Opportunity Can Undercut Your Winning Recipe And Neutralize Disaster

WHEN YOU WERE a child, you decided that you were not extroverted enough to succeed in the world. So you created a winning recipe to help you cope.  Now the recipe allows you to hide inside a socially acceptable way to be – coachable, focused, good, open, or significant. Or any of the thousands of other ways introverts try to be to gain success.  For example, my recipe is to be process-driven by building step by step procedures to cope with life.

In the last four posts we talked about finding solutions outside of your winning recipe to deal with grief.  Here we will switch gears and discuss ways to avoid relying on your recipe to overcome a disaster.

Catastrophes tend to be shocking, unexpected events that in the moment are overwhelming.  Dealing with them requires great flexibility, something your recipe is terrible at. It has only a single solution for whatever you encounter. It simply wants for you to be the way it has always urged you to be to minimize disruption.  Almost always it operates on automatic pilot, a feature that may have created the disaster in the first place.

That happened to me in 1992, when I was 49 and my automatic-pilot recipe led me into bankruptcy.

How I Discovered The Opportunity Solution

NINE YEARS EARLIER I married a wonderful woman named Sandy.  It was a second marriage for both of us, one in which we knew we had at last met the loves of our lives. 

While the relationship was awesome, our financial situation was always precarious.  My winning recipe drove me to pursue step by step processes in one entrepreneurial venture after another.  I did consulting in sleep reduction for executives, wrote mail-order computer manuals for software developers, and sold air and water filters via multi-level marketing. 

By 1992 we were seriously in arrears on our income taxes and faced the certainty that the IRS would soon foreclose on our house.  The only way out was personal bankruptcy, which in May of that year we filed in Miami Federal Court. 

We endured the humiliation, embarrassment, and devastation of it by prioritizing our relationship above all else.  I heard frenzied calls from my winning recipe to focus on some new process to get us out of financial trouble regardless of what it might do to our relationship. But I ignored those demands and thereby avoided the very thing that had ended my first marriage – giving in to similar calls years earlier. 

Sandy and I faced the future together, turning the bankruptcy into an opportunity – for the first time ever we resolved to remain debt-free.  First we had to pay our creditors, but the bankruptcy would buy us the time to do that.  Within a year we started pulling ourselves out of the deep hole we were in. 

The solution to the disaster was not continued reliance on the recipe.  Instead it was our commitment to never again take on debt, and we have adhered to it ever since.  We could not control our thoughts or our feelings.  But we could and did control our commitment to each other and to always remaining financially solvent.

Unpacking The Opportunity Solution

AS A FOUR-YEAR-OLD I began to design my winning recipe to do only one thing: to make me feel safer by insulating me from the emotional disruptions of an extroverted world.  It told me to win by being process-driven instead of by being an introvert.

When the bankruptcy disaster struck, the approach of the recipe was worse than useless.  If I had followed it, it would have damaged and perhaps destroyed my relationship with the most powerful ally I had – my wonderful wife Sandy.

Her counsel, her flexibility, the sustaining intensity of her love, and above all her wholehearted agreement to stay away from debt got us through the worst days.  It led directly to the healthy financial life that we have had ever since.

How To Use A New Prospect To Overcome A Disaster

A DISASTER TENDS to provoke the worst possible response from your winning recipe: it yells at you at the very time when it should be quiet. It insists that now more than ever you should follow the prescription it has always given you to cope with the world.  Never mind that such an Rx may have been precisely the thing that created the catastrophe in the first place.

Step 1. Call your recipe out.  The recipe operates so far in the background that you may not even be aware that you are running it.  As soon as a disaster strikes, stop to remember what your recipe consists of (to recall how to identify it, see Post #1).  Also notice what it says that you simply must do now. Ignore that and hold off.  Remember that you are not your recipe, you are the person who has the recipe.

Step 2. Transform the disaster into an opportunity.  To do this look for what might be good about the calamity that just happened. How can you use it?  No matter how bad it is, there is likely to be a kernel of positivity in it somewhere that you can use in order to draw on your strengths as an introvert. 

Here are some of the questions you might ask yourself about the disaster:

• What actions does it free you from having to take?
• Which new things does it require you to learn?
• What one-on-one relationships does it allow you to deepen?
• In what ways does it require deep focus and concentration?
• What listening, thinking and writing does it oblige you to perform?

Step 3. Act on the opportunity.  Instead of following your impulse, which is to give in to the urgings of your winning recipe, stop and instead follow the glimmer of hope that emerged in Step 2. Progress may be slow. But this can be a chance to break from the past in a significant way, and now is a good time to take advantage of it.

I Invite You To Turn Your Disaster Into An Opportunity Today

• What benefit lurked deep within your disaster?  How did you use it?  If you would like us to consider sharing your story with The Satisfied Introvert community anonymously, please email it to me at thesatisfiedintrovert@gmail.com.
• How can I help you to find opportunity in your disaster? Please go to the Contact page and enter your name, email, and questions. I cannot answer everyone but will do my best – especially if the answer could benefit others.
• To be notified of new posts to The Satisfied Introvert blog, please go to the Subscribe section at the bottom of this post and enter your name and email.  Under no circumstances will we share your information without your express permission. A new post appears every two weeks.  Coming up next: “Completions Can Weaken Your Winning Recipe And Offset Disaster.” If a particular post does not apply to you, future ones most likely will!

Welcome to the consolation that comes from

finding something positive in a disaster,

and the joy that can emerge when

you act on what you found

© 2022 The Satisfied Introvert LLC