get out and that I would prevail in the end. I decided I would turn my experience being in prison into the defining event of my life.”

“In retrospect,” he said, “I would not trade it.”

Per Stockdale, these were the particularly important lessons:

1.???? You must never confuse nor lose faith that you will prevail in the end;

2.???? You must be disciplined and confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be. Create a willingness to accept the brutal facts;

3.???? Keep the determination to focus on what you can control; and

4.???? Dismiss Denial and Defeat – these keep us from overcoming obstacles and achieving any form of progress.

I’m grateful for hard every single day. I want you to be grateful for hard every single day. Because tremendous success is what it's gonna get you. Through the hardness, through the stickiness, through the grittiness and into your greatness.?

That is what we and those around you expect from you. And I’d bet that is what you expect out of yourself as well.