Psychologist turned coach helping experts unleash their unique, category-of-one brand. She hosts The Uncommon Couch. | Alyssa Adams Coaching
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Whether you’re a business owner or a corporate executive, how you handle challenges is a keystone of your success. The possibilities for challenging situations are endless: difficult clients, frustrating supervisors, realignment to a new department, courses or products that didn’t sell, high-pressure responsibilities and working endless hours.
Entrepreneurship and leadership are potent opportunities to get to know yourself better, challenge yourself to evolve and look deeply at your patterns. These high-stakes roles allow you the chance to travel to the edges of your comfort zone and leverage difficult experiences as catalysts for personal growth.
It can be helpful to examine the psychological reasons for your immediate reaction to a problem. What gets triggered in you? When you know yourself well and are aware of your own patterns, it makes you more adept at handling difficult situations with ease. Business ownership and leadership are ripe with experiences that challenge you, bring up long-standing patterns and present you with opportunities to grow. It is impossible to untangle the influence of your personality on your professional life, so your ability to navigate your blindspots only serves to advance your success.
As a psychologist, business and executive coach, I work with clients regularly to overcome challenges. There is a common series of questions that I encourage clients to use on their own so they are equipped with a road map to tackle problems the moment they occur.
Five questions to turn a difficult situation into a vehicle for growth:
1. What’s the hardest part for you?
Often when we’re frustrated, mad or irritated we can get lost in our emotions. It’s important to take a step back, look objectively at the situation through a neutral lens and ask yourself, “What’s the hardest part for me?” This laser-focused question is meant to help you gain insight into the reasons behind your frustration. It’s a question that challenges you to go deeper and uncover the reasons behind your reaction.
2. What is behind the emotion? Get specific.
Anger, sadness, fear, frustration, bitterness or cynicism tend to be vague emotions. We know we’re feeling them, but it’s not always immediately clear as to why. Challenge yourself to complete the sentence, “I’m mad because [fill in the blank].” This strategy requires you to get specific so you uncover the exact reason why you’re upset. This can help you look for patterns in your reactions so you can choose a different response in the future.
3. What’s another way to look at that?
Arguably one of the most important skills to cultivate in your professional life is cognitive flexibility. This is the skill of thinking flexibly and looking at situations from various perspectives. You might catch yourself immediately creating an opinion about a scenario, and it’s easy to get stuck in your own perspective. In order to shift your thinking and look at the world more flexibly, it’s helpful to challenge yourself to come up with four or five other ways of looking at a situation. This encourages you to get creative and innovative and cultivate an open-minded approach to setbacks. When you create the skill of flexibility, you’ll be more likely to feel like you can handle any setback that comes your way.
4. What is within your control versus what is outside of your control?
It’s easy to get stressed when you try to control elements of your professional life that are completely out of your control. What is within your control? You can control your reactions, what you say, your perspective and your emotional experience. What is outside of your control? You cannot control the manner in which others react to situations, the emotional experience of others, the patterns of others and the unexpected scenarios that pop up in your life. When you discern what you can control versus what you cannot control, there is less pressure to control the uncontrollable and more energy for changing what you can.
5. What are the ideal, worst and most likely outcomes?
When presented with a problem, you may be likely to slip into “catastrophizing,” which is the tendency to go to the worst-case scenario and assume all problems turn into a catastrophe. It’s important to notice this pattern so you can bring it into your conscious awareness. The next time a setback pops up, ask yourself what is the ideal outcome, the worst-case scenario and the most likely outcome. This allows you to think through each possible outcome, and the “most likely” outcome tends to be the most balanced perspective.
Setbacks are ubiquitous—in life and in business. Your willingness to take a deep look at how you navigate challenges can change your life, grow your career and catapult your success. When you approach setbacks as an expected part of your professional life, you’re more willing to see the opportunities available to you. Leaders and entrepreneurs who approach difficulties with a thoughtful, objective and insightful approach will feel more ease and confidence in their ability to handle anything that comes their way.
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