Chapter 13
Recover More Quickly from Adversity and Win

Learn how to recover more quickly from adversity. Corporate feedback reflects an extremely strong interest in this topic. Simply put, those who recover more quickly win, while those who don't merely survive, especially in sales-based companies.

The word recovery usually conjures up thoughts of overcoming an extremely negative condition or circumstance. Usually when we talk about recovery, people assume it involves terrible problems or even tragedy. That's not necessarily the case. Everyone is confronted daily with situations from which they need to recover in order to retain a desirable level of performance.

In business and personal life, people constantly recover from conflict, crises, and stressors. Salespeople have to recover from daily rejections. Several times a day at least a parent must recover from the frustrations of rearing children and carrying out the normal routines of running a household. Athletes have to recover from setbacks and lapses. Hitters must recover from slumps. Pitchers have to recover from bad pitches. Recovery is a necessary part of every walk of life.

It's critical that you learn to recover from adversity and to do so quickly. This ability separates talented people who win consistently from those who win casually, lose, or just survive. If you know the technique and you have a process in your mental files that enables you to speed up your recovery from adversity, then you're going to perform better over a longer period of time than people who don't have the recovery technique or process. Quick recovery from adversity is a critical skill personally and professionally.

Nearly everyone with talent will win on occasion. Sometimes people are described as winning by accident, and that happens too. Given the right circumstances, you can win if you just show up, but this is not the case when it comes to regular, reliable success. Talent alone does not ensure winning, although it is a prerequisite. But you also have to be totally committed to what you're doing and what you want to achieve. Granted, part of the equation for success is being in the right place at the right time and getting the right breaks. But this kind of good fortune alone will not guarantee success without the other parts of the equation. Over the long term, you must have the capability to recover from misfortune or adversity.

As a leader, you need to be very perceptive of adversity and assume that another person's struggle may seem trivial to you, but it's very significant to them. We cannot judge people by how they react to different situations. We have to help them put a program in place mentally so that, regardless of the severity of the adversity, they can recover quickly.

In my judgment, the speed of recovery ranks among the most important variables for success, yet it is seldom discussed in books. If you have talent, then you will recover in time, but the key is learning to reduce how long it takes. There are two ways to do this. The first is recognizing adversity when it begins to appear, so you have enough time to counter it. The second is, when you hit bottom, learning to return to the level where you were previously. Even though you always play to win, it's healthy to lose sometimes so that you learn to recover. While losing is not what we set out to do, it presents us with an opportunity to improve ourselves, and that is a valuable part of life.

You will find losing to be an almost insurmountable barrier to performance if you're so talented that you've never felt the need to learn mental skills for fast recovery. Unfortunately, as in the case of some athletes whom I've worked with and known, people refuse to concede that adversity could ever rear its ugly head in their lives. That attitude presents a very difficult problem indeed.

A friend who was an outstanding high school football coach compiled an enviable record of 54 consecutive victories, which won him a place in the coaches hall of fame. His players never lost a game from the eighth grade until they graduated from high school. Many of the youngsters then signed major college scholarships.

But something unexpected happened. After a year or two, many of those players showed up back in their hometown. They'd quit their teams—not because they lacked talent or intelligence but because they had begun to lose games, make mistakes, and not perform as well as they had in high school. Because of the extraordinary success they had in their school years, their ability to recover was minimal. Up until that point it hadn't been a skill they needed to learn.

Take the case of a college pitcher who was signed by a pro team in his senior year in college. He had a record of 15 wins and no losses, making him a top draft choice. When he arrived at spring training, he discovered everyone on the team was just as good as he was, so that even when he was pitching well he wasn't winning all the time. As a result, he suffered from terrible anxiety problems that forced him to quit after less than one year. It was not due to any lack of talent; it stemmed from his inability to recover from adversity. He had never learned how to recover when he made a bad pitch or lost a game. Again, recovery is critical to sustaining performance and to winning.

The same principle applies to employees who keep their jobs after a company has gone through reorganization and cutbacks. In such situations, more efforts should be made to teach the retained employees to recover more quickly from adversity. This, too, is critical for the company. These employees will be required to do more work, to increase their productivity, and in some cases to give up the proper balance in their lives because of greater demands on them, creating additional adversity from which they will need to recover. They also face another challenge. They no longer have as strong a support system because so many of their fellow workers are gone. The company does not have the luxury of its employees making a relatively slow, deliberate recovery; that chance is gone. Business continues, so a quick recovery is required.

How do you learn to recover quickly? The first step in this process is to accept that adversity is real. It is a daily experience in life in most environments.

Next, you must assume you will be better by having gone through the adversity recovery process. You will learn from the experience and discover that you are a stronger person than you thought. And in the process you will prove to yourself that you can deal with conflict, and you will learn that adversity is not going to stand in the way of your goals.

If you are to recover quickly, you must avoid what I call the dark tunnels. These are parts of your mind that are filled with memories of your past mistakes. One of the worst habits to have is spending too much time replaying mistakes over and over, concentrating on avoiding them instead of focusing on what you should be doing well. It's good to review your mistakes briefly to develop a goal-based plan that will make you better. Otherwise dwelling on mistakes is like drinking poison every day. This approach makes it impossible to recover and return to a successful level of winning. At that point, the only option is survival, and unfortunately many people begin to feel complacent about where they are.

Think about how long it takes you to recover from adverse situations. How long do you carry the baggage around? If you are in sales and you make a presentation at 9:00 in the morning and get kicked out at 9:05, how long is it before you're back to being yourself again? Do you need three hours? Four hours? During the time it took you to recover, how many people did you turn off or upset? How many sales calls did you miss? How many potential closings? If you're honest with yourself, you'll find that adversity costs you significantly, not only in terms of financial reward but also personally, in terms of your relationships with other people.

If, as a leader, you make a controversial and difficult decision, how long do you dwell on it before you move ahead? Winners recover quickly. Winning hitters recover between swings of the bat, not between times at the plate. Winning salespeople recover between sales calls, not between days.

Recovering quickly is difficult, without question. The mechanics may be easy, but it is difficult to sustain. You must make a daily commitment to play to win; you have to want to recover.

Certain things are necessary in order to understand the seven-step recovery process. First, you have to define winning. This enables you to know when you have fully recovered. For a golfer I worked with, poor putting had become his adversity. In this case winning meant standing over the ball confidently, seeing the line from the ball to the cup, and stroking the putt with certainty. It was a matter of loss of emotional control, and we worked on how he could recover it. Finally he reached the point when, if he prepared to putt and didn't have a significant feeling, he stepped back, took a deep breath, and visualized a good putt he had made before. That restored the appropriate emotional level, and he performed better than he had in months.

Second, you must learn to recognize the signs of adversity. It does not always hit you in the face. There are subtle clues such as beginning to feel uncomfortable in a task, becoming anxious during performance, and feeling too much tension. You become unsure of yourself and are tentative in your presentation. When one or more of these symptoms appear, you need to start the recovery process. A typical reaction to adversity is to ignore it and attempt to move on. However, this can result in a worst-case scenario that requires much more time to recover than if you act quickly when you encounter difficulties, mistakes, and failure.

Consider another example from golfing. Some players I have counseled called me for assistance after they failed to make several tournaments or performed poorly when they made the cut. If they had sought help after missing the first cut or after the first three bad holes, then their recovery would have been accomplished within hours; instead, it took weeks.

Players who want to correct things in their game after years of doing them the wrong way expect to fix the problem in one or two days. Recovery doesn't work that way. Think of performance problems as analogous to addiction. The longer you smoke cigarettes, the longer it will take you to break free of the craving and recover to the nonsmoker life.

Third, you must learn to visualize, as discussed in Chapter 9. You have to see yourself mentally managing adversity and succeeding. It is essential that you store successful performances in your mental file. Any time you pull up a previously well-executed meeting or shot, you're adding to the positive file in your mind and you should be able to recall them whenever you choose.

These positive entry behaviors must be on file for use when needed. On occasion you should mentally recall a brush with adversity and then follow it with visualization exercises of how you successfully managed to overcome it. The most important variable is experience. You can develop a pattern of recovery through visualization. Relatively basic visualization facilitates your learning to focus during adversity. Focusing enables you to develop a plan to pursue success and to recover.

Fourth, selective attention is a prerequisite to recovery. As we discussed in Chapter 10, selective attention helps you maintain your focus, which is crucial to recovery. To use a well-worn expression, it's about keeping your eye on the ball, which, in sports that use balls, can be taken literally. A golfer who hits into the sand must focus very selectively to get out of the sand. This used to cause me terrible anxiety on the golf course. “I'll never get out of the sand,” I thought. Finally, a teacher told me to focus on hitting an inch or two behind the ball to get out of the sand. It works, and now the sand traps don't raise my anxiety level at all.

If there is something that automatically causes adversity for you, then you need to confront it head on and develop actions to deal with it. The next time it comes up, you'll be able to recover.

Fifth, you must realize that winners are either very popular or very unpopular in their environments, neighborhoods, or hometowns. While some people look at winners as heroes, others may be jealous or resentful. Survivors may be more popular because the winners set a standard that survivors do not appreciate or accept. You may find that you're bucking the system when you try to win.

That happened to a fifth grader who was very bright. He set a pace that was uncomfortable for his classmates. They began to intimidate the youngster, make fun of him, and ridicule him every day. The student soon became frustrated and confused. His grades fell, and then his tormentors left him alone because he was no longer a threat. But three years later, the boy is in a different school where intelligence is respected by his peers, so he has a positive attitude and his grades have improved. The recovery's been a long, slow process, and if he'd been removed from the negative environment sooner, his recovery would have been much quicker.

Sixth, you must understand how your winning affects other people during the recovery process. Other people must become involved in helping you until you can once again be a contributing member of a team. This is universal in the sports, business, and home environments.

Seventh, the recovery process requires patience. Obviously this is true of our physical health, yet some athletes and other people are so impatient and aggressive by nature that they try to shorten the natural healing time. You need to be patient. Sometimes you'll find that this is the most difficult part of learning and practicing recovery. In sports, post-injury patience is a worthy challenge.

When you've assumed a leadership position in a corporate environment, common sense tells you that people look to you when they try to recover. So pace yourself; even though you're trying to recover quickly, there's a certain amount of patience that will enable you to be more effective. When your people see it, they will respond and follow your lead. You must show patience in helping people to recover or change behaviors. This support is valuable for employee retention.

Parents in particular must understand that children don't change overnight. Sometimes it's one step forward and two steps back before the pattern is reversed and progress can be made.

Now let's talk a bit about the mechanics of recovery and the all-important perspective you have of the process. You're not recovering from something, you're recovering to good performance. Never run away from things. When something negative happens, back off mentally and visualize yourself performing the task or engaging in an activity correctly. If it is a conversation that didn't go well, immediately afterward take a few minutes to yourself and replay the conversation. Don't wait. Determine what went well, what could have gone better, and how you will improve the next time. By the time that happens, there will be little if any adversity because you have made the corrections mentally beforehand.

If you don't have a video recorder available to provide you with footage of an actual replay, then when you engage in an activity and do it well, take a few minutes and replay that process in detail. If it was your best performance, whether a speech or a sales call, a decision or a sports skill, then immediately afterward take a few seconds and replay it so you can store that correct performance in your mental file to be called up when needed. Every time you do this you're storing behaviors that you will recall to recover when necessary.

In your free time, visualize your past successes. This exercise repeated over and over will enable you to achieve faster recovery from the negative impact of adversity. Think about how bad adversity tastes. If you do not want to face the negative effects of adversity, now you know the quickest relief comes from what you have stored mentally and you use it to work on recovery. Use the worksheet that follows to remind yourself of the steps that can help you to recover from adversity, both professionally and personally.

Sprint Cup NASCAR driver Tony Stewart is exceptionally talented, determined, and totally committed. He began to experience adversity on the track, which spilled over into his personal life. To be successful in both environments required two behavioral styles. Aggression that was rewarded on the track was criticized off the track. Luckily, he is very bright, perceptive, and compassionate, and was able to take advantage of these strengths to recover quickly in six steps.

  1. First, he recognized the negative consequences of his reactions to adversity.
  2. Second, he made a conscious decision to learn how to recover more quickly.
  3. Third, he put a plan in place and surrounded himself with people who understood adversity and how to recover quickly.
  4. Fourth, he learned that a change in behavior would cause others to be suspicious. He learned to sustain this new behavior even under skeptical eyes until people realized he had sincerely changed.
  5. Fifth, he learned that there are people who are attracted to adversity, those who like to pile on when a person's down, and he eliminated them from his life.
  6. Six, he learned that emotion is a tremendous asset, and he used his edge to win the NASCAR championship that year.

It's very interesting that the bottom line to the whole process in working with Tony Stewart was to get him to spend his energy on things he controlled and to let the rest go.

Any good leader knows that if you're going to be effective, you've got to control what you can control and let the rest go. You've got to have people on your team who you let do their jobs. People are going to make mistakes, but they're going to make mistakes trying to get better, not trying to avoid failure.

Remember, the key to success is not recovery. Everyone will recover over time if they have talent. The key to success is speed of recovery.

img Recover from Adversity

  1. Review your assets and liabilities from Chapter 2.
  2. Analyze the adversity in the present situation.
  3. Review the goals you are trying to achieve.
  4. Determine which assets can be used to offset this adversity and achieve the desired result.
  5. Write down specific actions that will lead you to success.
  6. Prioritize these actions and begin to recover.
  7. Evaluate your recovery for speed, effectiveness, and efficiency.