Page 28 - Leadership Secrets of Hillary Clinton

OVERCOMING AND THRIVING ON ADVERSITY

egy empowers you to stay positive until you have all the
information you need to make a judgment about the situa-
tion. It also helps you operate with a sense of purpose and
intention through the difficult experience. To do this, you
have to stay focused on a few key things that resonate with
you in terms of what you truly care about. This kind of sus-
tainable focus allows you to not get distracted by the adver-
sity, but to use it as a significant source of energy in your life
that translates into mapping out and executing a plan.
For example, a friend of mine recently lost her job.
When her manager called her into his office to tell her the
bad news, her immediate reaction was fear and anger.
Why was her team being eliminated instead of another
team that wasn’t nearly as effective? How would she pay
her mortgage if she couldn’t find another job? If she had
responded immediately, she might have said things that
she would later regret. Instead, she asked if she could take
a day and then come back and discuss it further with him.
She went home, discussed the situation with her family,
took some time to figure out her options and what she
really wanted for herself, and then prepared to have that
next conversation with her boss. As a result, she came
away from that conversation with ideas for building and
leveraging a broad spectrum of relationships that could
help her find a new position and specific ideas for how to
make herself more marketable, both inside and outside her
company. She learned, based on her conversations with her

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