THIS IS WHEN HEROES ARE MADE

When faced with a crisis or a trauma, some break down while others emerge stronger & victorious. We’ve all heard of the term “post-traumatic stress.”

Post-Traumatic Growth is the positive psychological change that some individuals experience after a life crisis or traumatic event.

Post-traumatic growth doesn't deny deep distress, but rather posits that adversity can unintentionally yield changes in understanding oneself, others, and the world.

Life crises are seismic events. They have the power to shake the entrenched beliefs people hold and force them to think in completely new ways about themselves, their relationships, and the world. The job of every leader is to find the victory inside every adversity and the task of each human is to turn defeat into winning and tragedy into triumph.

I know that sounds obvious yet those who make their lives beautiful, joyful and great really do make it a practice of seeing windows of opportunity where most spot walls of adversity. I’ve been through a lot in my life, we all have.

We have been bruised and bloodied, disappointed and dejected. Yet, I’ve always tried my best to keep moving forward and to seek the blessing inside the curse.

And once you start operating like this, failure becomes a friend and a circumstance that introduces you to your gifts and strengths. This is when heroes are made.

Please know and trust, the hardship will pass, and the sunshine will most certainly return. Just maybe, the difficulty has arrived not for your failure but to promote your good fortune. And perhaps, your job is a straightforward one: to gain the growth amid the darkness, along with seeing the roses within the winter.

To move through trauma to growth, one must first get educated about what the former is: a disruption of core belief systems. For example, before the pandemic, many of us thought we were safe from the types of diseases that endangered people in the past; those bad things happened in other parts of the world but not ours; and that our social and economic systems were resilient enough to weather all storms. None of that was true. So now we need to figure out what to believe instead. When our assumptions are challenged, it is confusing and frightening and tends to produce anxious, repetitive thinking:?Why did this happen? Who’s in control? What should I do now??We are forced to rethink who we are, what kind of people surround us, what world we live in, and what future we will have. It can be extremely painful. But it can also usher in change that will be of value. We must begin by learning and understanding that truth. To move towards trauma to growth, one must be in the right frame of mind. That starts with managing negative emotions such as anxiety, guilt, and anger, which can be done by shifting the kind of thinking that leads to those feelings. Instead of focusing on losses, failures, uncertainties, and worst-case scenarios, we should try to recall successes, consider best-case possibilities, reflect on our own or our organization’s resources and preparation, and think reasonably about what we—personally and as a group—can do. The next step is to produce an authentic narrative about the trauma and our lives afterward so that we can accept the chapters already written and imagine crafting the next ones in a meaningful way. When we are ready, start to shape the narrative of this year’s trauma for ourselves and our organization. How has it caused us to recalibrate our priorities? What new paths or opportunities have emerged from it? Look to famous stories of crucible leadership involving people such as Oprah Winfrey and Nelson Mandela, and companies such as Chrysler and Johnson & Johnson, that have emerged from crisis stronger. They are examples of post traumatic growth. We can study and derive hope from them and remind those connected to us to do the same.