What does it mean to harness adversity? What is at the core of building resilience? Rather than simply avoiding, managing, surviving, or coping, focusing on harnessing adversity has the power to strengthen our resilience and improve our health, productivity, and life satisfaction. Understanding how you personally handle or don’t handle adversity in your life can provide you with insight on how to better learn, strengthen your resilience, and help you take effective action in difficult situations. Part of harnessing adversity is shifting perspectives to see different or difficult events as an opportunity to learn and grow. Using a growth mindset related to adversity doesn’t mean that we gloss over the struggle. In fact, recognizing and honoring the struggle first helps open yourself up to growth. A powerful way to harness adversity is by asking four important questions: What about this situation can I control? How might I take ownership and step up to make things better? What can I do to minimize the downsides and maximize the potential upsides? Finally, what might I do to help me get through the worst of this? Using these questions helps us to channel our inner strengths and better harness the adversities we may face in life.
