Leadership Challenge - Overcoming Adversity

At The Leadership Mission, we will be posting regular challenges designed to grow you as a leader. In order for it to work, you must take the challenge seriously and we highly recommend the following strategies to help ensure long term growth. It’s okay if you don’t have all of these right away, the point is to get started somewhere and you can add the missing pieces as you go.

1. Keep a regular log of your daily efforts whether they are mental, physical or emotional. You get where you‘re going faster when you know where you’ve been and how far you’ve come.

2. Find an accountability confidant. Being accountable is important, being accountable to someone you can also be completely transparent and open with is critical to success. It can be a spouse, sibling, parent, mentor, friend, or anyone you trust. It doesn’t matter as long as you have someone to keep you going.

3. Share with other leaders who will support you. You share with these folks at a much higher level and not all of the details but sharing is important. It is another level of accountability but also encouragement.

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Exhibiting courage in the face of adversity and giving hope to others is a crucial role that leaders must perform. It is on the leader to maintain composure and poise regardless of what is happening around them.

In order to do this, leaders must be great at compartmentalizing their personal feelings on the matter and respond. This is way easier said than done, especially if the adversity impacts you personally. However, it is in these times that leaders must be extra vigilant in how they respond.

The natural human tendency is to commiserate with others and share our worries, fears and struggles with them. However, if these people work for us, or rely on the leader to be the rock, that is a dangerous game to play. The same people we hope to lead cannot be the people be we commiserate with and share all of our intimate problems with.

This challenge is a thought exercise and is focused on how leaders can find a way to stay positive and handle adversity with poise and courage.

Reflect on how you have handled adversity in your past. Did you handle it well? Did you fall apart? Were you the (a) leader during this time? How do your people think you handled the situation? Being objective with yourself and how you handled these situations builds maturity and wisdom. Furthermore, you can learn from these experiences to better prepare you for the adversity you will undoubtedly face later in life.

Adversity is a part of life. Don't spend your days worrying about avoiding the inevitable but rather focus on how you will handle the adversity when it comes. By going through this thought exercise regularly, you will better prepare yourself for what lies ahead!

We love hearing from our readers, leave us a comment below and share some experiences you have had while on center stage!