When The Going Gets Tough.…

Tony Rob­bins’ new series, Break­through: The Power of Cri­sis, launched this week in the Huff­in­g­ton Post,  is tak­ing on one of the most impor­tant issues of our time: How can we be empow­ered by cri­sis rather than impaled by it? How can we use adver­sity as a mech­a­nism for per­sonal growth?

This is cer­tainly not a new ques­tion. In fact, it’s essen­tially the human con­di­tion. Life really doesn’t care if we like what it brings or if we’re ready. Life is imper­sonal that way. Life “hap­pens” and we are faced with choices about how we’re going to deal with it. Will we be a vic­tim of cir­cum­stances or will we use them instead to grow and become victorious?

I’ve been explor­ing this same topic, but in a slightly dif­fer­ent con­text: How can we trans­form the fear-based con­scious­ness of scarcity, which has so many peo­ple in its grip today, and live in the con­scious­ness of abundance?

Recall, our def­i­n­i­tion of abun­dance is not about greed or excess. Abun­dance in the con­text of these lean times is about suf­fi­ciency, liv­ing in the flow of “enough.” In the face of hard­ship, how does one over­come con­di­tions of scarcity and cre­ate con­di­tions of “enough?”

As Tony affirms, “It all starts with each individual’s inner strength and resilience.” So the ques­tion becomes: How does one shore up their inner strength when life has beaten them down? What do you do when the only thing in abun­dance in your life is scarcity?

Here’s an email I received from a reader of last week’s post, “Five Keys to a ‘New’ Abun­dance for Lean Times,” that gets to the heart of the issue:

Thank you for that won­der­ful arti­cle: 5 Keys to Abun­dance. The words were well writ­ten and thought­ful and it cer­tainly makes a lot of sense. These types of arti­cles are great but there is always one small prob­lem. The land­lord won’t take the arti­cle or words as pay­ment. Also the car com­pa­nies, gas and elec­tric com­pa­nies and super mar­ket will not take them as well. You get the point. Life will not wait for us to get bet­ter and learn to adapt these words and move forward.

Per­haps if the world was more com­pas­sion­ate it would work, say for instance tell all of your cred­i­tors that you need three to four months to get well and they accept that. Yes I am cyn­i­cal but I am also the aver­age hard­work­ing, family-loving per­son who is ready to throw it all away. Not because of what I don’t have but because I can no longer sup­port my fam­ily in ANY WAY.

The effort is great on the writer’s part and it will prob­a­bly help some of the peo­ple get through a cou­ple of extra days per­haps weeks but is not a solu­tion. I myself don’t know the solu­tion and try and fig­ure it out every minute of every day.

When you love your fam­ily and they love you back and every­one is pulling hard together it cer­tainly brings you closer together and you do learn a lot about your self but this for many peo­ple is not enough; they just can’t sur­vive finan­cially or emo­tion­ally and the result is what you see in the news every day and often. –Jef­frey F.

Jef­frey has voiced a legit­i­mate con­cern that hits to the core of what many peo­ple are fac­ing in today’s eco­nomic cri­sis. How do you pay the rent or buy gro­ceries with “good ideas?”

All this abun­dance phi­los­o­phy sounds good on paper, but when the resources are all dried up and the rent is due, then what? It might sound and feel good for a nanosec­ond, but when the rub­ber meets the road, the rent is still due and the kids are hun­gry. Let’s get real.

Seri­ously! Let’s do get real. Jeff feels he no longer can sup­port his fam­ily “in any way,” and is “ready to throw it all away.” So let’s exam­ine Jeff’s sit­u­a­tion more closely because his cir­cum­stances and his despair echo what can be heard across the land in many people’s lives today.

Let’s look at how Jeff sees his sit­u­a­tion: Given what’s so, Jeff feels he can no longer sup­port his fam­ily in any way. To this I ask: “Is this true?”

Jeff tells us he loves his fam­ily and they love him back and they’re pulling closer together through this expe­ri­ence. I know love won’t pay the rent, but notice, the fam­ily is pulling together. They could be mov­ing apart, but they’re not. I’m not sure if Jeff truly gets what a valu­able resource this is.

There is some­thing here that money can’t buy. So while love, alone, doesn’t pay the rent or make the car pay­ments, within this cir­cle of love and con­nec­tion called “fam­ily,” or even friend­ship resources, there is a foun­tain of pos­si­bil­i­ties wait­ing to be loved into form. And that form might very well turn out to be what pays the rent and puts food on the table.

There is a sacred bond, a deeper con­nec­tion, that man­i­fests when peo­ple come through hard times with the love and sup­port of fam­ily and/or friends. It comes into being when peo­ple dig deep to find within them­selves the strength and courage they didn’t know they had, the com­mit­ment to their future, the legacy they leave behind for those who fol­low, and their com­mit­ment to stand for them­selves and each other to real­ize and live into their great­est potential.

Talk to men and women who have been in mil­i­tary com­bat together — peo­ple who have stared death in the face together and come back to tell about it. Talk to peo­ple who have been through the cat­a­strophic ill­ness of a fam­ily mem­ber together. Talk to those who’ve sat at the bed­sides of their dying loved ones together. What will you dis­cover? There is an unspo­ken, sacred bond felt by those who con­front life’s biggest chal­lenges and who learn and grow from them together.

Do not sell this sacred bond short. In the depart­ment of valu­able resources, this one is right at the top of the list. It’s intan­gi­ble, yes, but if asked to choose which is more valu­able, the love and sup­port of fam­ily or money to pay the rent, what would you choose?

There will be peo­ple who, in the iden­ti­cal cir­cum­stances as Jef­frey, with all the same com­plex­i­ties, fears and mis­giv­ings, will turn their cir­cum­stances into a turn­ing point in their lives. They will take this same hand and play it, not from being ready to throw it all away, but from step­ping into the void that is already there, choos­ing it (it already is), and sum­mon­ing from their deep­est and high­est selves, their pow­er­ful inten­tion to move forward.

Peo­ple who pre­vail and get to the other side of hard times do so because they dis­cover a part of them­selves they didn’t know they had. In so doing, they real­ize that it was only under the pres­sure of what felt like no choice, they in fact chose the hand they were dealt and used that exact same hand to get big­ger. They were vic­to­ri­ous in the face of what looked like being dealt a los­ing hand.

Those peo­ple will look back on this time and see this was when they chose to live as a con­scious act, an act of voli­tion. And then they set sail toward cre­at­ing the rest of their life. Why couldn’t this sce­nario be yours?

Like­wise, there will be peo­ple who, dealt this same hand of cards, will respond by feel­ing empty, pas­sion­less and drained dry of life. Like Jeff, they’ve lost access to their inner resources and in the face of hard­ship are ready to “throw it all away.”

Which response do you think is going to pro­duce break­throughs, and even suc­cess? Which is going to empower some­one to press on, dig deep and come out winning?

Do you have a choice in the mat­ter? Think­ing you have no choice is a choice itself. Which choice is more empow­er­ing? Which one opens possibilities?

Surely in the face of “throw­ing it all away,” giv­ing up, resign­ing, the doors to pos­si­bil­ity are closed. The mind has decided there is no way for­ward and thus, it comes about. There is no way forward.

We lit­er­ally speak and think our real­ity into being. If the mind says, “This is it. I’m done. I have noth­ing left. There is no way for­ward,” this thought takes form and cre­ates itself on the mate­r­ial plane. Thoughts become things.

Abun­dance begins when you choose exactly what you have, not as in res­ig­na­tion or “set­tling,” but as a place from which to begin. If you’re in resis­tance to what already is, you are not in the present, where the only oppor­tu­nity to change things resides.

Resis­tance is a form of denial that has you locked into a belief that “this shouldn’t be hap­pen­ing” and thus, you’re stuck right where you are. All the resis­tance in the world will not change your cur­rent real­ity. You must stop resist­ing and choose what you have. Only then, are you avail­able to take com­mit­ted actions that will begin to turn things around and thus, trans­form your life.

I sense that Jef­frey has not com­pletely resigned yet. He has reached out and this is good. If he’d truly given up, he wouldn’t have taken the time to write with his ques­tion. He is still in the game, but on his way to the bleach­ers, while look­ing over his shoul­der to ask one more time, “Is there another way other than giv­ing up?”

Which to Jeff I say, “Yes! Yes!” For sure you’re going to lose if you retire to the bleach­ers and sit out the rest of the game. If you throw it all away, you’re not even going to give your­self a chance. So what if you’ve given your­self 1,000 chances? How do you know your chance is not at 1,001 or even 1,002 or beyond? How many times did Edi­son fail at the light bulb? 10,000? How do you know it’s time to quit? What if the game is just get­ting started?

And as for the rent, what if love and courage can pay it? What if self-love and courage are the miss­ing ingre­di­ents that would have Jef­frey know he’s capa­ble of win­ning, even if the score doesn’t look good? I’m reminded of a young man named Nick Vuji­cic, who was born with no arms and no legs. Nick is a win­ner. If you want to know what resilience and courage look like watch this. It’s worth 4:11 sec­onds of your time.

WATCH:

We have the hand we’re dealt. It seems unfair that some peo­ple should be dealt all aces and then there’s Nick Vuji­cic, who chose what he has and wrote his own rules about what it means to be dealt a life with no arms and no legs and we’re all richer for it.

Choose the cards you’re dealt, the ones you like and the ones you don’t, and play them full-on, play them with every­thing you’ve got for as long as it takes, for your very life might well depend on it. In a very real way, it does. For sure if you throw in the cards, you lose.

Jeff, I hope you still have your uni­form on and are headed back towards the field. The team is miss­ing a player with­out you in the game.

And to any­one who can iden­tify with Jef­frey, to those who ques­tion if it’s worth it, to those who won­der if they mat­ter, to those who don’t see a way out, please remem­ber this: the human team is incom­plete with­out you on it. You came to play out your life and there’s no one else who can “do you”. There’s some­thing you came to do, some­one you came to be, some­thing you came to learn and contribute.

You are essen­tial to the story of human­ity. If you don’t con­tribute your unique piece, the human story is incom­plete. So if abun­dance is scarce or if scarcity is abun­dant, go for it any­way. Your cur­rent cir­cum­stances are pre­cisely what you have, so choose them and then get busy cre­at­ing from there.

Tagged as: breakthrough, champion, courage, crisis, food, huffington post, inspiration, motivation, Nick Vujicic, player, rubber, survival, survivor, the Huffington Post, The Maxims of Ptahhotep, Tony Robbins, triumphant, way forward, winning, Wisdom literature, writer