055 – Finding blessings in the trenches

[00:00:00] Welcome to another episode of the podcast. Now, in this podcast episode, I want to talk about the importance of finding the gift in our challenges or the term that I came up with many years ago was finding blessings in the trenches. Now, this is important. It's important for all areas of life, but I've found it to be particularly helpful in my professional life or in my business.

Because inevitably that's something that most entrepreneurs, business owners, and people that focus on their career tend to face is we all have to face challenges and difficulties. And our immediate response tends to be to want to avoid it or get away from it because there's pain that's associated with the experience.

But in truth, I've found avoiding it perpetuates the pain. It makes it drag out. It takes longer for it to be dealt with and it can even exaggerate the pain [00:01:00] and make the pain feel bigger than what it actually is. So instead the strategy that I chose to use, and this has been inspired by many brilliant people, but the strategy that I chose to use was to lean into the challenge and see if I could find blessings or a gift in the experience.

Rather than trying to avoid it, and that tended to help me find opportunity that I wasn't seeing before, but it would also unlock a sense of gratitude for what was happening. Now that gratitude is important because it would assist me in experiencing a desire to persist, and it helps me develop resilience, which is what we need when we're pursuing something that has meaning to us.

Because we can't escape challenge, no matter how much we try to, no matter how much we try to avoid it, or stay away from it, the truth is, we can't escape it, because challenge and difficulty is a part of [00:02:00] life. It's what keeps things in check, because if things were all easy, with no difficulty whatsoever, we'd become lazy, we'd slow down, we wouldn't be very productive at all.

So it's the challenges that assist us, in holding us accountable, and helping us perpetuate. And so for me, leaning into the difficulties and seeing what the gifts are that I can extract from them has been crucial to my sense of longevity in my career and building my business. I would have given up a long time ago if I didn't have the ability to or the desire to lean in and discover what the gift is and find the blessings.

You know, it makes me think of this quote from Winston Churchill where he says, success is the ability to go from failure to failure without losing enthusiasm, which I think is quite insightful. [00:03:00] I would probably make a couple of modifications to his language, but in essence, it's quite a beautiful statement in that that's where the resilience lies.

Because when we're looking at failures or difficulties or challenges, we tend to come away from them feeling beaten up by them, or seeing them as negative. Whereas if you can find the gift or the blessing in what the experience was or is, you're more likely to maintain a sense of enthusiasm to keep going.

Because when you extract a gift from an experience that's painful or difficult, it gives you a sense of purpose to persevere. And it gives the experience a purpose in your life. And that's really important because without a sense of purpose in the experience, it becomes difficult to have the desire to rise to the occasion and continue to [00:04:00] persevere.

I've had clients who have had to navigate really challenging times in their businesses and they know while they're going through it because of the work that we've been doing together, they, Have said to me, I know this is going to help me in this business in the future. And if not this business, if it doesn't survive, it's going to help me.

In my next venture because of the lessons I'm learning in this business and for the other clients that I have who have a desire to be a mentor at some point in their career, they share that they know that what they're learning from their experiences and the difficulties that they're learning now, they're going to be able to share those insights with.

A younger generation of entrepreneurs and CEOs when they become a mentor themselves and they can share the insights that they've had, you know, Phil Knight wrote shoe dog his book, he's the founder of Nike and he wrote this sort of [00:05:00] journal entry of a book, a story of his experience over the decades up until I think it was the nineties.

And while it was somewhat of a journal entry and a story of the story of how Nike came to be and the various challenges that they had to face on their journey, there's a lot of insight and wisdom in those pages for entrepreneurs. So it's almost like he gets to transfer that knowledge from his own challenging experiences.

So for those of you in business or even in your careers who are challenged by a lot of difficulties that you're facing right now, I recommend reading his book. It's a great book. So for me, it's, I find it's critical in order for me to be able to maintain a buoyancy in my life in order to go from failure to failure, difficulty to difficulty without losing enthusiasm for tackling the challenges.

Because the moment my enthusiasm starts to wane, and drop, the [00:06:00] challenges start to become bigger and they feel more challenging. And so it's important that we're able to maintain this sense of internal resilience to be able to face these challenges because you'll have the desire to give up. And that's the last thing I want you to do, unless it's a wise thing for you to give up, which I'll tackle in another episode.

So the best way to do this, the simplest way to do this is sit down and ask yourself, what about what you're facing is challenging you? What about it is bothering you? What's upsetting you? What's, what about it is causing you so much pain? Because superficially you might look at the situation and say, well, I don't know, let's say it's debt.

Let's say you're running into a lot of debt in your business or your personal life and, That feels really challenging and difficult for you. You want to identify what specifically about that is so bothersome. What about that is affecting you so much? And the reason you want to ask that [00:07:00] question is because while being in debt may be an obvious challenge or a problem for a lot of people, the debt itself may not be the issue.

It's what the debt means to you, what it represents to you. That's the problem. And so by drilling into it and asking yourself, what about having this debt or digging myself further into debt is such a problem for me. And you may find that what you start to extract and this is what I've seen with others and myself included many years ago when I was in debt was that.

There may be a belief that you're not sure if you can dig yourself out and so what it's actually bringing up is a sense of feeling trapped or feeling hopeless or helpless or that you perceive you don't have what it takes to actually break this cycle of getting yourself into debt and so you want to see if you can get, it's sort of like double clicking into what the problem is so you can extract an underlying understanding of what's going on in there and then [00:08:00] by doing so then you've got a clearer understanding of what's specifically about, Whatever the challenge is that's bothering you.

For example, it may be that another idea that comes to me is if your business is failing and having to stare down the barrel of shutting it down. What's so challenging about that? Is it that you've got to? Let go of your founding executive team. Is it that you've got to deal with telling suppliers that you can't pay them?

Is it that you've got your personal name on the line and your reputation and you've got to deal with potential damage control on that? Whatever it is, you want to zoom in on or double click on what the underlying issue is for you and why it bothers you so much? Because that's going to reveal a lot.

Then, once you've worked out what that is, You want to ask yourself, what are all the positives? What are all the upsides? What are all the benefits that I'm getting from this? What's the gift out of this experience? Because there's more than one gift. [00:09:00] And start listing them out. How's it helping you? What's it teaching you?

That's one of my favorite questions. What is this situation and this difficulty? What's it actually teaching me? That i'm not saying because i like to look at myself as a student of life and i look at my challenges just as much as my success is as teachers constantly teaching me just up to me whether or not i'm actually paying attention and listening to what the lesson is what the teacher is saying at the time.

But i look at my challenges as teachers so what is it teaching you what are you learning about the challenges that you're facing what are you learning about yourself what is an insight that you haven't yet discovered. About your experience. that is actually going to inform and enhance your life.

Asking myself that question whenever I face a difficulty has been transformative. Now I want to be really clear here too, this isn't positive thinking. It sounds like it, but it's not. Because [00:10:00] positive thinking is almost like getting delusional about thinking everything is positive. I don't see finding a gift or finding a blessing as being a positive.

I actually believe that to be the center between the two extremes of positive and negative. So you feel what you're navigating right now is a negative experience. And then you've got on the other end of the spectrum, you've got extreme, uh, And then in the center is what I describe as the blessing or the gift or a sense of gratitude.

And so you don't want to swing into the positive because what tends to happen is when we swing into staying, getting overly positive, something will come into our lives that's going to try and bring us back to the center, but we tend to swing past the center and go back into the negative. But if you're self regulating and you're bringing yourself, but you're stopping at the center, you're more likely to access a [00:11:00] deeper sense of gratitude and appreciation rather than swinging from one extreme to the other, which is how most people operate.

People swing into these Optimistic cycles and then pessimistic cycles and they go back and forth and back and forth and it's like, it's this crazy roller coaster of an experience. I'm not surprised people get emotional motion sickness if that's a thing. So ask yourself, what's the benefit? What's the upside?

What's the gift? What's the lesson? What am I being taught here? Because it's going to start changing your perspective on what you're facing and will help you develop more enthusiasm to tackle the challenges. Now, there's one last thing I want to share with you that has been really helpful for me whenever I'm facing difficulty or anything in life, to be completely honest, is that I say to myself, and I had this as an affirmation many, many years ago, because it was an insight that I unpacked through my experiences, which is everything that is happening up [00:12:00] until this moment is preparing me for what comes next.

so much. Now, that's been true throughout your life. Everything that has happened up until whatever moment in your life was preparing you for what was coming next, but you didn't have the foresight or the prophetic abilities to see what was coming next. And then it wasn't until that came down the pipeline, you had to deal with that and then you reflect in hindsight and you draw, you connect the dots, looking back, as Steve Jobs says, and You can see all the connections and see how all these different experiences were preparing you for that particular instance.

That's true at all times in your life. Everything that's happening, everything that has happened is preparing you for what comes next. That's been true in your past, that's true in your present, and it's certainly going to be true in the future. So, [00:13:00] if you're going to look for the gift of an experience, you want to make sure that you're reminding yourself of that insight, because it can actually give you a sense of gratitude, I suppose.

It's not all wasted, this isn't just some kind of sick game that life is playing. Like a cat with a mouse playing with it and holding on to its tail and kind of throwing it around and stuff like that. That's not how this works. It's all a gift. It's just a matter of whether or not you're willing to find the gift and extract that from the circumstances.

Now, I'll also add really quickly, the gifts are not limited to the area of life that the challenge is showing up. So let's say you're facing a lot of difficulty in business. The gifts from the challenges in business are not limited to helping you in the business. They can help you in your financial life.

They can help you with your personal life. They [00:14:00] can help you with your physical well being. They may even help you with your spirituality or your connection with your loved ones. So when you're extracting gifts, do not limit it to that particular area of your life. Sure, start there and that can be helpful, but explore the other areas because as much as we like to think we can, we can't actually compartmentalize our lives.

That's really difficult to do. And I've, I've worked with people in the military who you would think if there's anybody that are able to compartmentalize their lives, they'd be at the top of the tree, at the top of the pyramid of being able to do that, but they struggle with it just as much as anybody else.

And that's because you're human. And you take stuff from different areas of your life into other areas of your life. So the same is true for the gifts. Just as much as you take problems and challenges from one place to another place in your life, the same is true for the gifts. They translate, they bleed through from one area to another.

So make sure you explore [00:15:00] those different areas of your life and how this challenge may be informing and creating gifts and opportunities and lessons throughout all different areas of your life.

That being said, I just wanted to quickly drop that in there. I thought this might be a nice little quick episode just to keep you going. Please come back to it whenever you navigate difficult times. Come back to these insights because I certainly do. I've been doing this for a really long time and to this very day I still keep coming back to this exercise because it's helped me and it continues to help me.

It'll keep me going and I know I'll continue to use it for many decades into the future. So, with that being said, I hope you got some value from this. Thank you for being here. I'm Georgio Genis. I'll see you in the next episode.