How To Turn Adversity Into Your Advantage

The following is an edited excerpt from the book Refuse to Lose: 7 Steps to Make Adversity Your Advantage by Adell J. Harris.

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Throughout my life, I have faced adversity. I’ve experienced pain, loss, and trauma. At times, my pain threatened to define not only my life but who I was as a person. But, by following the steps I outline in this book, I was able to embrace my adversity and rewrite my story.

My Story

Let’s begin at the end. It was June 6, and the year was 2014. It was a hot day in my hometown of High Point, North Carolina, also known as the furniture capital of the world and home to about 100,000. I was standing in my mother’s bedroom, in the childhood home I’d been raised in. The windows were open but creating zero breeze. Sweat poured down my back and my face as I tossed completely full, ninety-gallon-sized trash bags out her second-floor window, bag after bag. I was alone. I was exhausted. I was angry. I was sad. With every toss, my emotions grew stronger and stronger. This was the hardest thing I’d ever experienced.

Earlier that day, we’d celebrated my mother’s sixty-two years of life and laid her physical body to rest. Just four days prior, the woman who knew and loved me first, Joretta Allen Harris, had lost her battle with diabetes. I was overwhelmed with emotion and grief. I was also caught off guard by all the responsibility that death leaves for the closest of kin. I selected the last dress that she would wear, the casket that would encase her body, and the words for her obituary, and now, I was cleaning out every inch of the house that she’d lived in for thirty-plus years. It had been a long four days. It had actually been a long two and a half years, as my mother had lived her final years in poor health.

I had been going one hundred miles per hour, taking care of this and that. The intensity of the moment was coming to a head. Tears began to well up as I rested my hands on my knees, as a tired athlete does. I began to speak out loud.

“Where are all the people who lived here? Where is my brother? How am I here by myself?”

After my brief pity party, I asked a question that changed my life: “What is this here to teach me?”

I then began to open myself up to the benefits of the moment. Of everyone who could be doing this, why not me? I thought. Maybe I needed to be the one cleaning out this house, standing in my mother’s bedroom, throwing bags of trash out the window. It was symbolic. This was the end — of so many things. This was the end of hospital rooms, nursing homes, dialysis, and sickness. This was the end of physical moments with my mom. This was the end of the pain, hate, and anger that I associated with this house. Acknowledging this allowed me to release these emotions, which brought me a sense of peace. This experience was intense, and I knew I never would’ve done it willingly. I wouldn’t have found myself in that house in that situation if circumstances hadn’t forced me there, but I was supposed to be there. By cleaning out that house, I was cleansing my spirit, too.

I was adopted at three months old, and my adoptive parents divorced when I was three. My adoptive father largely dropped out of my life at that point. He always paid his child support, and I did see him occasionally on holidays and special occasions, but he didn’t play the role of loving, present father. Today, I have no relationship with him. I don’t think he meant to hurt me in the ways he did. I believe that he, like everyone in this world, was doing the best he could. But fatherless children live a different reality, and his absence has irrefutably changed my life.

My adoptive mother was tough, the epitome of an alpha woman. She had good intentions with everyone she met. She was a helper that gave more than she got. Like a lot of parents in the ’80s, she led using fear and had no problem dropping the hammer. I know my mother loved me, but growing up, it was hard for me to understand it. Love can be complex. She constantly pointed out my shortcomings, flaws, and faults. My hair wasn’t done. I smelled bad. I ran my mouth too much. My teeth were yellow. I struggled in math. I dressed sloppy. I wasn’t as smart as my brother. Her delivery was aggressive and sometimes physical. I interpreted this to mean that I wasn’t good enough. She probably thought she was being helpful, showing me the things I could improve on. She never taught me how to do these things differently, though, so she came across as a bully. Her disapproval affected my self-image and confidence. I desperately wanted her approval and love.

She had to be both father and mother to me, and perhaps I expected even more of her because of that. With being adopted, having no father, and feeling unloved, I was constantly seeking attention. Children want to feel loved by their parents. I was no different.

My mother remarried four times after my father, but none of those men were father figures. My mother was very religious, and she always told me that having sex before marriage was a sin. So, if she was going to have sex with a man, she had to marry him first. This is how people use religion to support their dysfunctional behavior. Five husbands, no fathers? This ratio would eventually have a negative impact on our relationship.

My mother’s second husband was an evil and disgusting human being. I don’t use those words lightly. He used to beat my brother and me with extension cords, usually for forgetting to add “sir” or “ma’am” to the end of a response. Beyond the strict rules and discipline, his presence changed my life forever when he decided to touch me inappropriately and expose himself during one of my evening baths. He never should have been in our home in the first place. He and my mother had separated, but she allowed him to continue living with us for a short time. He moved out of her bedroom to a bedroom across the hall from mine, which meant he and I began sharing a bathroom. I was eight years old with a secret.

Throughout my childhood, starting when I was nine, my mother fostered dozens of kids — at least fifty. Our house was filled with young people separated from their families, kids all too familiar with pain, disappointment, rejection, abuse, anger, and sadness. The first five kids became like family to me. I called them my brothers and sisters, and they lived with us until they were eighteen. Once they phased out of the system, I never saw them again. One day they were my sister or brother, and the next, they were out of our house and out of my life forever. This was when I began to build protective walls in my relationships, as I realized that if I never got close to people, I couldn’t be affected by their departure.

Early on, my mother would foster one child, then two, then three, four, and five. By the time I was in high school, our house began to feel less like a foster home and more like a group home, with as many as five to eight young boys at any given time. My mom would take in anyone, including those who acted out or who had been kicked out of other foster homes. Just like me, these kids had their own sadness, trauma, and toxic behaviors. I grew immune to the process, and in my last three years at home, every new child was a stranger; I had no desire to build any new relationships. My mother worked two jobs and was hardly home. I was greatly outnumbered with no one to protect my space or me. I remember having to buy an exterior lock for my bedroom door to protect my things while I wasn’t home. My things were still stolen. This too would cause a divide in my relationship with my mother.

My childhood home haunted me — not because of drug use or alcohol abuse or domestic violence, but because of the sexual dysfunction that every person that lived in that home experienced. From my sexual abuse at eight years old, to the regularity of pornographic magazines and sexually explicit letters from my mom’s incarcerated pen pal lying around the house, to teenage girls having babies by teenage boys as a result of sexual relationships that started in our home — it was a house of secrets. Everyone in my home was hurting, looking for love, wanting to feel needed and important.

Life outside my home came with its own challenges. When I was in high school in the mid-nineties, there was a rise in drug use across the country, known as the crack epidemic. High Point, like a lot of America’s cities, was impacted. During my high school years, violent crime in High Point reached record numbers. Thanks to my tough single mother, I was shielded from much of the drug use and violence. I’m grateful that she worked so hard, putting in sixty or more hours a week so that we could keep our house on the north end of town where violent crime wasn’t as prevalent. She and my father had purchased that house together, expecting to have two incomes to make the mortgage payments, but she managed to make ends meet all by herself.

Still, despite our fairly safe neighborhood that was for the most part free of drugs, I did not escape the growing toxicity unscathed. In my senior year, one of my classmates was killed by a stray bullet just twenty-five yards from me. Within that same year, my best friend committed suicide.

I left for Wake Forest University on a basketball scholarship with all of this trauma and pain bottled up inside of me, festering in a dark corner of my mind. I struggled with depression, anxiety, and suicidal thoughts throughout college. I spent endless energy being furious at my mother and father for all the things that had happened to me in my childhood. I felt the intensity of my past in every moment.

Shortly after I graduated, my first love, my grandmother, passed away from lung cancer. This was about all I could take. She had been my rock my entire life. I always say that she was the first person to love me unconditionally. I didn’t have to be the best student, best basketball player, have my hair done, or dress nice to receive her love. The pain of losing her sent me into a downward spiral of harmful behavior and alcoholism.

My personal life was in shambles, but as I always had, I was able to hide behind my basketball success. It was no longer as a player but as a college coach. Actor Terry Crews once said, “Success gives us a warm place to hide.” I get that, because I lived it. I was working as an assistant coach, and I was enjoying success in my role. However, alcohol was vastly becoming more of my identity. I was a binge drinker. I never had just one or two drinks; instead of one shot, I’d have six, and instead of a couple of beers, I’d have a dozen.

My downward spiral ended with being arrested for driving the wrong way down a one-way street with a blood alcohol concentration almost three times the legal limit.

My DUI was a turning point. I had let my pain control me and my actions for far too long, and something needed to change. I couldn’t go on living the way I had. I needed to find a way to handle and process my past adversities, and that’s exactly what I set out to do. I’d already been studying personal development and highly successful people for nearly seven years at this point. That work had allowed me to survive, holding on by my fingertips, but I was done just surviving. I wanted to thrive.

I decided that a move was necessary; I resigned from my assistant coach position at UNC Asheville and contacted the athletic director at Tusculum College about the vacant head coaching position. I was hired as the head coach at Tusculum College in May 2009, just three months after my DUI. It was a new beginning birthed out of adversity. I slowly began to realize that my cracks and wounds did not make me broken. They made me unstoppable. This was the realization I had on that hot summer day in June. As I embraced my adversity, new cycles of growth and opportunity arose, which eventually led me to walk away from my fourteen-year coaching career and create Refuse to Lose LLC, a personal empowerment company created to inspire the world to make adversity their advantage.

The Problem: Untreated Adversity

After reading my story, you might think you have nothing in common with me. However, I believe you and I aren’t all that different. We all spend so much time and energy trying to avoid pain, but nobody makes it through life unscathed, free of scars. Pain is inevitable — the cost of admission to being human. We are all living the human experience where we are disappointed, where we make mistakes and fail, where people do us wrong, where we suffer injustice and oppression, where we face lack and limitation.

I don’t know what your specific struggles are or what challenges you’ve faced. Maybe you’ve been fired from your job or don’t have enough money to make ends meet. Perhaps you’ve been bullied or told you’re not good enough. Maybe you’ve been sexually abused, or perhaps you’ve had your heart broken or lost a loved one.

Some pain is acute, lasting only a few days or weeks, and some is chronic, lasting years or even your whole life if you don’t properly address it. But no matter what your specific situation is, pain is pain. Your struggles and hurts are valid, no matter how small or inconsequential they may seem. We’re all different, with different stories, but we are connected in our journey by the unifying, universal emotion of pain.

Pain itself is not the issue, though. Without darkness, there would be no light, and without pain, we would not fully appreciate the goodness in our lives. As unbelievable as it may sound, pain can be a gift. The adversities we face — our stresses and traumas, our hurts and wounds — can be an advantage. However, the effect adversity has on our lives depends entirely upon how we react to, process, and live with it.

Though we all experience pain, we respond to it differently, often in unhealthy ways. Some people bottle up their pain inside and try to pretend it doesn’t exist, until one day it erupts, and they can ignore it no longer. Some people try to mask it, turning to drugs or food or promiscuous behaviors. Other people lash out, becoming the source of hate, bigotry, and prejudice — creating a negative ripple effect in the world. Still other people lose hope and fall into depression, unable to move forward, paralyzed.

From the micro to the macro, you need to deal with your pain. If you don’t treat a wound, it becomes infected. Emotional and psychological wounds are no different. Untreated, they fester and rot. At best, untreated trauma and stress will prevent you from moving forward and building the life you really want to live. At worst, it could literally kill you.

I believe unattended adversity is the number-one cause of death in our country. Obesity, opioid abuse, alcohol addiction, violence against others or ourselves, crime — these are all ways in which untreated pain manifests, and these are all killers. More than a third of the American population now suffers from obesity, and in the next decade, more people will die from diabetes than ever before. Every single day people die from drug overdoses, suicide, and violence, and a staggering number of incarcerated women — some studies estimate between 47 and 82 percent — were victims of childhood sexual abuse. Other studies say 94 percent of incarcerated women have been victimized sexually, some as children, others as adults.1 It’s no coincidence that women who have suffered such deep pain would end up locked behind bars. Pain can send people down dangerous paths.

You cannot allow your pain to control you. You cannot let yourself be held back from achieving your full potential. You must refuse to lose.

The Solution: Refuse to Lose

When you refuse to lose, you make the decision that you will be okay after the storm has passed, after you have made it through whatever difficulties you are facing. Deep within, you decide, I will not lose. No matter what. My pain will not define me. It is one part of my journey, but it’s not going to be the biggest portion. I have a whole marathon left to live, and I’m going to come out stronger and better than ever.

The key to achieving this mentality is finding something greater than your pain. For me, this was my faith and the sport of basketball, and all the people I met and grew to love because of those two things.

We all have something within us that wants and desires more — some inner drive that pushes us to find meaning in our lives. We all have a purpose, a reason for being on this earth. I believe our job is to find out what our purpose is — how we can make use of our inherited talents and gifts, our unique oneness, to give back to the world. In doing this, our purpose can replace pain as the dominating force in our lives, guiding us through any storm.

In both fiction and real life — from Rocky Balboa to Oprah Winfrey — we have been given countless examples of people who have adopted the refuse-to-lose mindset. After not believing in themselves, after rejection, after insecurities, after deep and suffocating pain, these people chose to become the heroes of their own stories and, in so doing, made the world a better place for those who came behind them.

The refuse-to-lose mindset is based on seven simple steps:

1. Acknowledge your pain.
2. Accept your pain.
3. Rewrite your story.
4. Model the attitudes and behaviors you desire.
5. Take your E (empathy) and G (gratitude) vitamins.
6. State your cause.
7. Share your story.

When you follow these steps, you make adversity your advantage. You don’t “overcome” your pain; you own it and use it. We are creatures born for expansion and growth. We are the greatest form of creation, and all of us know that there is more to our lives — even if that knowledge is buried deep inside or shoved into the corner of our minds.

Though we were built for growth, we tend to find our bubbles of comfort, and then we stagnate, thinking,This is good enough. In the depths of adversity, though, no one ever thinks, This is good enough. Instead, when we face deep pain, we are filled with the certainty that there must be more.

Adversity opens us to resourcefulness and curiosity. It is the birthplace of innovation. I’ve never been content and have always been obsessed with growth, but where I focus my learning changes based on how well I know myself and where I am in my journey. Each day, I continue to learn who I am. It’s like that old saying: “You don’t know what you don’t know.”

Adversity forces you to change, and you get to choose whether you will grow into a new, better version of yourself or fall into toxic attitudes and behaviors. While I, of course, would not wish pain on anyone, your pain is a deep well of energy that you can use to transform yourself and your life. When you begin to look at adversity through this empowering lens, you will unlock unlimited potential.

This is not to say that your pain shouldn’t hurt or be uncomfortable. Frequently in my sports career, when I faced physical pain and exhaustion, I would tell myself, “Suck it up. You’re tougher than that.” Later, as a coach, I would tell my players the exact same thing. So much of the time, we’re not given permission to feel our pain. The refuse-to-lose mentality isn’t about “sucking it up.” Acknowledging and experiencing your hurt is important, but eventually, it will be time to ask yourself, Now what am I going to do with this pain? I believe the only acceptable answer is, I’m going to turn it into something incredible that would have never existed otherwise.

To free yourself from the prison of adversity, you have to work on yourself every single day. The process described in this book isn’t a one-time fix; it’s a lifestyle. If you want to be the best version of yourself, if you want to live with full freedom, unshackled by pain, if you want to own your outcome, you must live the refuse-to-lose mindset every single day.

For years, we go to school, sit in classrooms, and take notes. We are overloaded with knowledge and forced to grow. Then, we get out of school, and there’s nothing to challenge us — nothing to strengthen who we are, how we think, or how we feel. No one is forcing you to grow anymore, so you have to make the decision for yourself. You can lie wounded, or you can pick yourself up and march into battle, wearing your scars proudly. It’s your choice.

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To keep reading, pick up your copy of Refuse to Lose: 7 Steps to Make Adversity Your Advantage by Adell J. Harris on Amazon.