Managing Adversity with Reach and Endurance

Life by Design

Jessilyn and Brian Persson introduce part two of their discussion on adversity. Based on CORE, originally created by Paul Stoltz, part one focused on the C and the O, Control and Ownership. This episode explores the R and the E, Reach and Endurance. How far does the adversity reach into our lives and how long is it going to endure? And how do we recognize and make peace with that?

Adversity is a big topic and CORE explains how impactful it can be while also introducing ways of facing it that allow for handling it to the best of our abilities. Jessilyn and Brian explain that the reach adversity has will flow through us, into our partners, into our children, and into our larger families if we are not careful. It can endure for years if we let bitterness take hold and we don’t assess it. They each share examples of large adversity from previous work that led to burnout and health stress within families to demonstrate how reach and endurance creep into daily life. But they also describe how they embraced personal growth, a different mentality, to get around the bitterness to stop the adversity’s continued existence. This is a valuable second part to pair with the first as a guide to dealing with adversity.

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Transcript

Jessilyn Persson: [00:00:09] Welcome to the Life By Design podcast with your host Jessilyn and Brian Persson. We work with professional couples to help resolve conflict and elevate communication within their relationship.

Brian Persson: [00:00:19] We are the creators of the Discover Define Design framework, which supports you in resolving conflict and communicating better.

Jessilyn Persson: [00:00:26] This episode we're going to talk about adversity part two of CORE, originally created by Paul Stoltz. Our last episode, we focused on the C and the O, which is control and ownership. And we went into unpredictability. This week we're going to go into the R and the E, which is reach and endurance, and we're going to wrap that one up talking about when you're up to big things, it can cause big adversity.

Brian Persson: [00:00:51] Yeah. Reach and Endurance. The way I like to think about reach and endurance versus control and ownership is control and ownership is you can be proactive with it. You know where your control and where your ownership lies. But with reach and endurance, I find for most people it tends to be a lot slipperier. You don't notice it as much, it just kind of as it says, reaches out and grabs on to things. The adversity kind of gets you and the endurance just keeps going and you don't really notice it.

Jessilyn Persson: [00:01:23] Yeah, no, that's a good way, good way to put it. So when we're saying reach like it's one thing to impact you, but the reach we're talking about here is when it rolls into your partner, your children, your work, wherever it's going to reach and it creeps in there. And then endurance is more like, how's it impacting you long term? If you don't like, wrap it up and let it go in a sufficient time manner?

Brian Persson: [00:01:46] Yeah. Reach is like, you know, the waves of a pond, right? It starts with you, goes to your partner, goes to your kids, goes to your family, your extended family, keeps on traveling. How far is that reach of that adversity and the impact that it made to you? How far is it going?

Jessilyn Persson: [00:02:03] Yeah. So when we're talking about reach here, we are looking at situations that reach into other areas of your work, your life. And to what extent does the adversity extend beyond the situation at hand. So we have a great story where your old position as an employee, how adversity struck and how we let it go further than it maybe should have.

Brian Persson: [00:02:29] Yeah, I think it's a common aspect of most careers and most professionals.

Jessilyn Persson: [00:02:34] Yeah.

Brian Persson: [00:02:35] And most anybody who has a job. Like that job on average takes up 40 hours of your week. That's a large chunk of time where, you know, you can't do your groceries, you can't do your cleaning, you can't do all these other things that you need to do. And then stuff happens at work, too.

Jessilyn Persson: [00:02:54] Yeah.

Brian Persson: [00:02:54] And now you have this situation where you're stressed out at work, you're stressed out because you got a life to live as well, and all of a sudden that stress at work starts coming home, starts affecting your relationship with your kids, maybe you treat them differently. Definitely a lot of relationships we see, the partners are treated differently for sure. And yeah, totally happened to me. 100%. I was at a company, employed, and I kind of just allowed the things that happened in that company and the stresses and the frustrations that I was experiencing come home and it looked like making excuses as to why I had to work late, when probably I really didn't. And I was actually just more stressed about what was going on than actually needing to work. And then, of course, that affects my partner, Jess. You.

Jessilyn Persson: [00:03:50] Yeah. Yeah.

Brian Persson: [00:03:51] And then it just, it can snowball from there. So it went, the reach of the adversity at work went way beyond work. It trickled into everything. And you need to compartmentalize that. And I didn't know that at that time.

Jessilyn Persson: [00:04:07] Yeah. No I didn't either, obviously. Otherwise, I might try to pull you out of it. But, just kidding. I say that knowing I've done it too, like I had a contract I was working on, and I remember it was too much. It was way too much. And I was doing it. And when I look back at that year that I did it, I don't remember a lot of what our kids did. They went bowling for the first time, and I didn't even know it happened until months later. Like that's how far out of reality I was with my home life, because I was so busy with my work and then talk about reach and endurance doing that long enough, it's what caused me to have burnout.

Brian Persson: [00:04:49] Yeah, you literally collapsed.

Jessilyn Persson: [00:04:50] I literally collapsed and I couldn't leave the house for almost two months. I was so sick. And of course, that had reach. Because now you're fully responsible for the kids and you're helping me try to get better and I'm trying to figure out what's going on. But to think of where that actually stemmed from, like it was months, even maybe years past, and it just reach and it just kept on enduring because we didn't understand how to really manage it.

Brian Persson: [00:05:17] Yeah, yeah. And in my position and my emp...