This time of churning that we are living through is bound to bring us challenges. Sometimes, in frustration, we 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, the things we find difficult are exactly the situations we can gain the most from learning to handle, our most important next step for personal growth.
Every skill we have today has come from a challenge we faced in the past. And so the first step in addressing any new challenge is always to ask ourselves, “What are the opportunities this so-called ‘problem’ is bringing me?“
We know that even interpreting our challenges this way will make us more likely to create the outcomes we want. And as we look closer we will find that there are ten types of opportunity in any situation.
We get to choose which of the ten opportunities we pursue. We get to choose how we respond. And when we do that, we get to choose which skills and abilities we develop, what outcomes we create, and who we choose to become. And as Steve Jobs showed us, the bigger the challenge, the bigger the opportunity.
For all these reasons, learning to recognise that the challenges we face are actually opportunities is yet another step to becoming antifragile.
What challenges are you currently facing? Do you see them as ‘problems’ that you wish would go away — or as opportunities that are helping you to become the person you most want to become?
Adapted from The Churning, Inner Leadership: a framework and a set of tools for building inspiration in a time of change.
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