When the Going Gets Tough: Engagement Strategies

I am often asked about the mindset of high achievers when confronted with tremendous internal obstacles. Specifically, what strategies do high achievers employ that carries them through periods of immense personal difficulty. The difficulty could be any of the following and more:

• Extreme bouts of low self-worth. 
• Profound sense of aloneness and exile, often while being an integral part of a driven, collaborative, and team centric culture. 
• Prolonged absence of income and the mounting pressures of debts, time, and family responsibilities with no employment on the horizon.
• Total depletion of mental and emotional reserves, and a numbing indifference to consequence.

Each of these describes circumstances that require the individual to push on. To address these feelings, weights, and pressures, the following engagement strategies are particularly helpful.

• Social Engagement — During a time of personal crisis the natural tendency is to swing one of three ways: social withdrawal and isolationism, extreme social immersion and exploitation, or social concealment and the practice of camouflaging oneself in the crowd. Neither of these are helpful tactics. Instead, social engagement should take two forms. The first form is to remain socially engaged with established and healthy relationships. The key here is health relationships. Do not sabotage these types of relationships by withdrawing from them, suffocating them by being ever-present, or become codependent. The second form is to socially engage with those that are in a less fortunate condition than yourself.

  The act of helping others in need psychologically lightens the weight of your own burdens. It engenders compassion, a sense of fulfillment, and takes your eyes away from your own problems. Rather than looking inside, your eyes begin to realign with the fact that no one is an island.

• Peer Engagement — Look for brothers or sisters in arms. Such people are not drinking buddies but individuals that empathize and support you through your difficulties. They are willing to emotionally and rationally walk beside you through your battle. Notably, the quality and personality of these kind of people can be hard to find. That is why peer engagement needs to be nurtured over time. Ideally, peer relationships are developed over long periods of time—long before you may experience a difficulty of this caliber.

  However, you should not expect that this kind of peer support can be filled by many. Be very grateful for having one such peer and be ecstatic should you find three. And if you believe that you have more than three peers of this caliber, carefully reexamine your standards of acceptable peer engagement. You may discover that your criteria is not as robust as you need.

• Coach Engagement — Having peer engagement is helpful for peer accountability and emotional support. But a coach can be an effective agent of necessary change in your life. The principles of coaching equally apply to top athletes and individuals in periods of immense personal difficulties. One of the key principles of coaching is that one must voluntarily give authority to the coach. In other words, what the coach says goes. A coach is tasked with driving you toward victory without getting stuck in the uncomfortable moment. A coach is therefore able speak truth into your life so that you can confront yourself with unvarnished eyes and take guided action to overcome what you did not otherwise perceive. Furthermore, a good coach will not permit you to wallow in despair but will drive you to grow despite the difficulty.

  Finding a good coach can be daunting, that is why such a task ought to be done before a crisis. Also, a good coach is not necessarily a professional coach. A good coach is one that is willing to invest their time and energy in you, can synthesize the complexities of life with brevity, and inspires your respect to such a degree that you are willing to submit yourself to their leadership.

• Spiritual Engagement — The final strategy is to remember your ultimate value and eternal meaningfulness. God, the author and creator of heaven and earth, is over all things and sustains all things. He is the God who made humanity in His image and, despite sin, paved the way of redemption through salvation in Christ. The God who made humanity and who sent His only begotten Son for humanity is worthy of all praise. He has a plan for you, and that plan entails accepting His Son’s life and death on the cross so that you may have eternal life; and eternal life equals eternal worth. For this reason, the extreme difficulties of today do not measure to the eternal glory that awaits in heaven. This spiritual engagement involves first acknowledging Jesus Christ as Lord of all and praying for the peace of His presence in your daily life. “And the peace of God, which surpasses all comprehension, shall guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus” (Phil 4:7 NASB).

  The necessity of spiritual engagement cannot be understated. An upward facing soul can weather what a downward or forward-facing soul cannot endure. By seeking God’s direct engagement with your life, the mind and heart can draw on the strength that is greater than our own and more reliable than the best our social network can be. Spiritual engagement enables resiliency through the most difficult of circumstances.

The strategy for victory through the most difficult of times involves hierarchical realignment. It involves socially engaging with others in need and helping them through their circumstances; enlisting a few peers of like mind that will walk with you through the battle; submitting yourself to a coach to objectively steer your path through the storm; and spiritually depending on God for deliverance while recognizing that you are eternally worth more than you can possibly imagine.

When the going gets unbearably tough, high achievers hierarchically realign themselves by reaching down to help others stand, reaching out to lean on a peer’s shoulder, reaching forward toward the coach’s commanding voice, and reaching up to receive God’s assurance.