Proven Strategies to Successfully Overcome Difficult Situations!

 

 

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 Are you a carrot, an egg, or a coffee bean?

A daughter complained to her father that her life was miserable. Her father, a chef, took her to the kitchen. He filled three pots of water and placed each on a high fire. As each began to boil he placed carrots in the first pot, eggs in the second, and ground coffee beans in the third.

After twenty minutes he took the carrots and eggs out and placed them in separate bowls and poured the coffee into a cup.

"Daughter what do you see?" he asked. "Carrots, eggs, and coffee" she replied.

 "Look closer." he said and explained "The carrots, eggs, and coffee beans all faced the same adversity - the boiling water

The carrots went in hard and unrelenting and came out soft and weak; the egg was fragile but in the boiling water, the egg's insides became hard.

The coffee beans were exposed to boiling water and changed. They created something new. Which one are you?

There isn't a person who has not faced difficulties in pursuing his/her dreams. These obstacles are complimentary gifts given to us for pursuing our vision. So one doesn't have to be scared of facing them.

 Every time you face an obstacle you come out as a better person. You become more resilient, mature, and experienced.

 

You need to change our attitude towards obstacles. Instead of becoming bitter or resentful, you must thank God for allowing you to grow and become better.

 

You must understand that all tools required to face any obstacle resides in you. It is your mental haze that does not allow you to see it and use it. This happens primarily because the moment you encounter an unpleasant situation or thought or person, you start resisting it. You focus on the wrong things.

Instead of focusing on “How can I deal with the situation?” You focus on “How to avoid it?” or “Who to blame for the mess we are in?”

“What you focus on Grows”

 

When you resist the situation, it produces friction in your mind. It agitates your mind. An agitated mind cannot think clearly. It is like a stirred-up pond. So long as the water in the pond is still, one can see the reflection of the moon in it, the moment it is stirred up one cannot see the reflection in it, and it also becomes muddy. When your mind is not still the thoughts you think, the decision you take will not be correct. You would be reacting rather than responding.

 

Use CAR to Get out of Difficult Situation

 

I generally do not watch videos circulated on social media. One day I came across a very beautiful video of Gaur Gopal Das.

In that video, he explained how we can face a difficult situations in our lives. He explained the strategy with the Acronym CAR.

 

C- Change what you can.

Whatever situation you are in, you can do something to change the situation. Even when you can’t change the situation you can surely change how you respond to it.

 

A- Accept the situation

There will be times when you can’t change the situation. Then you accept the current situation. Make peace with it, instead of resisting it.

 

Here R has two meanings.

R- Remove yourself from the situation you are in.

If your boss is yelling at you, excuse yourself and go out of the office for a walk.

However, you may not be able to remove yourself from the situation all the time then you:

 

R- Rise above your current situation

When the situation is beyond you, rise above it. When you rise above your current reality it would seem petty to you. Then you will not be bothered by it. It will lose the power to cause stress to you.

 

Stockdale Paradox

 

Jim Collins in his book “ Good to Great" talked about Stockdale Paradox, named after Admiral Jim Stockdale, the highest-ranking military officer in Hanoi prison, taken as PoW during the Vietnam war.

He spent eight years 1965-73 in captivity enduring brutality and uncertainty over his future. When he was questioned as to how he survived the ordeal of a prison?

“ I never lost faith in the end of the story," he said, when I asked him," I never doubted and not only that I would get out, but also that I would prevail in the end turn the experience, into the defining moment of my life, which, in retrospect, I would not trade?"

 "Who did not make it?" he was asked.

 “ Oh, that's easy." He said, “ Optimists, oh they were the ones who said, we are going to be out by Christmas. And Christmas would come, and Christmas would go and Easter would go. And then Thanksgiving and then it would be Christmas again. And they died of a broken heart."

He further said"

  “ This is a very important lesson. You must never confuse faith that you will prevail at the end which you can never afford to lose-With the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be."

 

Here Admiral Stockdale in no way suggests that you should not be optimistic. If you are not optimistic you will give up very easily.

The crux of the matter is you should focus on the things which you can control. Being optimistic is under one’s control having hope is under one’s control. But expecting that they will be out of the prison by a stipulated date is not controllable, they can’t have any control over when they will be set free.

 

“Focus on what you can control, and let Faith take care of the past.”

At the same time accept the current reality and face it to the best of your abilities.

 

Lessons from Concentration Camp Survivor

 

Since we are discussing PoW's let me narrate a story of a Holocaust survivor, Victor E Frankl. In 1942, Frankl, his parents, wife, and brother were arrested and sent to the Auschwitz concentration camp. His entire family perished in the concentration camp. But he survived the camp, and later on, helped other people to get over the trauma.

“ The lesson one can learn from Auschwitz,' he says, "and other concentration camps, in the final analysis, those who were oriented towards a meaning to be fulfilled by them in future were more likely to survive."

People who had faith in life after prison could survive under those inhuman conditions. They had a meaningful vocation to be undertaken when they go out of the prison. Their hope of a meaningful and bright future gave them the strength to face their current reality."

 

“ Those who have a Why to live can bear with almost any how"---Victor Frankl

 

Victor Frankle realized an important aspect of human nature which helped him to put up with all the atrocities of the camp. He says:

“ Everything can be taken from a man but one thing the last of the human freedoms to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s way.”

 

“ When we are no longer able to change the situation we are challenged to change ourselves."

 

Victor and other inmates focused on the controllable- faith, meaning in life after their release, their attitude. They did not try to change the situation, because it was beyond them. They accepted the situation and changed themselves. People who could not accept the situation had no hope for the future did not come alive.

When we are in a difficult situation, we must ask ourselves:

1. Are we focusing on solution or the problem? 

2. What are the things I have control over? And focus on them.

3. Am I trying to change the situation or myself? For you can change yourself not the situation.

 

Don’t Just Hope Take Action

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In difficult times it is very easy to fall prey to the traps of hope and faith. I am not saying that faith/hope is not important, for it is the catalyst that keeps the person afloat during life changes. But many a time people use hope/faith as an excuse not to take action.

 

Faith without action is futile and even dangerous. It is like a person who sits on the bank of a river and hopes that he will go across the river, but does not make effort to cross the river at all.

 

Your actions should take you closer to your goals and not away from them. You want to achieve success in your life, however, you do not put in any effort, waste time on social media, or hang out with friends every night. These actions will not do you any good to achieve what you want in life.

 

On April 26, 2003, during a solo descent of Bluejohn Canyon, in Southern Utah, Aron Lee Ralston, dislodged a boulder, pinning his right wrist to the side of the canyon wall. He was stuck there for 5 days. After 5 days he had two options-1) Die there waiting for help to arrive and 2) amputee his forearm.

He decided to break his forearm to amputate with a dull pocket knife. After amputating his arm, he rappelled down a 65 feet drop and hiked 7 miles to safety.

Faith is essential but will not have any value if no action is taken. Hence, during difficult times one must take tough decisions, which means amputating one's forearm with a blunt pocket knife, so be it.

Tough times demand tough actions.

As Robert Schuller has said," Tough times do not last but tough people do". One must develop one's mental strength so that one does not crumble in the face of a challenge.

I read a story of an individual who was stuck in a life-threatening situation, he was losing hope, and suddenly he thought about how his family going to survive after his death.

 Now he had a bigger reason to survive than saving his life. This why- gave him renewed strength and purpose to come out of that life-threatening situation. And he did survive to be with his family.

 

Similarly when faced with challenges, one must remind oneself of one's higher purpose which is beyond name, fame, and possessions. That higher purpose will catapult you out of that challenging situation.