The Happy Side of Struggle
Taking a moment
There was a point at the beginning of the pandemic, where (like everyone else) we became a little overwhelmed by what the future might hold. I remember the whole team meeting where we sat together in our office, 1.5 metres apart, preparing for the lock-downs that were to come, and wondering what would happen with all our face-to-face leadership programs.
It’s fair to say that in the meeting the team were anxious and tired. It had been a busy start to the year already, and now this…
As an organisation who prides itself in bespoke, iterative design and delivery, our clients know they’re getting highly tailored service. But at that moment in time, we didn’t know what those new needs might look like, or if we would be able to meet them in the same timely manner.
Though uncertainty and fear were the order of the day across the country, and the world, our Managing Director took a calm approach. This was the moment, she said, to use all the skills we have at our disposal, to look for the opportunities that will come from such a massive disruption to BAU. The creative and confident and lilt in her voice told us, not only would we be OK, but that we could support others to be OK too. She saw through the crisis to the other side.
But before anything else, she said, we are going to spend some time acclimatising to this discomfort and checking in on each other and our clients.
That acclimation period is what some might call “sitting in our struggle.” It’s the idea that negative emotions and experiences need to be acknowledged for what they are — useful information that can lead to changed and better outcomes.
Make Struggle Your Friend
Researcher and commentator Adam Fraser talks about “making struggle your friend.” In the early 2000's, he says, we experienced a happiness movement, where we learned to demonise any negative emotions, and tried to avoid them.
But what we’re recognising now is the benefit of knowing a full range emotions. Fraser asks, “Can we sit with a negative emotion, but still enact constructive behaviours?” Or are we caught in a loop of waiting until our emotions are more positive before we can take action? In the former, there is growth, in the latter, a limited kind of reinforcement.
His research shows that the people who handle struggle well, believe that they don’t need to be experiencing a positive emotion to evolve, change or grow.
These kind of people exhibit certain sorts of behaviours that include:
- Being able to sit with the discomfort without showing dysfunctional behaviours?
- Accepting their own reaction without judgement. This also correlates with being able to empathise with, and validate, the negative emotions others might be experiencing.
- Focusing on the development that will come out of the struggle i.e., the ability to reassess and evolve how they live. “I know it isn’t comfortable right now, but how could it be better in the end?”
- Engaging with the most constructive action that they can manage, to help win the moment or improve their situation, despite what they are thinking and feeling.
Fraser makes a point of saying that the first three actions give rise to the fourth, even through we might not realise it.
Putting it into Practice
For our team, the constructive action was to recreate our face-to-face program to be wholly online. This was enacted quickly and energetically, after we’d taken a moment to sit with the situation, accept it, and look past the immediate struggle to a positive outcome.
So many wonderful outputs came out of that period for us, including our own road map for creating an optimal digital learning experience, which we called ATOMIC presence; an expanded mindset in terms of what we could do for our clients, with the upgraded practical skills to match it; and, some extremely cool digital artifacts, which you can download:
Here be Dragons Landscape, Colour
Here be Dragons, Landscape, B&W
