This time of churning is bound to bring us challenges. And sometimes, in frustration, we might wish that they would go away. But in our work, the challenges we face are not a barrier to our job, they are our job: resolving them is what we are paid to do. And in our personal lives, the challenges we face are not a barrier to our growth, they are exactly the situations we can gain most from learning to handle: they show us our current best opportunity for personal growth.
Every skill we have today comes from a challenge we faced in the past. So the first step to addressing any new challenge we face today is to ask ourselves, “What are the opportunities this so-called ‘problem’ brings?”
Simply looking at challenges this way will make us more likely to create the outcomes we want. And as we look more closely we will find that there are ten types of opportunity in any situation.
Then we get to choose which of these opportunities we pursue. We get to choose how we respond to the situation. And as we do so, we get to choose where we focus our energy and time, what skills and abilities we develop, and the outcomes we learn to create. We get to choose who we become. And as Steve Jobs showed, the bigger the challenge, the bigger the opportunity.
For all these reasons, learning to transform the challenges we face from barriers into opportunities is yet another step to becoming antifragile.
What challenges do you currently face? Do you see them as ‘problems’ you wish would go away — or opportunities that are helping you to become clearer about what matters most to you and more able to achieve that?
Adapted from Inner Leadership: a framework and tools for building inspiration in times of change.
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Photo By Neil Young via StockPholio.net