|
It's a very bad thing to become accustomed to good luck and threat-avoidance. Hurricanes, terrorism at LAX, outbreaks of disease, or a friend's passing. None of us can predict the future. Through the millenniums thunderbolts have changed the trajectory of a life and civilization. Some scars are slow to heal; lost warriors left to their own device in Benghazi, a shooting in an airport, an earthquake in New Zealand, a bombing at a celebratory Marathon in Boston. Thunderbolts are beyond our control; events that strike and rock us. We have no choice but to accept it...but we have a lot of options about what to do next.
It's how we react to thunderbolts that matters most and they're certainly not all created equal. In the daily threat-stream of life and career, the most we can do is to be vigilant. Sometimes that's not enough. Today when everything on the globe is a potential conflagration, we're becoming numb to the unending stimuli. Still our phrase "don't be afraid, be ready" comes into play.
Saving the worst and most painful of these unwanted and unexpected shots to the midsection, we can put into perspective thunderbolts that occur in daily professional life. (1) There is no doubt as to "will they occur?" only "when and how intense the damage?" (2) We can curse the tides and fates, striking out at people with whom we work or the ones we love, or we can play the "Ain't it awful game" acquiescing to our misfortune as a victim. "Well that's just my luck...just the way it goes for me." Pat Riley once put it in perfect context: "Rocked by adversity, people sometimes get so much empathy and caring poured on them that their misfortune actually starts to feel good...sort of special: 'what a tough break, you don't deserve it'." But as Riley once told his team, "Sympathy is like junk food. It has no real nourishment." Eventually the emptiness returns while little goes forward in the interim.
Keep in mind these thoughts address professional or personal setbacks and not the life-changing loss of a loved one. That said, forget about sympathy and reload your resolve. Even if the odds have shifted, they'll come back around assuming you expect them to. Venerable Detroit Tiger manager Sparky Andersen was fond of saying, "Having a really bad day? Well, the world turns over every twenty-four hours." He was right.
When hit by a thunderbolt no matter how many ways you sift through it you have two options;
give in with resignation (it just wasn't meant to be), or fight like hell doubling-down on your goal and your belief in getting there. Consider Captain Phillips, subject of the smashing docudrama, who had mentally rehearsed desperate adversity and convinced his somewhat skeptical crew onboard the Maersk Alabama, piracy drills really did matter. Within hours of those drills two ominous blips traveling at high speed, dead on course for his ship, meant only one thing; life-threatening danger. Phillips figured the odds using rapier-fast situational thinking and because of it saved his entire crew, though he was kidnapped by the Somalis facing almost certain death.
We can't do much about where we came from, what we were born into, or how we'll die. But the days in between, there's much we can do about our conduct, mental toughness, and our expectations for dealing with thunderbolts.
|
