Photo by John Mccann on Unsplash
The fact is life is hard for all of us.
It may be that your finances are a mess and that your credit score starts with a five instead of an eight. Maybe you’ve put on so much extra weight that your face looks distorted. It could be that you have an overcrowded graveyard of failed relationships in your past.
After considering your self-made trials, the world is full of broken, unhappy people willing to orchestrate more difficult circumstances for you. And let's not forget that sometimes bad stuff happens.
Am I the only one who’s desperately begged God for a do-over or wished some magical earthen being would swoop in and make all my junk disappear?
Sometimes life can feel like being trapped in an escape room, alone, unable to figure out the clues and realizing no one is coming to save you. It can be hard to make it from day to day without surrendering to thoughts of hopelessness and despair, wondering if things are ever going to get better for you.
How, then, do we deal? Do we try to cover our circumstances in over the top optimism or wave our white flag?
Henry David Thoreau said, “However mean your life is, meet it and live it.”
The answer is not to take this path or the other, ignore the situation while covering it in saccharine platitudes, or wallow in how bad things are and give up. The solution is a “yes, and at the same time.” Think of an improv scene. You see what looks like a natural flow of characters finishing each other’s thoughts and sentences. What you will find if you were ever to study improv is that responding to each comment with a “yes, and” rather than a “but” is what makes a scene work.
Similarly, in Good to Great, Jim Collins discovered this duality in the successful companies he studied. He coined it the Stockdale Paradox.
Admiral Stockdale was a POW in the Vietnam War for eight years. Although by the grace of God, most of us will never experience a circumstance so horrendous as to be held against our will by a hostile group of people, we can learn a lot about the mindset he credits for keeping him throughout his imprisonment. Here you have a man in a situation that is horrific beyond measure without any idea of how it’s going to turn out, no idea if he’ll ever be released and see his family again and you have to wonder how did he manage to cope with something like that.
What’s interesting is that the mindset he adopted is probably counterintuitive to what most of us would’ve come up with. He owned up to the fact that he was not in a good situation, to say the least, and set about trying to figure out how to transcend his circumstances. He taught himself and others ways to survive torture by giving out bits of information, he sent sensitive information home to his wife in letters, and he even went so far as to disfigure himself at one point so as not to play into the propaganda that his captors were distributing about how well the prisoners were being treated. He did this while also holding on to the belief that he would be free again one day.
I never lost faith in the end of the story...I never doubted not only that I would get out, but also that I would prevail in the end and turn the experience into the defining event of my life…
Admiral Stockdale speaking to Jim Collins, Good to Great
“Yes, and at the same time.” Yes, he understood and acknowledged the direness of his situation and went into corrective action to prevail in spite of and also yes, he held out faith that things weren’t going to end for him there.
Photo by Devin Edwards on Unsplash
This is a very important lesson. You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end – which you can never afford to lose – with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they may be.
Admiral Stockdale speaking to Jim Collins, Good to Great
It’s not an either-or but a “yes, and.” Confront the facts of your circumstances, minus letting your thoughts drive the bus into the land of hopelessness and despair. And also never lose faith that this is not how your story is going to end.
Life is unfair – sometimes to our advantage, sometimes to our disadvantage. We will all experience disappointments and crushing events somewhere along the way, setbacks for which there is no “reason,” no one to blame…What separates people, Stockdale taught me, is not the presence or absence of difficulty, but how they deal with the inevitable difficulties of life.
Jim Collins, Good to Great
Don’t be afraid to say yes to the difficult things in your life, and at the same time, never lose faith that this is only a chapter in your larger story.