Adversity

I’ve heard it all my life; “how someone deals with adversity says a lot about that individual.”  Sometimes I wonder what that really means, but each of us confronts adversity in our own way, and there is no simple way to capture that old adage with absolute clarity.  We deal with life based on our own experiences, our training, and the foundations we developed as children.

It would seem a wonderful utopia if we didn’t have adversity in our lives, but then what kind life would it be - really?  We are whom we are, not from the simple successes we have, but from the failures and defeats we have picked ourselves up from and continued to move forward.

We either gain resiliency or we don’t.  If we don’t then each success is dismissed as happenstance and each failure is magnified.  If we allow the adversity that is a normal part of our lives to become a dominating center than I think we inevitably fall into the pool of self-pity.

 Today, I sat in on a review of a flight test program that has been going on for a year.  The contractor promises great things and routinely fails to deliver on those promises.  We’ve reached a point where we have to decide what to do.  To her credit, the program manager of this project stood up and called for a suspension to the flight test program, but she was in a position where she had few options.  Over the next month she will struggle with how to salvage a program that is already a year behind schedule and millions of dollars over the original estimates.  It will be a great challenge for her and her team, but she is a strong woman and I think she will come through with good decisions, but choices made earlier in the program will subject her to senior leader reviews that will question every decision she and her team have made.  This next month will be a stressful time for her.