How to use your PAWs to overcome obstacles

I recently read The Obstacle is the Way. I felt the message of the book was timely, not just because of what we as a global society are currently facing, but also in terms of the obstacles I’m facing in my own life and career. The central message that Ryan Holiday espouses in this book is summarised by Marcus Aurelius nearly 2000 years ago: “The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.”

This thing in front of you. This obstacle blocking you from moving forward. This issue that feels insurmountable. This unexpected problem that is preventing you from doing what you want to do. The thing you dread or secretly hope won’t happen. What if it isn’t so bad? What if it is the greatest gift from the universe and it’s exactly what you need to advance your most important goal or become the person you want to become?

The book draws its inspiration from Stoicism, the ancient Greek philosophy of enduring pain or adversity with perseverance and resilience. Stoics focus on the things they can control, let go of everything else, and turn every new obstacle into an opportunity to get better, stronger, and tougher and to advance their most important goals.

Holiday offers a three-step process to overcoming obstacles. These steps can be effectively summarised in the acronym: PAW:

P = Perception

A = Action

W = Will

Let’s look at how we can apply each of these steps practically to turn obstacles or challenges into opportunities.

Perception

Perception refers to the way external sensory information is organised, interpreted, and consciously experienced. In simpler terms, it’s how you see the world. Perception is affected by our personalities, our culture and our history. Our thoughts and emotional experience influence how we perceive situations. What this means, is that we don’t see the world the way it really is, we see the world the way we are. Thus, how you are looking at the obstacle in front of you determines whether you see it as something that is insurmountable of whether it is something that might propel you forward.

Sometimes we look at a specific situation and all we see are obstacles. We feel that what we want to accomplish is impossible. When this happens, try asking yourself, what’s the gift here? Or what if this is the best thing that could have happened? Or as I mentioned in a previous article on resilience, one way that you can learn to view the world from an abundance lens instead of a scarcity lens is to change the question you ask yourself when faced with a challenge or difficult situation. Instead of wondering why this is happening to you, instead ask “How or why is this happening for me?”. By reframing your thinking into noticing how this challenge, setback or frustration could potentially be happening for you, you turn it into an opportunity to learn something or grow something inside yourself. This feels much more empowering, because it’s not happening to you, so you don’t have to see yourself as a victim of the circumstances.

Focusing on answering these types of questions, helps you shift your perception and places you in the role of owner or author in your life, instead of the victim of your circumstances. It’s another way of focusing on what you can control versus what you can’t control, which is something I discussed in more detail in my article The Value of Stoic Principles in Times of Crisis.

The secret behind changing your perception, has a lot to do with incorporating the three C’s of resilience. View the problem as a challenge or an opportunity, remind yourself of what you are deeply committed to and strive to prioritise your most important commitments, seek support from your network, and focus on what you can control as opposed to wasting valuable time and energy worrying about things that are simply not in your control.

Action

Once you have reframed the situation to view it as an opportunity instead of a threat, it’s important to take action; not any kind of action but directed action or purposeful action. According to Holiday, it’s important to always keep moving. He believes that often courage is the simple process of taking action.

However, I do want to insert a caveat here. Mindless action won’t do. Often, the behaviours we choose to engage in, are simply ways we choose to “numb” so that we don’t have to focus on the problem. Watching hours of mindless TV, or surfing the net aimlessly, or overeating, or drinking, smoking, over-exercising, whatever your choice of numbing might be, will not serve you in overcoming this obstacle. In fact, it keeps you stuck, avoiding the obstacle until the obstacle starts to feel insurmountable. What started out as small hump then becomes a mountain.

To ensure that your actions are directed and purposeful, there is value in spending some time exploring what the challenging situation is calling you to face in your life. What are you meant to learn, do or grow from this situation? Who would you like to become because of this challenge? How would you like to change your life? If there is no way around this obstacle and you simply had to go through it, who do you want to be while you are going through it? Answering these types of questions helps you clarify purposeful action.

Holiday, advises that when it comes to taking action, it’s important that you don’t simply focus on the end goal or the final outcome. In overcoming obstacles or challenging situations, the process is actually more important than the end goal. In fact, sometimes focusing too much on the final outcome gets us stuck. It feels impossible or overwhelming, so we stay stuck where we are fretting about finding the “best” way or the “right” way instead of taking the first step. The hardest step is the first one. No matter how small that first step is, just take it and then concentrate on taking the next one.

To be physically and mentally loose takes no talent. That’s just recklessness. We want right action. To be physically and mentally tight is called anxiety. It doesn’t work well either. Eventually we snap. But physical looseness combined with mental strength, that is powerful. It means we are willing to be flexible in the moment, while having crystal clear clarity on what we want to accomplish on our journey.

Climbing a mountain requires mental clarity on two things. Firstly, which mountain do you want to climb? That’s equivalent to asking what do I want to learn or grow about myself? Who do I want to be after overcoming this challenge? Secondly, climbing a mountain requires focusing on each step in front of you. It takes time to get to the top and it doesn’t happen in leaps in bounds. It happens by taking one step at a time and ensuring that while you are taking the next step, you are putting all your mental, emotional, and physical energy into taking the next step. By simply concentrating on what’s in front of you, you avoid becoming overwhelmed by the prospect of climbing the whole mountain, and step by step, you end up climbing the whole mountain without it feeling impossible. Before you know it, you reach the summit and the view is spectacular.

Of course while climbing the mountain, you might not be able to imagine what the view from the top will look like, but if you spent time identifying the right mountain, then it doesn’t matter what route you take up the mountain or how long it takes you to climb the mountain, because you know the summit will be worth every step to the top.  It’s when we are climbing the wrong mountain or worrying about the 100 steps ahead of the one we are taking now, that we become frustrated, overwhelmed or completely debilitated. Just follow the process and focus on the single next step in front of you. The direction is always the same – forward. That’s all you need to know to avoid getting stuck. Take the next step forward.

Sometimes the next step might not feel like it’s taking you forward. It might be such a small step, that it feels insignificant. However, it’s important to keep in mind that every single step is important – no matter how small. Sometimes those steps that feel like invisible progress, end up being the most important pre-steps to a bigger step further along the way.

We don’t start the journey knowing exactly how things will turn out. We simply start by getting into action. And then we stay conscious to the process by focusing on the now. By doing that, we engage our minds in free flow thinking and in noticing how the path is unfolding. This enables us to know when to change direction or add a step not previously considered. It’s not necessary to know the exact path or have a precise map to get to the top of the mountain. All you need is clarity on the summit/bigger dream or vision and the willingness to take the next step, even when the fear imbedded in that next step feels impossible to overcome.

Susan David reminds us that courage is not about being fearless. It’s about knowing we are afraid, but still deciding to act and take the next step. Courage is knowing what matters most to you and holding those values as guideposts to determine the next step on the journey. “Courage is not the absence of fear. It’s fear walking.”

Will

According to Holiday, will is the power to overcome and to move forward. If action is what we do when we still have agency over the situation, then will is what we do when agency has all but disappeared. People often think will is how badly we want something, but Holiday postulates that will has a lot more to do with surrender than with strength. True will is quiet humility, resilience and flexibility. It’s recognising that we cannot control everything and that even when we have the best intentions, things might not work out the way we had hoped. Will is the commitment and the willingness to keep holding on to the dream, even when things don’t go according to plan. It’s the resilience to adapt, to change course, to try something new we haven’t considered, all in the name of moving forward – even in the smallest possible way.

Nobody is born with a steel backbone. We must forge it ourselves. Holiday explains the Latin phrase “Mens sana in corpore sano” which usually translates as “a healthy mind in a healthy body“.  Holiday believes that we craft our spiritual strength through physical exercise and our physical hardiness through mental practice. What this means practically, is that we must find time to take care of our physical bodies. Honouring our physical bodies through adequate sleep, nutrition and exercise, means we build the strength and energy to overcome difficult circumstances. When faced with adversity, when we are physically healthy, we also have greater mental clarity. A strong body, cultivates a healthy and resilient mind.

Holiday encourages us to build our inner Citadel – i.e. your inner core strengths to face challenging times. He recommends a more proactive approach to dealing with challenges; something he calls doing a “pre-mortem as opposed to post-mortem”. What this means is that you anticipate change and how you might react to it instead of waiting for disaster to strike and then having to evaluate afterwards what went wrong and how you could have handled things differently. Thus, being proactive seems to be critical in overcoming challenges or obstacles. Another advocate of being proactive in life, was Stephen Covey, who suggested that being proactive is the very first habit you should cultivate if you endeavour to become more effective in life and work.

Being proactive also means identifying your big rocks – i.e. those things in life that matter most to you or that give your life meaning – and consequently investing time and energy on those big rocks, BEFORE you need them in challenging situations. Things like our physical health, our personal growth and learning, the important relationships in our lives and our support network, our financial resources etc. We know these things are important, but we often neglect to spend sufficient time on them, until a crisis hits and one of these core rocks become threatened. Then, we end up reacting to life and the circumstances that are threatening our big rocks, instead of being able to respond proactively in advance.

One way we can proactively anticipate and plan for setbacks and challenges and consequently strengthen our conscious will to create the life we want, is through a process called fear setting. Fear setting is beautifully described and illustrated by Tim Ferris in his TED Talk Why You Should Define Your Fears instead of Your Goals, and describes identifying your biggest fears around taking a specific action and then planning in advance how you will deal with problems that arise along the way. You can spend time identifying proactively what steps you could take to prevent the problem from arising and how you would repair any damage if the problem does arise. He also encourages you to explore what the benefits of the specific action would be and how taking the specific action might serve you. Part of this is considering the cost of inaction or inactivity over the long run, i.e. six months from now, one year from now and three years from now.

Often when we do fear setting, we realise that the cost of inaction and staying stuck where we are is so much greater than the benefit of moving forward, even if there are risks involved in moving forward. It’s the difference between a default future and a consciously created future. In the default future, we let life and events decide where we end up and we become a victim of our circumstances. In a consciously created future, we decide where we end up and how we would like to get there. We create the life we want by taking calculated and focused action, instead of staying stuck in fear.

Regardless of whether we take action or not, the future will arrive. Taking action might feel overwhelmingly terrifying, but compared to just letting life happen to you, it’s not nearly as scary as ending up at some default future that was not of your choosing.

By choosing your actions and setting the intention to prioritise what’s most important to you, you influence the outcome of your actions, even though you might still not know what the final destination will look like. In other words, you choose the mountain you want to climb, instead of climbing a mountain that was thrusted upon you and then getting to the top of that mountain, only to see the mountain you wanted to climb in the distance and realising you could have chosen differently.

Apart from fear setting, another valuable skill to cultivate will, is to learn the art of acquiescence. There is always something or someone that could change the plan. This idea is captured in sayings like: “Man proposes. God disposes”.  Or “as fate would have it”.  Or Murphy’s Law that states that: “Anything that can go wrong will go wrong“. Choose the version you prefer. If we have really considered what the gift in a specific situation is, we’ve taken focused and intentional action despite feeling the fear, and we have committed to choosing the mountain we want to climb. Even after investing in our big rocks and staying focused on the step right in front of us, life might still throw us with curve balls. The will to continue is about taking life at face value and surrendering to what we cannot actively control or mitigate. It’s to “play it where it lies“, as a golfer would say. The way life IS, gives you something to work with, if you are willing to be with it; to notice the gift or the lesson in any situation.

There is a lovely quote from Nietzsche that explains the real meaning of acquiescence:

“My formula for what is great in mankind is amor fati: not to wish for anything other than that which is; whether behind, ahead, or for all eternity. Not just to put up with the inevitable – much less to hide it from oneself, for all idealism is lying to oneself in the face of the necessary – but to love it.”

The lesson in this ancient saying of “amor fati”, is that if you can learn to love whatever happens, you will find your way through any difficult situation. However, there is a big difference between acceptance and indifference. Acquiescence is not indifference. It’s recognising that you cannot control everything, and sometimes the gift is in accepting what IS, instead of resisting it. Sometimes what we don’t want ends up shaping our lives and helping us grown in ways we could never have imagined.

References:

1. Breytenbach, C. (2020). The value of Stoic principles in times of crisis. Available online at: https://chantalbreytenbach.com/value_of_stoic_principles_in_times_of_crisis/
2. Breytenbach, C. (2020). Slowing down to the speed of life. Available online at: https://chantalbreytenbach.com/slowing_down_to_the_speed_of_life/
3. Breytenbach, C. (2020). Being like the bamboo: Cultivating resilience. Available online at: https://chantalbreytenbach.com/being_like_the_bamboo/
4. Covey, S. R. (2004). The seven habits of highly effective people. London: Simon & Schuster.
5. David, S. (2016). Emotional Agility: Get unstuck, embrace change, and thrive in work and life. New York: Penguin Random House.
6. Ferris, T. (2017). Why You Should Define Your Fears instead of Your Goals. Available online at: https://www.ted.com/talks/tim_ferriss_why_you_should_define_your_fears_instead_of_your_goals?language=en#t-3186
7. Holiday, R. (2014). The Obstacle Is the Way: The Timeless Art of Turning Trials into Triumph. New York: Penguin Group.