Staying calm when facing adversity

People who know me have always asked the same question when I was facing adversity in my life: “Laurent, how do you stay so calm?”.

My co-workers would often ask the question when leading the company through difficult moments, when business seemed to collapse with no end in sight, with employees’ livelihoods at stake and massive pressure from top management.

My friends would ask the question when I was going through a complicated divorce, where everything I had built was “taken away from me”.

My children would ask me the question when going through cancer treatment this past year, from the diagnosis to chemotherapy, then radiation and finally three complicated surgeries.

It’s true that feeling calm is an emotion that I cherish. It allows me to take a step back, to get out of the situation. But calm does not mean disengaged. I still care, I am still committed, I am still determined.

Staying calm when facing adversity can be achieved through physiology, extreme ownership and embodying your future-self. But first, let’s look at why you should stay calm when dealing with challenges.

1. What are the benefits of being calm?

Miyamoto Musashi, the famous Japanese samurai-philosopher, wrote in his masterpiece The Book of Five Rings: The Strategy of the Samurai:

“Both in fighting and in everyday life you should be determined though calm.”

We often think of other virtues for warriors: combativeness, toughness, courage and determination. And yet Miyamoto Musashi mentions being calm as one of the highest virtues for the samurai.

There are three main benefits of remaining calm when facing adversity and which probably explain why Miyamoto Musashi valued that virtue for the Japanese swordsmen.

a.     Better judgment:

As I mentioned before, when feeling calm, I extract myself from the situation and see it with more objectivity. I don’t deny the difficulties I am facing, but I don’t make them worse either. I focus my attention on what I can control, and let go of what I cannot, including regretting the past or worrying about the future. Feeling calm keeps you focused on the present moment. From that state, I usually come up with better solutions, and I make better decisions, thus creating better results in my life.

The best example to illustrate this is Warren Buffet, a legendary calm investor in the very noisy and ostentatious world of finance. When he advises to be “fearful when others are greedy, and greedy when others are fearful”, what he is truly saying is “don’t let fear and greed drive your investing decisions”. Rather, come from a place where you don’t let your emotions drive your decisions, from a place of knowingness where you control the fundamentals of your investing decisions.

b.    Patience and compassion:

When facing adversity, our emotions of fear, anxiety, doubt or anger run high, often because we have a hard time identifying the problem, let alone finding a solution to it. Ignorance is the biggest issue at first.

And yet, we rush to take action, to try to find solutions when we don’t even know what the problem is in the first place. This urge to take action comes from wanting to get rid of our negative emotions. We believe that if we just do something, somehow our negative feelings are going to disappear. Notice that taking action could include over-eating, over-drinking or taking substances. We are reacting to our emotions, which means that we are under their control.

Being calm does not mean that you don’t feel those same negative emotions. You will still feel afraid, you will still feel anxious when waking up in the morning, you will still have doubt or be angry at times. But you don’t react to them. You learn how to be patient, how to be compassionate with yourself, while trying to understand the problem that you are facing. By learning how to be patient and compassionate with yourself, you show the same qualities with others. That’s why I believe my co-workers trust me. They know that I won’t “lash out” at them when they come with bad news, or that I will avoid the problem. They can trust that I will always be there to support them finding a solution.

When I was first diagnosed with stage 3 cancer, my emotions were all over the place. I would wake up in the middle of the night feeling terrible. My mind was racing with all the worst possible scenarios, thinking of my children, my wife, my parents, my friends and my work colleagues. The main emotion I was experiencing was terror. It lasted for several weeks.

By allowing the emotion without reacting to it, by being patient and compassionate with myself, I saw little by little that my feeling was coming from a belief that I was going to die. Which was a completely optional belief. No doctor had told me anything about that outcome. My brain had come to that conclusion just based on the negativity around the word “cancer”. Once I could see the problem with clarity, I could then find a solution to it. I chose to believe something different, which allowed me to completely turn around my experience of cancer.

c.     Confidence and optimism:

Another corollary of being calm when facing adversity, is that you inherently believe in yourself, in your capacity to come up with solutions even if you don’t see them just yet. We are often blocked with fear when we don’t know how to do something or solve a problem. Staying in that fear usually leads to procrastination, avoidance and/or giving into urges. When you believe in your own resourcefulness, rather than obsessing on the missing resources, you often come up with creative solutions to your problems.

You are confident that all problems have a solution, and that life will bring your way what you need, either through insights or by attracting the people who will help you. It doesn’t mean that you don’t have to work, that you don’t need to show up. It means that you fundamentally believe that every “negative” situation comes with silver linings and that with time, they will become evident.

This attitude also allows you to do the “leaps of faith” that life requires from time to time. Sometimes you won’t have all the insights to make a decision. Sometimes you won’t see clearly all the consequences of your actions. Yet, from a place of calmness, believing in yourself, in your ability to figure things out, and remaining optimistic on the outcome, you make the decision anyway.

Now that we’ve seen the benefits of being calm when facing adversity, the question is “how do you do it?”

2. How to remain calm when facing adversity?

a.     Physiology:

There is a lot of advice on the internet on how to calm down by using your breath. It definitely works as a way to temporarily calm down. I highly recommend it, if you’re in the grip of an intense emotion such as anxiety or fear. But it is very difficult to keep your attention constantly focused on your breath. It’s a quick fix but difficult to maintain in the long run.

In fact, the best advice I can give to stay calm in difficult moments is to take care of yourself before you need it. Just like the well-trained crew will weather a storm much more easily than the one trying to figure out what to do in the middle of it. Eating a balanced diet, sleeping well and exercising regularly will put you in a mental state that will allow you to gain perspective much quicker.

Continue taking care of yourself even in the midst of your difficulties. When I was younger, I often overlooked this myself, thinking that my problems were more important than taking the time to look after my body. It was always a big mistake and came to bite me at one moment or another, especially when the adversity lasted for months.

If you haven’t been taking care of yourself until now, it is never too late. Start now. Learn how to eat a healthier diet. Exercise regularly. Get a good night’s sleep. Our thoughts are not generated out of thin air. They emanate from a biological process in our brains. We underestimate that the quality of our thinking also comes from the quality of our bodies. 

This will require some discipline. When in stress, we tend to do the exact opposite. We want to drink that glass of wine, smoke that cigarette or watch Netflix until 2 am. These are crutches to try to avoid our negative emotions. You will only end up the next day with brain fog, indulging or reacting to your negative emotions, with no solution in sight to your problem.

b.    Extreme ownership:

“Extreme Ownership is a mind-set of not making excuses and not blaming anyone or anything else when problems occur.” – Jocko Willink, Leadership Strategy and Tactics

Extreme ownership allows you to take full responsibility of what is occurring in your life. By owning it, you are telling your brain that it is in your power to find a solution to the problem. There is nothing more disempowering than to blame someone else or circumstances for your situation. You have no other solution than to try to control others or the world, and we know how successful we can be at that. Close to zero.

There are two levels of extreme ownership. First, you have to own your results in your life. Whatever your situation in life, you are there because you’ve made some decisions in your past. Had you made different choices, taken different actions, you would have created a different result for yourself. At times, this can be difficult to accept. Life can throw you some weird curve balls. But by taking extreme ownership, you can start asking yourself the right questions: 

• What do I need to do differently?
• What can I learn from this in order to course-correct?
• What did I do in the past that got me here?

If you believe it’s only because of chance or bad luck, you will not open up to your inner wisdom. For example, I took full ownership of my cancer. You might think that I am too harsh. But thinking otherwise, believing that it was just bad luck, only puts me in a position where I can’t do anything about it. Whereas taking ownership allows me to revisit how I prioritize my health in my life. I realized that, having never been sick before, I took my health for granted. Taking ownership of my situation allowed me to revisit this. I now make different choices, take different actions, which ultimately will create different results. For example, I exercise four to five times per week, prioritizing these moments on my calendar over anything else, unlike before. I very rarely drink alcohol anymore, even in social settings, when I used to be a regular “social drinker”. I do a regular health checkup, when before I wouldn’t see a doctor for years.

The second level of extreme ownership is owning everything you feel. Whatever you are feeling, it has nothing to do with your current circumstances or what others say or do. Once you take ownership of your emotions, then you can start having some authority over them and change how you feel. Coming back to my personal example of feeling terror when I was diagnosed with cancer, my feeling had nothing to do with what the doctor said. It even had nothing to do with cancer itself. The tumor was probably developing for months or years in my body and I wasn’t feeling anything. No, my feeling came from my belief that I was going to die. It was only by taking full ownership of my emotion, without trying to push it away, resisting it or reacting to it, that I could see with clarity what I was creating for myself. I then decided to believe, first that “I am going to live”, and then that “my cancer is a blessing in disguise”. Which leads me to tell others that this has been one of the best moments in my life, despite all the pain and discomfort due to the treatment. I couldn’t stop counting my blessings.

c.     Embodying your Future-self

Finally, one of the most powerful techniques to feel calm when facing adversity is to come from a place where you have already overcome your problems. This can only be done once you care for your body and take ownership for your results and emotions. 

Visualize yourself having overcome the adversity that you are currently facing. What are you feeling? What are you thinking? Who have you become at the end of this process? Once you are there in your imagination, and feeling those emotions in your body, what advice can your future-self give to your present-self?

Feelings of confidence and certainty will arise powerfully in your body. You come up with solutions that you didn’t even know existed. In that stillness, you will find the answers to anything you are dealing with in your life.

For me, the question isn’t so much “how do you stay so calm in the face of adversity?” but rather “why?”. I stay calm, because I know, in the deepest core of my Self, that the solutions to my “problems” are not outside of me.

Being calm is the best way to access our inner wisdom, that collective intelligence that has been built for hundreds of thousands of years. Our brain is the latest and best version of it. We have to learn how to use it, rather than our brain using us.