How to Emerge a Winner From a Major Life Crisis

A major life crisis shatters some people, yet others emerge stronger and healthier as if they had discovered a new person within. Everyone’s life circumstances are unique to a great degree but how they react to these crises vary from person to person. If you look at people who have emerged renewed from major life crises, you would notice four qualities or skills in them. Conversely in people who are crushed by life crises you would notice the absence of one or more skills. The first of these life crises surviving skills is:

Ability to Find Meaning

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The ability to find meaning answers the question “Why?”

How does an individual find meaning for suffering or misery when life seems incomprehensible and fragmented?

You need to frame your present situation in the wider context of your entire life path. Reflect on the events of your life. This gives you perspective. You see that others have misfortunes and trials also. Your misfortunes could have been much worse. Surely, you must have some good memory of success or good achievement. With this perspective, you get an ability to identify your strengths. Then you need to adjust your expectations to better suit your abilities and opportunities. If you can, you are then ready to exploit them better in new ways and assume new roles for yourself.

Resilience

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The skill of resilience answers the “How” question. This is the motivation part, the “Why bother” aspect.

You accept difficulties as signals for your growth rather than punishment. Resilience is your ability to see the bigger picture and anchor yourself to a higher plateau of possibilities. You need to see that in order to gain something valuable you need to invest in a lot of effort. You need to make compromises, defer instant gratification. People who can manage to leverage their unique qualities and characteristics achieve success because of this ability to sublimate desire without repression.

The marshmallow experiment is a famous test of this concept conducted by Walter Mischel at Stanford University in the 1960s. A group of four-year olds were tested by being given a marshmallow and promised another, only if they could wait 20 minutes before eating the first one. Some children could wait, and others could not. The researchers then followed the progress of each child into adolescence, and showed that those children with the ability to wait were better adjusted and more successful (determined via surveys of their parents and teachers), and scored an average of 210 points higher on the Scholastic Aptitude Test or SAT.