As the waves of uncertainty come rolling in, many people feel the immense pressure and sacred responsibility to keep everyone's heads above water. Although the highs and lows are what it feels like to be human, navigating the waves can at times leave us wondering if we’ll be able to stay afloat or if this will be the one that will take us under. The specifics of the adversity will look differently in each of our lives, but the chances of experiencing some sort of “big one” is 100%.
Hope prevails, however, in knowing that building true strategy through adversity is possible. Even completely remaking your life in a relatively short period of time is possible. I know, because I’ve done it. It wasn’t that long ago that I found myself sitting on the floor, on carpet that smelled like wet dog. I had just moved back into a run-down condo, a newly single mother of four little ones, with no job, no corporate work experience, no access to my money, and no idea where to even begin. As I thought about all that was ahead, the weight of that moment felt almost crushing as you can imagine, and likely know personally with scenes from your own story.
But little by little, I began to rebuild. Although terrified, I pitched myself into my first corporate job. A little while later, I bought my very first car, then my first home and have since launched a company. I’m here to tell you that whatever you are going through at this moment, with a few strategic steps, your hardships can be the invitation to your greatest opportunity. “When the Japanese mend broken objects, they aggrandize the damage by filling the cracks with gold. They believe that when something’s suffered damage and has a history, it becomes more beautiful.” Written by Barbar Bloom, these words first allowed me to shift the way I viewed myself and my situation, and were a beginning cornerstone to the new way I interacted with the world. Now I know there is no wisdom gained, no strength built, no maturity grown without walking through hardship. It's the only way to get there.
The fundamental key to preparing for and navigating a crisis is learning how to build strategy through adversity, both preemptively and in real time. How do we do this? It begins with three things. First we must shift our perspective of hardship itself, understanding that the opportunity to be in a better position on the other side is alive and well within the trial. We can utilize our hardship as the potential catalyst to our greatest strength. When researchers began to study crisis and trauma, they thought that people came back in one of two ways - debilitating anxiety and depression, or bouncing back. However, when they began to look into this, they realized that there was a third option - some people not only bounced back, but utilized the hardship to bounce forward. They called this forward movement, Post Traumatic Growth.
Once our new perspective is established, we must own our agency. Yes, our hardships can be redeemed, but we are the ones who must take full ownership of building our lives forward. If we are holding anyone else responsible, we lose this power. We have to begin to trust that inner knowing, for we are the only ones who can see the full picture of where we want to go. We must also build our bravery muscle and keep walking forward, even if we are afraid. Just as the physical muscles in our body grow stronger through exposure to resistance, so too our bravery muscle becomes more powerful every time we choose to move forward despite our fear.
Thirdly, we must practice strategic foresight and fire up our imagination to vividly create the world we’d like to see. We can do this by simply asking the question, “What is the most beautiful life I can imagine?” Starting here pushes past any self-limiting beliefs and raises the plot point we begin shooting for each day.
From here, we check our mindset. We must first be aware of the thoughts in our head. Mindfulness and meditation are about slowing down enough to gain an awareness of the thoughts that are driving us. Like lenses through which we view the world, our beliefs lead our thoughts, which affect our feelings and ultimately our behavior. Right now, take out a piece of paper and divide it into several quadrants. Label each with the main buckets of your life - career, love, body, home, etc. Now get really quiet with yourself and listen to the thoughts that you hear about yourself or your life in each of the areas and write them down. It's okay if they are not the friendliest. Now turn the page, and start in the same way, writing out each of the quadrants. However, this time, write what you would like to see, in the following framework - “I am so grateful that…” and finish the sentence with what you wish was true. For example, in the home area you may write, “I am so grateful I live on and around the water.” Or in the love area, you may write, “I am so grateful that I have a partner that brings out the best in me.”
The final step is to set up the daily and weekly systems that support the results you’d like to see to increase your physical, relationship and financial health and get you closer to those preemptive gratitudes (PGs). The magic really happens when you practice a consistent revisiting of the PGs, acknowledging the micro steps towards their completing and finally checking them off once you’ve made them come true.
We are the captains of our own ships. Our homes, our work environments, our bodies, our relationships. As captains, the entire ship benefits if we offer a plan and the proper support to strategically navigate adversity, so that we may not only be prepared for crisis, but flourish through it.
Kimberly Stark is the CEO and founder of The Flourish Consultancy, a California headquartered education group. Although graduating with a degree in psychology, Kimberly entered into adulthood and quickly noticed a gap between the conventional education taught in school and the tools we need to build a successful adult life. As a natural information curator, Kimberly became obsessed with purposefully seeking out and gathering the information needed to fill this gap. When a crisis brought her to her knees, she realized the first step in strength and wellness is understanding how to navigate and build true strategy through the adversity we are all certain to face.
Little by little, she began to apply the tools she had gathered and rebuilt her own most beautiful life in a relatively short period of time. Once she stabilized life for herself and her children, she turned her attention to helping others by curating and offering the missing education so that all may flourish.
Kimberly sought to fill this white space, taking her course to market as an employee wellness program. From the company’s perspective, the course is a benefit because the adversity their employees face has a measurable hardcost to the company as seen through attrition, absenteeism, lower productivity, etc. From the employees perspective, the Flourish masterclass adds value because it changes the trajectory of their lives for the better.
Kimberly now teaches that adversity itself is a catalyst to our greatest strength and gives clients the tools to plan and implement the change they long to see.
Flourish, her education group, provides employee wellness programs, Social Emotional Learning (SEL) for adults and educators, and CPA courses for continued education, giving each person the agency they need to redeem and redefine their hardships while creating systems that support future desired results. Kimberly’s Flourish Model ™ results in an entirely refreshed view on life. Clients are now able to remove their previous lens on how they experience the world, and specifically how they view times of trial.
Kimberly has worked with over 800 people over a wide range of verticals from school districts, to insurance companies, the hospitality industry and private clients. Her course passes along the life-impacting teachings of thought leaders such as Viktor Frankl, Steve Jobs, Dr. John Gottman, Dr. Virginia Satir, Richard Tedeschi, James Clear and Herman Kahn, to name a few. Kimberly lives on the harbor in Newport Beach, California with her four children.
