Rules of Resilience: How to Thrive in a World of Change and UncertaintySýnishorn

Resilience Rule #5: Find the Opportunity in the Challenge

When faced with an obstacle, it can be tempting to become frustrated by overfocusing on the problem. One of the most powerful questions to coach yourself with is this: What’s the opportunity in this challenge? There is often a message in the midst of the mess, but when you refuse to look for it, you can miss out. The problem doesn’t have to be good in order for something good to come of it. If you intentionally look at your challenge from a different perspective, you can interpret the difficulty in a way that inspires you to make resilient choices about how to react. Our responses are determined by how we choose to think.

With a shift in perspective, it becomes easier to see the opportunity offered to you in the midst of a challenge. You might not have wanted things to go the way they are, but since they did, ask yourself, How do I want to show up? What do I want to do? What is the opportunity in this? Opportunity can look like:

• Something new. Is there a chance to do something you haven’t done before?
• Lessons. What lesson(s) can you learn from this challenge? What wisdom can you glean?
• Start over/reset. The end of something often makes room for the beginning of something else—something good, something better, perhaps even a chance to start over that otherwise wouldn’t exist.
• Expanded comfort zone. Maybe what you really need is courage, and this is a chance to develop it. When you learn to get comfortable with being uncomfortable, you’re in a position to grow.
• Gratitude. Contentment begins with thankfulness. Perhaps your opportunity is very simple—a profound act of gratitude and a chance to focus on what you have, not what you don’t.
• A decision. When things don’t go as planned, you often have to make decisions you would not need to make otherwise. Sometimes those decisions become the pivotal points that can change your life for the better.

When you’re living at the highest level of resilience and are thriving, you’ll discover that challenges can provide an opportunity to grow as you recover, so that you can emerge from the difficulty better or stronger in some way than you were before. In this way, stressors are a matter of perception. If you reframe challenging circumstances, choosing a constructive interpretation that empowers you with hope and inspires action and resilience, your focus and energy can make the difficulty less overwhelming. Finding the opportunity in a challenge cultivates hope, which produces positive emotion, motivation, and action.

To be clear, this is not about denying reality or ignoring your frustration or disappointment just so you can focus on the opportunity. This is embracing reality, allowing yourself to feel what you feel, but also intentionally choosing thoughts, creative approaches, and actions to help you make the most of the situation. It is choosing to believe that things can indeed work together for good, even if they emerge from a situation that isn’t.