The video underscores how overcoming adversity is integral to achieving success. It emphasizes the importance of resilience, perseverance, and developing a strong sense of self-confidence in the face of challenges. The speaker invites the audience to explore the techniques and ideas that help transform failures into growth opportunities, thereby fostering personal development and empowerment.

The audience will learn valuable lessons on mental preparedness and the importance of choosing positive, constructive responses to life's inevitable challenges. Engaging with adversity with readiness and willingness is portrayed as the key to developing enduring success and true self-confidence. Historical and anecdotal examples provide a grounding to these principles, demonstrating their timeless applicability across various domains of life.

Main takeaways from the video:

Please remember to turn on the CC button to view the subtitles.

Key Vocabularies and Common Phrases:

1. adversity [ædˈvɜːrsɪti] - (noun) - Difficulties or misfortune that one faces. - Synonyms: (misfortune, hardship, calamity)

How we tackle adversity determines our eventual achievement.

2. resilience [rɪˈzɪliəns] - (noun) - The capacity to recover quickly from difficulties. - Synonyms: (tenacity, toughness, endurance)

The resilience we show defines not just our character, but also determines the direction of our success.

3. perseverance [ˌpɜːrsɪˈvɪərəns] - (noun) - Continued effort to do or achieve something despite difficulties. - Synonyms: (persistence, determination, steadfastness)

Your perseverance is the measure of your faith in yourself and your ability to succeed.

4. tenacity [təˈnæsɪti] - (noun) - The quality or fact of being very determined. - Synonyms: (persistence, perseverance, determination)

We will explore the ideas of tenacity, adaptability, and fortitude that help people to transform failures into stepping stones toward achievement.

5. indispensable [ˌɪndɪˈspɛnsəbl] - (adjective) - Absolutely necessary, essential. - Synonyms: (crucial, essential, vital)

But the second quality was harder to measure, though it was also absolutely indispensable for long term, high level success

6. adaptability [əˌdæptəˈbɪləti] - (noun) - The quality of being able to adjust to new conditions. - Synonyms: (flexibility, versatility, adjustability)

We will explore the ideas of tenacity, adaptability, and fortitude that help people to transform failures into stepping stones toward achievement.

7. fortitude [ˈfɔːrtɪˌtjuːd] - (noun) - Courage in pain or adversity. - Synonyms: (courage, bravery, endurance)

We will explore the ideas of tenacity, adaptability, and fortitude that help people to transform failures into stepping stones toward achievement.

8. triumph [ˈtraɪʌmf] - (noun) - A great victory or achievement. - Synonyms: (victory, success, conquest)

If you believe absolutely without a doubt that if you persevere long enough and hard enough, you will eventually triumph, then nothing can stop you

9. depravity [dɪˈprævɪti] - (noun) - Moral corruption; wickedness. - Synonyms: (corruption, immorality, degeneracy)

In your responses are contained all the elements of human greatness or great depravity.

10. proactive [prəʊˈæktɪv] - (adjective) - Creating or controlling a situation rather than just responding to it after it has happened. - Synonyms: (preemptive, anticipatory, making plans ahead)

You give yourself the power to turn problems into steps toward bigger goals by training your mind to be persistent, flexible, and open to learning from all experiences.

How To Overcome ADVERSITY - Brian Tracy Motivational Speech

Ladies and gentlemen, esteemed visitors. Today we address a basic principle that molds every path towards success. How we tackle adversity determines our eventual achievement. adversity always crosses our path in the search of our aims and aspirations. Obstacles, disappointments, and uncertain times that try our will and determination. The way we face these challenges, the attitude we take, the behavior we do, and the resilience we show defines not just our character, but also determines the direction of our success. These pivotal moments are when our actual potential shows itself, when we bravely, clearly, and relentlessly negotiate challenges. Come explore with me the techniques and ideas that enable us to face difficulty squarely. We will explore the ideas of tenacity, adaptability, and fortitude that help people to transform failures into stepping stones toward achievement.

Accepting obstacles as chances for personal development and education helps us to empower ourselves to come out stronger and more competent than before. Let us keep in mind as we travel this road, that hardship is a roadmap to excellence rather than a roadblock. Developing a resilient attitude and using our inner power helps us to position ourselves to produce remarkable results and motivate others to follow in line. I appreciate you being here. Let's explore the transforming potential of confronting difficulty with bravery and will, and learn the secrets to releasing our full potential and attaining long lasting success.

True self confidence comes from positive knowledge rather than positive thinking. Your job is to develop the kind of unshakable confidence in yourself that makes you an unstoppable force of nature. Your job is to take every possible step to become so positive that you become irresistible and capable of achieving any goal you set your mind to. One of the most important things you need is absolute faith in your ability to overcome any adversity that the world throws at you.

Napoleon Hill said that persistence is inherent in a man's character, just as carbon is inherent in steel. He also said that before success comes into anyone's life, they are sure to meet with many temporary defeats and possibly some failures. When defeat overtakes a person, the easiest and most logical thing to do is to quit. That is exactly what most people do in reality. Your perseverance is the measure of your faith in yourself and your ability to succeed. If you believe absolutely without a doubt that if you persevere long enough and hard enough, you will eventually triumph, then nothing can stop you. And when you build this absolute certainty within yourself, then practically anything becomes possible for you.

Robert Ringer, in his best selling book Million Dollar Habits, says that the most important of all habits leading to great achievements is what he calls the habit of reality. I choose to call this the principle of reality, and it is consistent with the experiences of men and women who have achieved greatness in almost every field. Happy and successful people are intensely realistic. They do not indulge in self deception. They face the world as it is rather than as they wish it to be, accept the unchangeable facts of life and work, and plan their activities around them. It's easy to feel good about yourself and have high levels of self confidence when everything is going well. But the true test of a man or a woman is when you can keep your head and keep functioning. When things seem to be falling apart around you and everyone else is discouraged and often blaming you.

These are the times when you really prove what you are made of. The Stanford University Business School has conducted extensive research on the qualities of a man or a woman that distinguish them as they move up to the executive suite and ultimately to the position of president and CEO. After examining dozens of qualities, they were finally able to identify two qualities that were most representative of the superior person in terms of ensuring that the organization under their control would continue to survive and thrive in a dynamic and competitive world. The first quality was the ability to perform as a member of a team and the ability to build teams to achieve common goals. But the second quality was harder to measure, though it was also absolutely indispensable for long term, high level success.

This quality was the ability to function well in a crisis, the kind of courage that is instantly available to a person who is awakened at that hour and has no time to mentally and emotionally prepare for a crisis. They called this the rarest form of courage, and in their conclusion, very few people had it. In military terms, they call this being under fire. A question that every soldier, sailor, and airman asks is how they and others will behave under fire. They know this is the ultimate test of an individual's character and training. Your self esteem and self confidence are closely tied to your deep inner feeling about your ability to be effective in the face of problems and difficulties that hit you like a punch in the solar plexus.

It's your ability to get up off the mat and keep swinging that is the true measure of what you are made of. One of my favorite poems is by Robert W. Service, and it's called the quitter. There is a verse in that poem that goes like this. You're sick of the game. Well, now, that's a shame. You're young, you're brave, and you're bright. You've had a raw deal. I know, but don't squeal. Buck up, do your damnedest and fight. It's the plugging away that will win you the day. Just summon your courage. It's easy to quit. The hard part is keeping your chin up. The quality of your entire personality is affected by how you face adversity and how well you hold your head up.

Successful and self confident people are not those who do not have problems. They are simply those who face their problems differently from the average person. BC Forbes, founder of Forbes magazine, wrote that history has demonstrated that the most notable winners usually encountered heartbreaking obstacles before they triumphed. They won because they refused to be discouraged by their defeat. And you can too. No matter how well our parents protect us while we are growing up, sooner or later we face challenges and difficulties in our relationships, our work, and our other activities. Each time we face one of these external challenges, we have the option to respond positively and constructively, or to let it overwhelm us.

If we deliberately choose to respond positively and constructively, to keep our mind calm and cool, and to effectively deal with the inevitable problem, we learn, we grow, and we become stronger. Our self confidence increases, our belief in our ability to achieve our goals grows, our self esteem rises, we form a better self image, and we become more self assured and optimistic. Every great enterprise goes through the same cycle of challenge and response. If a small business is able to cope with the inevitable setbacks and reverses it experiences, it will continue to grow and generate even greater responses. Peter Drucker once said that a business stays in business as long as it continues to make enough money to cover its mistakes.

A business consultant estimated that every three months, a small business faces a crisis that, if not responded to properly, could lead to the collapse of the company. You and I are similar to small businesses in many ways. Fortunately, our inability to respond will not lead to something as definitive as business collapse. But if for some reason we do not overcome challenges, but instead let them take over us, our self esteem and self confidence will diminish and our ability to face subsequent difficulties will decrease drastically. As I mentioned before, almost everything that happens to you is determined by your response to life. Your responses contain everything you have learned and everything you have become.

Thomas Huxley said that experience is not what happens to a man, but what a man does with what happens to him. Your life and everything around you are demonstrated in your way of reacting. It's not about what happens to you. That's why Stanford's study was quite clear when it stated that the demonstrated ability to function in a crisis is the absolute prerequisite for promotion to a higher position. In a way, what we are really talking about here is character. One of the goals of your life should be to develop your character, to become a better, finer, and stronger human being. But character development, though essential for long term happiness and well being, is not as easy as it seems at first.

You probably do everything possible to organize your life in such a way as to minimize or eliminate unexpected and generally unpleasant surprises that may occur. You use your intelligence, education, and experience to organize your life and affairs so as to avoid adversity. Whenever possible, you probably plan and prepare thoroughly in advance to ensure that everything goes well at home and at work. You take special care with your health and the well being of your family members. Almost everyone does this, except for those who are thoughtless and irresponsible. However, despite doing everything possible to avoid adversity, you experience it. adversity still comes spontaneously to you. You tend to be surprised by adversity, and it happens despite your best efforts to avoid it.

But even in the absence of adversity, you cannot develop your character. You cannot become a better person. You cannot develop resilience, perseverance, and character resolution. You cannot become the kind of person who enjoys high levels of self confidence and the feeling that you can face and master anything that comes your way. You cannot make yourself stronger without the adversity that you consciously and deliberately avoid. You cannot develop the character that is the hallmark of the mature person. Caught in this dilemma, you only have one option that you can choose in advance to rise to the occasion.

Ann Landers summed it up wonderfully with these words, expect trouble as an inevitable part of life. And when it comes, hold your head high, look it squarely in the eye and say, I will be bigger than you. You cannot defeat me. Frederick Robertson said, it is not the situation that makes the man, but the man who makes the situation. It's not what happens to you, but how you respond to what happens to you that determines your whole life. In your responses are contained all the elements of human greatness or great depravity. Men and women are simply those who have responded well when things were wrong, and the rest is history.

Doctor Abraham Selznick of Harvard is one of the few people who have ever conducted extensive research on the subject of disappointment. What he discovered when studying how different people respond to disappointment was that one could largely tell how high and how far a person was going to go in life simply by analyzing how they reacted when they faced frustration and setbacks in reaching their goals. Doctor Selznick found that the vast majority of people do not mentally prepare themselves for the inevitable disappointments that arise in life, and when they arrive, they tend to be taken by surprise and emotionally overwhelmed. They generalize disappointments and allow themselves to feel that by not having achieved them, they are not really very good at what they do.

They often see these disappointments as indicative of their inadequacies and lack of competence. They easily become disappointed in themselves and lose the courage and confidence they need to move forward. They often become depressed, and in most cases, they give up. They stop setting goals and working on themselves, and they worry more about security and potential losses than about taking risks and possible gains. The winners in his study responded to disappointment very differently. First, they mentally prepared themselves in advance for disappointment, so that when it arrived, they had already thought about how they would react and the possible courses of action available to them. They considered a particular setback to be very specific and not indicative of a general lack of skill or character flaw.

More than anything else, these superior men and women had developed a series of mental tools that they used almost automatically when things went wrong. Historians consider Napoleon Bonaparte perhaps the most brilliant battle general in the history of mankind. In a military career spanning 25 years and involving hundreds of battles, large and small, Napoleon lost only three times. He was famous for taking the time to consider all possibilities before each battle without illusions, facing the worst possible outcomes and setbacks that could occur. When the battle was underway and confusion reigned everywhere, a steady stream of messengers and officers came to him with news and sought instructions on what to do next.

His responses were always clear, concise, and immediate. No matter what happened, he had a response ready on the tip of his tongue. And the reason for this, and what helped make him the master of all Europe, was that he had thought everything through in advance. This program on the science of self confidence aims to be very practical and useful for you. In the next few minutes, I'll share with you some of the mental tools used by the most effective men and women in our society to face adversity. What I suggest you do is to turn them over in your mind and review them periodically until they become an automatic part of your thought processes. And when they do, I promise you will have taken a giant step toward becoming unstoppable and enjoying the high levels of self confidence that are possible for you.

The first mental tool is to reevaluate your entire attitude toward the concept of failure. You know that fear of failure is the greatest obstacle to success and happiness in adult life. It is learned and as a result, can be unlearned, freeing you from the fears that hold you back and giving you the self confidence that propels you forward. The starting point for eliminating this fear is to accept and realize that success is not possible without failure. Every success is preceded by failure. Great failures usually continue over a long period of time. Abraham Lincoln was considered one of the great failures in american politics.

A man who lost his business, lost his girlfriend, and was defeated in elections time and again. However, by learning from each temporary defeat, he won the final elections and became one of the most important and respected presidents we have ever had. As Stanley wrote, don't be afraid to fail. Don't waste energy trying to cover up failure. Learn from your failures and move on to the next challenge. It's okay to fail. If you're not failing, you're not growing. Success is learned by failing, and no success is possible without it. Thomas J. Watson once received a visit from a young journalist who asked him how he could be more successful and faster. Watson, the founder of IBM, replied with these wonderful words, do you want to succeed? Then double your rate of failure. Success lies on the other side of failure. Every man or woman of great achievement has been at some point, a magnificent failure.

The greatest successes of our generation from our history books are mere stories of men and women who failed frequently enough to finally learn to triumph. In David Suskin's program a few years ago, there were four men who became millionaire entrepreneurs before they turned 35. During a break, they were asked to add up and calculate the total number of different businesses they had started or tried before they found the business where they made their fortune. It turned out that the four men had started an average of 17 businesses, each of which 16 had failed. But it was, on average, the 17th business that made them rich. Now, the obvious question is whether these young men failed in each of their business ventures, and the answer is clear. They were not failing. They were simply learning how to succeed.

Their previous business ventures were the testing ground where they learned the lessons necessary to achieve financial independence, which was their true goal. Thomas Edison was the most successful inventor of the 20th century or any century. But Thomas Edison was also an extraordinary failure. As an inventor, he failed more times than any other inventor of his time. He failed thousands and thousands of times trying to find the right filament for the first electric light bulb. He failed thousands more times trying to find the right plant from which to extract natural rubber. And in his laboratories at what is now known as General Electric, he gathered some of the best scientific minds of the time so that they could dramatically increase the number of failures.

You see, Edison knew that success is a numbers game. It's based on smart effort and the law of averages. If you try enough different things in enough different ways and learn from each trial, you will inevitably succeed. Fear of failure, on the other hand, causes people to try fewer and fewer things, thereby reducing the likelihood of achieving something significant. In the same year, Babe Ruth hit more home runs than any other batter in the USA. He also struck out more than any other batter. When he swung the bat swung with every ounce of force he had. It often whirled and fell to the ground as a result of his efforts.

But he also set an american baseball record that wasn't broken for decades and became a legend in his time. Your job is not to fear failure or avoid it so meticulously that you also avoid success. Your job is to move forward and take smart risks, thinking them through beforehand and learning from all of them. In hindsight, Zig Ziglar says, you can tell how tall a building will be by the depth to which they build the foundations. The height you reach in life will always be determined by the depth of your personal foundation, which is almost always the quality and quantity of your failures and what you have become as a result of them.

Napoleon Hill wrote, when defeat comes, accept it as a signal that your plans are not sound. Rebuild those plans and set sail once more toward your coveted goal. And Dale Carnegie wrote, a successful man will profit from his mistakes and try again in a different way. The starting point for triumphing over adversity is to overcome the fear of failure to the point of being willing to boldly move toward your dreams. We said before that whatever your emotions are, they control your decisions in everything you do. When you write clear goals and make detailed plans to achieve them, and think about them all the time, you build within yourself the burning heat of desire, which can eventually become so powerful that it surpasses any fear of failure that might hold you back.

The more you think about your goals, talk about them and write them down, the more determined you will be to make them a reality, and the more likely you will be to overcome any small fears that may arise. The second mental tool you can use to face adversity is called crisis anticipation, which refers to your ability to think ahead. Your mind is the most powerful tool you have to grasp reality. Everything you feel and all your reactions are initially determined by how you think about any subject. If you change the quality of your thinking, you change the quality of your life.

Start by applying your thinking ability to your current situation. Crisis anticipation involves looking six to twelve months into the future and making a list of everything that could go wrong in areas that are important to you. It's similar to what Napoleon did in anticipation of an upcoming battle. If you have a business, make a list of all the issues that could arise and threaten the survival of your business. If you're in sales, list all the things that could happen that might drastically reduce your sales volume.

Consider your family or even planning a family vacation. Make a list of all the unexpected events that could occur and derail your plans and objectives. In a business with eleven salespeople, the owner discovered that over 60% of sales came from two of them. If one of those individuals were to quit, or worse, go to work for a competitor, the company's sales volume would drop dramatically and its ability to survive might even be threatened. Once the owner realized this, they immediately began an intensive sales training program for all their people. At the same time, they started recruiting and looking for better salespeople, while arranging to encourage those with poor performance to leave elsewhere. Within six months, no single salesperson represented more than 15% of the business.

So when one of their previous top performers decided to leave, the company was able to absorb the temporary drop in productivity and continue to grow. What are the possible crises that could occur in your life? What if interest rates doubled or your business dropped by 50%? What if your best selling products stopped selling or your top customers stopped buying? In what areas are you overly dependent on someone or something else to continue succeeding? And what steps could you take starting today to protect yourself against a crisis if it were to occur? You'll be surprised at how much more confident you feel when you feel you've thought through the critical areas of your life and made plans in case something goes wrong.

The third mental tool you can use to triumph over adversity and maintain high self confidence is knowing how to face an unexpected disappointment. One step at a time. Let me explain. Every time one of your cherished dreams blows up in your face or you hit a star stone wall in pursuit of one of your goals, there's a natural reaction process that you and everyone else go through. When you can recognize this process in yourself, you can better see it in others and cope better. Elizabeth Kubler Ross refers to this process as the five stages of facing death.

They're the same for dealing with the death of a dream, a hope, or a goal, or even the death of your peace of mind. Due to an unexpected source, the five stages appear to be identical. The first stage when something goes completely wrong and you face an unexpected setback similar to the death of a friend or family member is denial. You simply refuse to face it. When a company is in trouble or a person's career isn't going well, this is the most common reaction. In this first stage. You refuse to accept what happened as reality. You say something like, I can't believe it or say that couldn't have happened.

You demand proof and immediately want to call someone or get information to verify what you've been told. The second stage, once you confirm that what has happened is a real fact, is anger. Anger is triggered by a feeling of pain or fear, especially in the face of uncertainty or the unknown. Losing a major client and what that could mean for your results immediately generates anger, the tendency to lash out. You get angry with yourself, with the client, and with your competitor. That's why people often explode when they hear bad news. The third stage in facing any disappointment is to blame someone.

As a result of childhood conditioning. It's almost an automatic response for us to seek someone to blame when something goes wrong. We want to be able to point the finger at the person whose actions caused this setback. If we ourselves cause the problem, we will blame our secretary, our friends, our family, or even shout at our children. But in any case, someone is to blame. The fourth stage is often depression, especially in the case of death, but also in the case of a major loss. You tend to feel depressed and a little desperate. You feel like a victim.

Your self confidence plummets and you think, what's the use? If you're not careful, you'll take a single setback or disappointment and generalize it to yourself as a person. You'll feel that this setback means a major flaw in your personality or your ability. The fifth stage of disappointment is when the lights begin to come back on. This is when you accept full responsibility for what happened. At a minimum, you accept responsibility for your responses, for how you react to the situation. You start exercising a certain amount of self control and self mastery. You accept the disappointment as a fact and decide that it's no use crying over spilled milk.

You tell yourself something like, well, what can't be cured must be endured. Once you've accepted responsibility and turned your gaze to the future, to what can be done rather than what has happened, you move on to the final stage and that's the action stage. You consciously choose the future over the past. You become more solution oriented than problem oriented. You start looking for the valuable lesson you can learn from this situation. You start thinking about how you can minimize the damage and maximize the opportunities that may arise from this setback.

Friedrich Nietzsche, the philosopher, is famous for having said, what doesn't kill me makes me stronger. You know that the only antidote to negativity, worry, and low self esteem is positive, decisive, and constructive action, the direction of your goals. As soon as you get busy, your self esteem and self confidence will begin to increase again. You start feeling more in control of your emotions in your life. You stop making excuses and start making progress. You begin to think about how you can capitalize on this situation. And the most important thing you can do when facing any setback is to deliberately move through the five stages as quickly as possible.

Ultimately, you triumph over adversity. If you have clear values, clear goals, and clear plans, you gain full control over your mind and your thoughts if you decide to persist, no matter the odds, no matter what happens, until you succeed. Recognizing that perseverance is a form of courage. It's the courage to withstand adversity and disappointment, and it's the quality that ensures you will ultimately succeed. Calvin Coolidge, president of the United States, summed this up when he wrote that nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not. There is nothing more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not.

Unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not. The world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. Persistence is self discipline in action. Every time you exercise self discipline to persist through adversity and disappointment, your self esteem increases. By engaging in the action of perseverance, you build your resistance to taking the easy way out. You create the friction that arises from going against your natural tendencies. You generate the heat that crystallizes your character at a new and higher level.

And with this heightened level of perseverance, self discipline and character, your self esteem, self respect, and personal pride increase. Your belief in yourself serves as a deep foundation of confidence upon which you build a great life. You become more positive, more optimistic, and more unstoppable in everything you do. And you do this because, as Churchill said, you never give up. Never, never give up.

As we wrap up our discussion of how dealing with problems affects our success, let us go forward with a deeper understanding and a renewed drive. Even though it can be hard and scary, adversity is what makes people strong and helps them become great. Overcoming problems is how we learn what we're really capable of, improve our skills, and make it stronger in our desire to keep going after our dreams. Think about the ideas and plans we talked about today. Think about how these ideas can help you on your own trip.

Instead of seeing problems as setbacks, see them as chances to grow and change. You give yourself the power to turn problems into steps toward bigger goals by training your mind to be persistent, flexible and open to learning from all experiences. As you leave today, I want you to remember that problems can be used to help you grow as a person and as a worker. Being strong, brave and determined are traits that will help you move forward even when things go wrong.

Remember that our success and legacy are not shaped by the lack of obstacles but by how we deal with them. Thank you for taking the time to read and share. The ideas we've talked about today should help you have a future full of strength, success and reaching your greatest goals. Let's keep going through hard times with unwavering determination, knowing that the problems we fix are what make our way to success.

Motivation, Inspiration, Leadership, Self-Confidence, Adversity, Personal Development, Achievemore