The Adversity Advantage by Paul G. Stoltz Ph.D. & Erik Weihenmayer & Erik Weihenmayer

Author:Paul G. Stoltz, Ph.D. & Erik Weihenmayer & Erik Weihenmayer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Three Steps to Success

This chapter is about creating systems and developing new ways to accomplish tasks. How can you make the undoable doable, and pioneer new possibilities so you continue to grow and flourish? Following is a simple, three-step process for doing exactly that:

Step 1: Select a worthy challenge. It should stretch you in new ways and represent new possibilities. It should be something that involves some kind of risk or resistance, and just the idea of completing it should make you tingle with excitement. You already have your Summit Challenge, so you can go directly to the next step!

Step 2: Engineer the Signature Systems that will be the key to your success. You will need a personalized, customized, original way to do what it is you want to do. Like your signature, your systems become uniquely yours, and people will associate them with you once they see them implemented. Ordinarily you would begin with the typical action plan: setting specific, realistic, achievable, and measurable steps that you can achieve in a timely manner. This is excellent for everyday goals, but not gutsy enough for your Summit Challenge.

Step 3: Practice to perfect. Refine your new systems so they work consistently, especially when it counts the most. While others are still managing the downside, you will be generating and perfecting an upside.

When it comes to harnessing adversity and living at the top of the Adversity Continuum, complacency is your enemy; innovation is your friend. Over the course of your life and career, has your perception of what’s possible grown, or shrunk? Compared to years past, do you believe more, or less, is really possible? Do you spend most of your time doing what’s tried and true, or do you continually invent new ways to get things done? How do you respond when someone comes to you with the question, “What if . ”

Every organization must innovate to survive. The relationship between adversity and innovation was substantiated through comprehensive research by Dr. Gideon Markman at the University of Georgia, who discovered that those people who had the highest AQs (those who responded to adversity most effectively) generated the most innovation. Those with the lowest AQs tended to innovate the least. Since Markman’s study, my team and I have observed the same dynamic time and time again. We see nonprofit organizations embark on new fund-raising approaches when faced with slashed budgets. We see sales teams reassemble the value package they bring to clients when faced with a crumbling economy. We see entire workforces step up to new challenges they must take on in order to stay alive, let alone win. In fact, we constantly rediscover that, without adversity, many possibilities would remain, well, impossible.

Adversity is the parent of our possibilities. At work, when budgets get tightened and the goals raised, what do you do? Do you throw up your hands and declare, “This is impossible!” Or do you work on finding a way to make the impossible possible? Guess which approach gets you

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