82. CRISITUNITY: Flourishing Friday

Feb 12, 2021

EPISODE 82: CRISITUNITY-TURN CRISIS INTO OPPORTUNITY: Flourishing Friday

Flourishing Friday (FF)-Welcome to Flourishing Fridays (FF), where every Friday we bring you a Positive Psychology-based life hack that will help you flourish.  In these episodes, we look at the real-life application of Positive Psychology while giving you tips and strategies to put Positive Psychology into use in all areas of your life. 

Shout out to Dan Trommater CAPPster from Canada in our recent Better Than Before COVID 19 programs.

We were talking about how to turn obstacles and crisis into gifts or opportunities.

He said, in typical animated Dan fashion, You mean, a crisitunity! 

I thought he was friggin brilliant, then he told me it wasn't his, it was Homer!

It turns out in a Simpsons episode, and daughter, Lisa Simpson, says, "dad, did you know that the Chinese have the same word for crisis as they do opportunity?"

And homer exclaims, "Crisitunity!"

The word they're referring to is both a Chinese and a Japanese word called Kiki. It's made up of two characters. 

The first symbol represents dangerous, while the second one means opportunity: Aka, a crisitunity.

Yes, a crisis may be scary, it may be dangerous, but it also forces the chance for change, and with that chance, a doorway to opportunity.

This, of course, with the pandemic, is on the minds of many of the people that I work with and corporations that I support. People are asking how do we pivot? How do we become resilient? Since the pandemic started, I've been running a low-cost online program called Better Than Before COVID-19. We've had over 1,500 people go through the program in the past nine months, all united around a shared vision of learning positive psychology skills to be better after the pandemic than you were going into it.

That's why I'm in love with the word crisitunity. 

1. A mindset shift that the moments of crisis can be a gift can be an opportunity. It makes me think of the first principle of Anusara yoga, a yoga style that I used to teach. The first principle is "open to grace.
2. Accept the past - check out last week's Flourishing Friday episode on psychic masochism and how to stop beating up on yourself about the past. 
3. Ask yourself - how can I learn from this? How can I grow? How can I view this as a contrast? Meaning what I'm experiencing is what I don't want. How can I use this to create something I do want?
4.  Asking yourself, what are my options? What can I do? All these things get us out of problem focus into solution focus. 

Food for thought. What crisis have you turned into an opportunity?