Dealing With Adversity
by, Corey Wells

No matter who you are, at one time or another you’ve had to deal with adversity. We’ve all experienced times when nothing seems to go right. Whether it’s surviving a crisis, dealing with an unexpected setback or any number of possible occurrences. If you can name a problem, it’s happen to us or someone we know.

Today, we live in a society where blaming is pretty much the norm. We blame our parents, we blame the politicians, we blame our employers, we blame our customers, we blame the weather, and so on. But if we want to overcome our adversities, we need to change our attitudes and outlook. Instead of looking at adversity as something that was “done to us” by something or someone else, we need to identify it as a blameless event that we can learn a positive lesson from. Instead of saying; “Why am I the victim of such adversity?” ask yourself “What can I learn from this?

By changing our outlook, we’ll find we have better responses and a much better outcome. It’s not the problem but rather your response to the problem that’s important. By coming up with new responses, we’ll be free from the previous response patterns that have always limited our progress. If we can look at adversity as just an impersonal experience, we’ll soon discover that overcoming it is nothing more than choosing a different way to experience the situation.

One of the greatest thoughts on adversity I’ve ever heard comes from the late professor Randy Pausch who was dying of pancreatic cancer and said, “We can’t change the cards we are dealt, just how we play the hand.” I think this sums up dealing with adversity perfectly.

Let’s get started.

1. “All virtues come down to courage, at the sharp end of the sword. But courage must be tempered by prudence. Courage wasted by misdirection is the most heart-breaking of all tragedies. If there is an eighth deadly sin, it ought to be stupidity, by which all virtues run out into dry sands. Yet…where does prudence end and cowardice begin? That’s a very good damn question!”
   -Lois McMaster Bujold,
2. “Every man hath a good and a bad angel attending on him in particular all his life long.”
   -Robert Burton,
3. Never underestimate the importance of having fun. I’m dying and I’m having fun. And I’m going to keep having fun every day, because there’s no other way to play it.
   -Randy Pausch
4. “Grief and tragedy and hatred are only for a time. Goodness, remembrance and love have no end.”
   -George W. Bush,
5. “Justice while she winks at crimes,
   Stumbles on innocence sometimes.”
   -Samuel Butler
6. “A real thinker is one of the rarest things in nature. He comes only at long intervals in human history, and when he does come, he is often astonishingly unwelcome. Indeed, he is sometimes speedily sent the way of the unfit and unprotesting earthworm.”
   -Nicholas Murray Butler,
7. “Until you walk a mile in another man’s moccasins you can’t imagine the smell.”
   -Robert Byrne,
8. ” “Adversity is the first path to truth.”
   -Lord (George Gordon) Byron,

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