Whether you like it or not, we’re all going to go through hard times. It’s just a fact of life. And even though it’s tough, I never want you to give up just because you’re going through a hard time. 

I help my clients with this all the time. They run into a challenge and then they have the urge to throw in the towel. I never want to tell them that what they’re going through doesn’t matter, because it does and they are hurting. So I coach them on how they can not only get through these challenging times but how they can benefit from them. 

In this week’s episode, we’re talking about how to benefit from challenging times. There is nothing we can do about adversity, it’s always going to happen whether you want it to or not. But what you do during this time of adversity is what matters. 

Resources from this episode:

Unreasonable Hospitality: THE REMARKABLE POWER OF GIVING PEOPLE MORE THAN THEY EXPECT By Will Guidara

Website:
www.theerikacruz.com

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Podcast production for this episode was provided by CCST.

Episode Transcript:

Erika: Hello, hello! Welcome back to this week’s episode of Ch*ngona Revolution podcast. This is a very short and informal episode where I want to talk to you about overcoming difficult times. The truth is we are all going to go through difficult times, right? Life is going to life. Not everything is going to go the way that we want it to, but how we react to these moments is what dictates the quality of our lives.

And I’m not saying that You should just like always be happy even whenever you’re going through a very difficult time and almost invalidate yourself or gaslight yourself to not acknowledge the, the thing that you’re going through. Let’s definitely hold space for what it is that we’re going through.

But being that we know that not everything is going to go our way and that we are going to face challenges that we are going to face adversity. How do we want to show up in those moments? So I was reading a book that my coach recommended it’s called

 Unreasonable Hospitality, The Remarkable Power of Giving People More Than They Expect. It is a great book if you are a business owner or if you are in hospitality. It is specifically around the restaurant industry and how they took, um, Eleven Madison Park, which was a restaurant in New York, as a restaurant that just was getting really bad.

reviews in about a rep to becoming the number one restaurant in the world and how they used hospitality to do that. And in this book, they’re talking about the 2008 recession and they titled this chapter Adversity is a Terrible Thing to Waste. And this has stuck with me since reading this book because we are all going to face adversity.

We are all going to go through difficulties and misfortunes. And when we’re in it, the only thing we want to do is get out of it, right? The only thing we want to do is no longer be in adversity, but it is a terrible thing to do. to waste when you know that through adversity and through challenges and through failures and through misfortune, that is how you’re going to grow and how you’re going to learn.

How can we look at adversity as from a different perspective? I’ve said many times on this podcast, we don’t learn from winning. We learn from failing and that’s exactly why inside of my group program, courage driven Latina, we have everybody work on a failure challenge. We actually just finished the failure challenge last week.

We did it all the month of April. And y’all, every time we do the failure challenge, there is more action taken in this program than any other time. And people start looking at failure differently. They start looking at it as an opportunity for growth. Because whenever they’re allowing themselves to do something that could possibly result in failure, they’re also just taking more action and more risks.

And practicing courage, which is inevitably going to also give them more wins. It’s not like they failed every time they tried. No, they ended up with a ton of wins. People made so much progress on their courage projects. And I feel like we should almost call it the adversity challenge because I’m so obsessed with this quote.

But no, I think the failure challenge works really well. Because they begin to redefine the way they look at failure. And it’s so interesting because you would think, okay, after one month of like participating in a quote unquote failure challenge, do people come out feeling more like a failure? No, the complete opposite happens.

They learn so much, they gain so much clarity. They’re a lot more vulnerable. They’re willing to ask for coaching. It just completely transforms people whenever they lean into adversity, whenever they lean in to failure. And the truth is that if everything always went our way, we would never find creative ways.

Of doing things. I remember when I was working in the tech industry and we were making these experience boxes because I worked on the marketing team. We were making these experience boxes for customers and we ran out of a certain supply. And whenever we ran out of this supply for the boxes, we ended up using something that we already had in the office that was allowing us to not only recycle and use something we already had, so it was cost effective, but it was also a lot more environmentally friendly because it was something that we already had on hand.

And we ended up, it was like what we were stuffing the boxes with and it ended up working out so well. And the truth is if we would have never come across the challenge where we ran out of the other supplies we were using, I would have never come up with this other new solution. And I mean, this has happened in the kitchen for me so many times I’m out of an ingredient.

So then I substitute something else and then I end up creating a recipe I like even better, Or if you’ve ever not had a particular piece of an outfit that you had in mind, so you end up substituting something else and you end up liking it even more, or when you just like don’t have something, so you have to get resourceful. That is a beautiful example of how adversity was not wasted.

And in this book, they’re talking about the 2008 recession. And how a lot of people were not spending money on fine dining. They were being a lot more careful with how they are spending their money. And they had to get really creative and they created a two course lunch menu that was, was getting more people in the doors that was a little bit more accessible and they just got really scrappy with the way they were doing things.

They looked at their finances and I feel like a lot of us are going through adversity right now, but how can we utilize it? To inspire creativity. How can we utilize it to allow us to pivot in a different direction? Again, I’ve said this so many times on the podcast, but failure is nothing more than redirection.

Just like, you know, rejection is redirection. So is failure. Failure is teaching you what does not work so that you can then practice something that does work. If everything you did always worked, you would never try new things. A lot of the beautiful things that we have today. All of the amazing solutions were because they were like, there was adversity that, that occurred some type of challenge that occurred.

And now this was solving the problem, like even zoom, right. Or like video conferencing. The challenge was that people couldn’t travel across the world to have a business meeting to then like follow up again in a week, if you lived on one continent versus another, and that’s how this was born. So a lot of what we are experiencing today 

is the solution to what was adversity at some point. So I don’t know what you’re going through in your life, but I can tell you that in my life, I’ve gone through a lot of adversity this year, even since the end of last year, I’ve had a lot of ups and downs this year. Um, business is just kind of shifting, the economy is different.

The way that I have enrolled in my programs has had to, I’ve had to get really creative. I’ve had to do things different, but you know what? I’ve learned. So much. I mean, I am so excited about this round of magnetic mastermind that I just finished enrolling for because I have started to look at my business from new, from a new perspective through all of the recent adversity that I’ve had.

I cannot wait to serve my clients because I feel like I’ve come up with so many creative solutions to get people results faster that I wouldn’t have come up with if everything was going all fine and dandy. So again, the quote is adversity is a terrible thing. to waste. So whatever you find yourself going through in life right now, I know it can feel like, I just want to get out of this.

But what if you sat with it for a moment? What if you sat with it and maybe journaled about a few things? What if you sat with it and maybe talked to your adversity, maybe through visualization or through journaling. And here is some of the things that I would have you reflect on. You can always come back to this and, and, You can take a screenshot of where you are in the podcast episode so you can journal about this later.

But I’m going to give you some journal prompts that immediately come to mind and what I would inspire you to reflect on. So the first thing is, what is the adversity I find myself in right now? What are the challenges I find myself in right now? This could be life related, business related, friendship related, I mean whatever, whatever is going on in your life right now.

And then ask yourself a follow up question of, what could this be teaching me? And you don’t have to be right, right? What could this be teaching me? We’re just leaning into it with curiosity. And then you’re going to start to broaden your perspective by answering that question. And then I want you to answer, who would I be if I never went through this adversity?

Who would I be if I never went through this challenge?

And then the final question is, who will I be when I overcome? This adversity. So those would be the four things that I would have you reflect on and journal on and really start to look at adversity as. A very powerful player in your life that is helping you grow and is helping you expand. And even though all we want to do is like sucker punch this sometimes and just escape it.

How can you lean into it? How can you grow from it? Because you are not the adversity you find yourself in this moment. I was actually coaching inside of Courage Driven Latina a couple of days ago. And one person was talking about,Yeah. So this, this client of mine was, um, looking to get a new job and she was going through the interview process.

And there was just a lot of uncertainty. And I recalled that when there was so much uncertainty in this client, it felt like. I’m going to be uncertain forever. But then the next call she ended up getting the job, which was amazing. And then she was like, just so joyful and excited about the job and excited about her move.

And, you know, I just called out, like, I want to remind you that a couple of calls ago. Yeah, it was. I think a couple of calls had gone by. I was like a couple of calls ago, there was so much uncertainty in you. And I actually inspired her to like, I invited her to write a blog post about it, where she was able to document and share her experience.

So she could go back and reflect on it. So the reason that I’m sharing this is because at any given moment of our lives, it feels like the current feeling and the current circumstance where you’re in is permanent, right?

If you’re having a horrible day, it feels like your whole life is going to be horrible. If you’re having a great day, we, we tend to believe that. What’s happening in this moment is just going to happen forever. And we failed to recognize that like, no, you’re not going to stay stuck here. Right? So just like you may find yourself in adversity in this moment.

Like my client found herself in so much uncertainty and anguish of like, what’s going to happen. Remember that this is only temporary. Nothing is ever permanent. Nothing is ever permanent. So you will overcome this adversity, but while you’re in it, I invite you to take it to dinner, to sit with it, to journal about it, and to learn as much as you can from it.

Because we cannot avoid adversity, but we can leverage it to help us grow and be the best version of ourselves. All right, friends. I told you this would be a quick one. Thank you for sitting with me as I give you this little rant. This is not scripted, but I appreciate you spending, spending some time with me. All right. I will see you next week.