5 Ways to Easily Turn Adversity into an Advantage

Things That Will Help Make a Difficult Situation a New Opportunity

6 min readApr 9, 2019

To continually reach new levels of success, we must know how to easily turn adversity into an advantage.

Throughout our lives, we’ll experience more challenges, adversities and struggles than successes. Knowing how to turn adversity into an advantage will help us:

Stay focused on what we want.
Maintain our confidence and motivation levels.
Have a healthy mental attitude.
Appreciate any progress we make.
Enjoy the journey we’re on.

The ability to turn adversity into an advantage is a quality successful people have. It’s a quality that can be developed.

In the book, “Think and Grow Rich,” in the chapter on “Desire,” Napoleon Hill wrote, “Every adversity brings with it the seed of an equivalent advantage.”

Recognising there is an advantage whenever we’re experiencing adversity is the mindset we must develop.

Common Adversities People Face

Most of our struggles in life fall into one of these three categories: health, relationships and money. The common adversities we face include:

Loss of a loved one.
End of a relationship.
Financial loss or struggles.
Health issue.
Loss of a job.
Experiencing failure.

When we learn how to turn adversity into an advantage, we’ll continue to make progress toward what we want.

Recently, I lost two members from my virtual team. One member moved to a new country and couldn’t work in the short-term. Another member wanted to focus more on her priorities, without the added responsibility of working for me.

This created an extra ten hours of work as I had to cover the tasks they were doing. This was a new challenge I had to deal with.

As every adversity can be turned into an advantage, I asked myself, “What’s the opportunity in this situation?”

A few things I had to consider included:

Managing my priorities and tasks better.
Using technology to systematise and automate processes.
Whether to add another member to my team straight away.

I hadn’t been project managing myself effectively, which meant I had to change how I was working. I introduced a new project and task management tool to keep track of what needs to be done. This has improved my ability to focus on my highest priorities, while ensuring tasks gets done on time.

I’m also using more automation tools that has eliminated many repetitive tasks either my team or I did. This has allowed me to free about five hours every week.

Another advantage was I found a service that placed university students as interns. These students are looking for work experience and can work as interns for a short period. This has led to the addition of an intern into my team. While they’re gaining experience, they’re also helping ease my workload, which is a win-win situation.

By looking at my situation, I turned that adversity into an advantage. This means I don’t have to struggle through my situation.

5 Things You Can Do to Easily Turn Adversity into an Advantage

There are things we can do to train ourselves to look at our situations as opportunities. Here are five things you can do whenever you’re facing an adversity, so you can turn it into an advantage.

Look at your current situation from the future. The best thing we can do first is to pause and reflect. One technique is to put ourselves in the future and look at our situation from there. If we were to look at our current situation three years from now, how would we view it? This process of contemplation will help us see things from different perspectives.
Ask better questions. The quality of our experiences depends on the quality of questions we ask. When we ask better questions, we’ll receive better answers. Questions can include, “What does this situation make possible now?” or “What’s the opportunity in this?”
Clarify where you’re heading. Whenever we experience an adversity, it’s a good time to revisit our goals and priorities. Sometimes, an adversity can be a reminder to slow down and evaluate whether we’re on the right track or not. If we’re not on track, we can take corrective actions.
Get more resourceful. This may involve looking at how we’re doing things. If we’re facing an adversity, it could mean there are things we have to learn and do. It can lead to the introduction of tools and resources that will help us get to where we’re heading.
Engage the help of others. We don’t have to go through our adversity on our own, if we don’t want to. Help is available if we ask for it. Part of becoming more resourceful is leveraging the skills, strengths and abilities of other people. When we do, we can focus more on what we’re good at.

Mantras or Mindsets to Turn Adversity into an Advantage

Conditioning ourselves to look at our adversities as advantages is a mindset. Here are a few mindsets to remind us to look for opportunities whenever we’re facing adversities.

Adversity is my advantage.
Adversity is temporary and shall pass.
Adversity is teaching me something I need to learn.
Adversity is a chance for me to stop and reflect.
Adversity will show me the way.

Conclusion

Despite how challenging a situation may be, if we train ourselves to look for an advantage, we’ll find one. Our job is to not let our adversities defeat us. Instead, we can use them as fuel to create better results.

Action Step: For an adversity you’re facing, stop and reflect on what’s going on for you. If you were to look at your situation three years from now, how would you view it? And what would you do differently? This process of contemplation will offer you solutions to your current situation.

Question: What are more ways to easily turn adversity into an advantage?