ADVERSITY UNIVERSITY

2009 has been a year of challenge, trial, and adversity for a lot of people. All around the world, the banking crisis of late 2008 and the recession that followed in 2009 has been a challenge to some, a set-back to others, and the failure of dreams for many others. How much challenge has the world-wide recession been to you and how have you handled it? How much resilience have you had to developed or wish you had before it all began?

Adversity in whatever form it takes can either make or break you. Mistakes, failures, rejections, financial collapses, bankruptcies, demotions, redundancies, business failures, income losses, relationship breakups, these and many other forms of adversity can knock you down and defeat you or knock new sense and wisdom into you. Which does it do for you? It all depends on your interpretative style and your ability to learn and develop new coping skills.

So, what courses have you graduated from at Adversity University? What degrees have you obtained? The problem with life isn’t that we have problems— that’s inevitable. As long as we are fallible and mortal human beings— we are going to have problems. In fact, problems can just as well bring out your best as your worse.

Actually, we need problems. We human beings are a class of life who thrive on problems. There’s nothing more boring than a movie where everything is rosy, going as expected, and everybody’s perfectly happy. We need drama. We need a challenge to conquer. Give a human being too perfect of a life, and they invent problems. For fun, they do cross-word puzzles, math problems, riddles, computer game problems, or read fictional stories about the end of the world or some severe challenge.

And why? Because we’re sadistic? Because we have sold out to the dark side? Because we have a pathology within for the negative? No! It’s because we are by nature problem-solvers. Problems bring out our best because they give us contexts for applying our creative minds. Problems require that you think hard, that you think laterally, that you think in wild and crazy ways to come up with solutions.

It’s not the problem per se that turns us on, that brings us to life, that wakes us up— it is that we now have a context that needs us! That’s why there’s nothing like a crisis for coming to terms with the essence of life— What are we about? Why are we here? What are we doing to do? What can we contribute? How can we solve this or that difficulty?

And that’s why the most creative, the most effective, those who step up into leadership, the entrepreneurs of tomorrow’s businesses are those who love problems, who are turned-on by

difficulties, and who have an attitude of “bring it on!” They also have something else. They are experimenters. They try one thing and then another. Not knowing the solution is a good bit of the fun because that makes the problem-solving an adventure, a discovery. So they take risks trying this, and then trying that, and all along making mistakes. But the mistakes are nothing but learning-solutions along the way to the final solution.

In building up a dynamic and joyful problem-solving mental attitude, make sure that you frame mistakes as just playing around with possible solutions. Don’t demonize them. They are part and parcel of creativity. And if you use them to learn from, they are not bad at all, but a nugget that can be learned from.

The solution focus mind-set of a leader, entrepreneur, creator, or innovator is the driving force that causes them to not only endure “problems,” but search for them. “Problems are great!” they think and say. Inside of problems they find solutions. Inside of problems is wealth. “The bigger the problem I can solve, the more value I add, the more the solution is worth.” Problems are wonderful because they are tokens of the future. The solutions that we invent today for the problems people bring to us, that we encounter, that society struggles with paves the road to the better future that we are now creating.

Did you receive any invitations to Adversity U. this year? Did you go or have you been avoiding it like the plague? Do you first need some robust frames of mind to build up a more beefed-up attitude and a stronger sense of inner resilience? Are you ready to win your own inner game of frames about adversity or mistakes or disappointments or set-backs? Then seek out a Neuro- Semantic Trainer or a Meta-Coach. We specialize in the creative attitude that best characterizes self-actualizing people— the solution focused attitude of using problems to create value.