264: Shifting Your Mindset to See Opportunity In Challenges: Fan Favorite Replay

Hi there. You’re listening to the Leading Lady podcast. I’m your host, AliceAnne Loftus, and I’m a certified professional coach specializing in leadership and work-life balance. I work with clients to shift their limiting beliefs, insecurities, and self-doubt. This podcast will be filled with tools and strategies to help high-achieving women like you feel connected, empowered, and in the lead of your life, both personally and professionally. Let’s transform your life, starting now. Lead yourself. The rest will follow.

Shifting Your Mindset: Finding Opportunity in Challenges

AliceAnne Loftus:
Hello there, leading ladies, and welcome to today’s episode, where I’m going to walk you through how to shift your mindset and look at challenges you’re experiencing—and just shift so that you can see the opportunities those challenges present.

I know nobody wants to think about that. Everyone’s like, “Oh, come on, AliceAnne. Things are hard right now. I’ve been in this COVID chaos for the last six months. Don’t give me another upbeat, positive podcast about how challenges make us stronger and what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger,” or any of those cliché things.

I admit that a couple weeks ago, I was listening to my BNI podcast. If you don’t listen to the BNI podcast by Dr. Ivan Meisner, I highly recommend it, even if you’re not a BNI member. It’s a powerful podcast about business and networking. I have found it to be extremely useful—quick, fast, easy to listen to, and he always offers wonderful nuggets of information.

So, I’m not going to take you down the path of this positive podcast and have this Pollyanna attitude that nothing is difficult, because the truth is, I think all of us are in a difficult season in some way—in how we’re dealing with our business, how we’re managing personally, how we’re juggling it all. And we’re still in the midst of this pandemic. We’re six months in, and while things are improving and it looks like businesses are opening back up, some kids are in hybrid schooling, some are still doing virtual learning. We’re still taking steps to move forward.

Opportunity in Challenges

So, what do I want to share in this? There’s opportunity in challenges. The truth is, there’s opportunity everywhere around us. We have the power to look at something and either be a victim or a victor. When I say victim, what I’m talking about is when you don’t feel that you are in control of your day or your life or what’s happening around you. To be a victor is to recognize that things aren’t happening to you—they’re just happening. You really can only control your attitude and your effort in how you are going to show up and tackle what lies ahead.

When we are the victor of our lives, we recognize that our happiness, our success, our achievement, our overall enjoyment of life has nothing to do with what’s happening or the circumstances around us, but really in how we approach it and how we choose to move forward regardless of what’s going on.

Lessons from a Difficult Email

I wanted to share with you a couple opportunities that came up once I was able to look at a challenge and really make a thoughtful decision on how I wanted to move forward. The truth is, the world is messy. We can’t really control the circumstances around us. We can’t control what challenges come down the pike. We are only ever in control of our attitude and our effort.

Recently, I woke up one morning and—I never check my email first thing in the morning, but for some reason I opened my email and it was a really spiteful, mean-spirited email. It just sent me reeling. I’m like, “Oh my gosh, this is not the way I want to start my Monday morning. Why do people have to be so nasty?” I call them keyboard warriors, where people feel that they can hide behind a keyboard and spout off some really hurtful email and that there’s no consequences to that.

So, I was really kind of upset about this email, and it was my kids’ first day back to hybrid learning. I really wanted to be in a positive mindset where I could be present and supportive in helping them to start their day off well. So, I took some time and really tried to think about what was the point of this email? What is the sender trying to convey? I couldn’t think of one positive objective that would warrant such a spiteful message—not just sent to me, but to a greater community. It was just like a public shaming and a tattletale kind of adult temper tantrum.

It was unfortunate that this individual felt the need to send this type of email to a group of individuals, many of whom weren’t even involved in the issue. It was disheartening to know that now other people were waking up on a Monday morning to this unnecessary drama.

So, I thought, “Okay, there’s got to be a lesson in here. There’s got to be something that I can pull from this as an opportunity to grow or to be better or to put out positivity into the world.” So, what I did was I went to my Facebook group, Leading Ladies with AliceAnne Loftus, and I shared the story about how crummy it feels to wake up to a yucky email like that. But the opportunity there was to remind myself and others—my listeners, my followers, the individuals in the group—that we never really know what other people are going through, and it’s important to think twice before lashing out.

It’s important to maybe leave your email in a draft and wait—simmer down before hitting send—to really think about if that’s the message or tone you want to send out into the interwebs, into the world. Be more thoughtful: if someone cuts you off on the road, don’t scream profanities or lash back out and engage in road rage. Maybe pause or think twice before leaving a business a bad review if you’ve had one negative experience. Maybe the person you were interacting with that day was just having an off day or had received some terrible news and still had to show up to work.

So, I took that challenge, that pain, that annoyance, and I said, “If we all just paused for a moment and said, is this really worth it? Is this really worth spewing anger and spite and hurtfulness out into the world? The world’s already hard. Why make someone else’s day harder?” So, I took that opportunity to share that message with my group and the Leading Lady community, and I received so many positive messages back—messages about, “I’ve been feeling on edge, and that message you shared really helped bring me back to reminding me how I wanted to show up,” or “I’ve been snapping at my team and loved ones, and I really needed that reminder to think twice about how I was coming off to people, especially the people I care about.”

So, that challenge—had I not received that email that Monday morning that sent me off on this “ugh, that didn’t feel good”—because I took that challenge and negative experience and said, “Okay, what’s an opportunity here?” Well, the opportunity is to share that story with others and remind others that we don’t have to behave that way. We don’t have to spread hurt, anger, or spite. We have the power to move forward with grace and kindness.

Did that change the sender? Probably not. I certainly didn’t say this back to her. I just responded professionally and went about my day. But what it did was create a ripple of positivity rather than a ripple of anger. I could have had a completely different morning. I could have been upset with my kids, short with my husband, carried that frustration and anger into my workday and taken it out on my team. I could have shut down and allowed that negativity to permeate my function for the day.

But I recognize that in those challenges, there’s always a choice. There’s always a choice to find the opportunity. There’s always a different side—a different “choose your own adventure,” if you will. You get to choose if you’re going to continue down the path of the challenge or if you’re going to find a new path that brings opportunity, growth, positivity, and just a better outcome.

Turning Business Challenges into Growth

That was one of the challenges I had. Another challenge I’ve recently had is—well, as you know, I operate childcare centers. We are still trying to navigate under our new regulations, new capacities. It’s been a difficult time. However, because of some of the challenges, it’s opened up opportunity for us to do additional professional development, additional trainings, additional support for our lead staff.

We’ve been able to be more thoughtful about hiring. We are able to really take a hard look at our policies and procedures and fine-tune things. What wasn’t working? With the new regulations, we have to make updates anyway in our policies and procedures. This is a great opportunity to look at the other policies and procedures that aren’t COVID or pandemic-related and just really look at it with new eyes and determine what changes we want to implement or continue on with the new changes we’ve had to implement due to COVID.

So, that was a really interesting opportunity in that, yes, business is hard, but it’s also an opportunity to slow down and really assess what has worked in the past, what isn’t working or hasn’t been working, and how can we use this time to implement those changes and that shift.

We were able to send the majority of our staff back to be certified in positive psychology, which is something I had completed earlier in the year. Now we’re moving each two staff at a time through the program because they have a little more time to engage in professional development. With the lower ratios in our classrooms, the teachers are able to work from home and do more of the continuing ed and professional development, and now we’re going into the new school year with trained teachers in a completely different curriculum and focus.

It’s actually empowered our staff and our program to come out of this pandemic—even though we’re not quite out of it—but when we do, we used that time as an opportunity to further develop our staff, curriculum, and program. Super exciting stuff. As a business owner, it makes me feel that it was a good use of our time and that we were able to really keep staff engaged and focused on moving forward with something, even though times are a little uncertain right now.

Final Thoughts

I hope that whatever challenges you are going through, either personally or professionally, you can pause and say, “Okay, what is the opportunity here? I have the choice whether to continue as a victim in this challenge, or I can do something innovative, I can pivot, I can pause, I can completely adjust myself so that I can be the victor of this story and really seize the opportunity that the challenge presented.”

If you have questions, comments, or would like to chat further about finding opportunities in your challenges, feel free to post in the Leading Ladies with AliceAnne Facebook group, message me, comment on the podcast, or leave me a review. There are so many ways to reach me and engage in further discussion around this.

Thanks for tuning in for another episode of the Leading Lady podcast. You can find all of the links and information mentioned in this episode at www.leadingladycoaching.com. If you enjoyed this episode, don’t forget to subscribe to the show so you don’t miss any future episodes. While you are there, it would mean the world to me if you would take a few seconds and leave me an honest review. This will allow me to help other high-achieving women find inspiration, connection, and develop strategies to live and lead with purpose and intention. See you here next week.