Issue #128 How Problems Prove You Are In the Arena

A few weeks ago, one of the businesses I am closely involved with received some difficult news.

Our financial backers, partners who had supported us through several years of growth, informed us they wanted their money back faster than we had planned.

Much faster, in fact, which meant cutting deep, rethinking the operating plan, and making decisions we had hoped to avoid.

When it first landed, it felt oppressive and premature - the business was showing real signs of progress.

We had made some hard decisions in prior years and reprioritized our focus; as a result, the bets we had made were paying off, with revenue and profits up. We believed we had a real path to building something meaningful.

We had assumed our investors would recognize our efforts and stay the course; supporting a business that was showing real promise.

There is an old saying about making assumptions: when you assume and hold certain expectations, it often makes an ass out of you and me.

I am not sure what broader dynamics forced their decision, but our financial partners had made up their minds.  A new reality for us was clear: the risk appetite that had once been there, was now gone.

It was hard not to feel like a victim in that moment, and for a while, I did.

I felt the temptation to blame, the desire to point outward and say that this was being done to us; that we were at the mercy of forces we could not control and that the outcome being handed to us was both unjust and unfair.

The Trap of Living in Effect

There is a concept I have been sitting from one of the books I return to every year.

Stephen Covey wrote about a spectrum of human maturity that sits beneath everything in "The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People." I had read it before, but this time, against the backdrop of everything that was happening, it landed differently.

Covey describes three stages we move through on our human growth journey: dependence, independence, and interdependence.

In the dependent stage, we speak in the language of “you.”  This is the stage where others are seen as having influence over our lives.  It began for us when we were children; our parents looked after us, our teachers taught us, and our coaches helped form us. For a season, dependence is exactly where we are supposed to be.

We then enter the independent stage, which is where most people aspire to land. At this stage, the language shifts from "you" to "I." It is when we take ownership, solve problems, and build lives on our own terms. We stop waiting for the world to sort itself out and instead start doing something about it.

The most mature stage is when we reach interdependence, where the language shifts again from "I" to "we." We come to understand that anything worth building requires others, serves others, and is accountable to something larger than ourselves.

The problem is that most people never fully leave the first stage, and the danger in that is clear: if we do not grow out of a dependent mindset, it will lead to a state of victimhood.  When we anchor our identity to what other people do or don't do, we surrender our agency and live in a state of perpetual effect rather than being at cause.

As I reflected on Covey’s framework, I realized that for most of my life I have been striving for independence, and only in recent years has my focus begun to shift toward becoming more interdependent.

What stood out even more, however, was the awareness that when I received the difficult news from our financiers, I was operating squarely in “you” territory, blaming, pointing outward, and living in effect.

I should have known better, but it quickly became clear that my thinking had drifted into a place of victimhood.

A Different Mindset

While I did not welcome the decision of an aggressive repayment plan, it gave me an opportunity to zoom out and consider a few things differently.

The first is something Buddha observed long ago: life is suffering. 

None of us enjoy that reality, but we have to accept it as part of the human journey. Difficulties are not interruptions to a good life; they are the forging process of creating one. It is the challenges that build character and pain that produces progress. 

Always sunshine only desert; we require the storms in our life to bring the nourishing rain that will in term support our growth. 

The second is to offer grace. There are forces I cannot see nor fully appreciate. Our lenders have their own pressures, their own concerns, their own form of suffering that they are living through. I have to accept that I cannot understand all the factors that are driving their decisions, and that requires empathy on my part.

The third, and most important, is the shift from asking who or what caused this, to instead asking what we can create from this? 

That is a harder place to get to, but what I’ve come to realize is that these new constraints have, in many ways, forced a level of creative thinking and problem solving that was probably overdue. As a result, we have embraced austerity, made meaningful operational changes, and shifted away from our desired growth plan toward what we need now:  an optimal survival plan.

‍

None of it has been comfortable, but all of it was within our control; and taking control is where we need to be. It is the place where we feel intentional, empowered and fully alive. 

The experience has also brought me back to a phrase I have reflected on often: hold onto your actions tightly and your outcomes loosely.  Covey captures why this matters so clearly. He describes three circles that define our relationship with the world around us: the circle of control, the circle of influence, and the circle of concern.

The circle of control is the smallest, and it is the only one that is truly ours. Within it, there are only four things: what we say, what we think, how we ultimately choose to feel (our first feelings must always be felt; but we get to decide what they mean), and finally what we do. 

From those four things, we build our circle of influence over the people within our orbit. 

Beyond that sits the circle of concern, which holds everything outside our reach: the setting of the sun, the shifting of the tides, the direction of the wind, the movement of markets.

This perspective is both humbling and empowering. Humbling because it reminds us that so much of what happens is beyond us, and it is only hubris that lets us think otherwise. Empowering because we only need to govern four things and do them to the best of our ability.  It is also a great reminder that we are to work like it depends on us but pray like it depends on God.

I’ve been building companies for over thirty years and have seen just about every outcome imaginable. What I’ve come to accept is that much of what ultimately shapes those outcomes sits outside of our control.

We can read the wind and adjust our position, but we can’t force the market to cooperate, the capital environment to open, or the timing to align simply because we’ve worked hard and believe we deserve it.

Problems Are the Price of a Life at Cause

Theodore Roosevelt’s The Man in the Arena is a piece I find myself returning to often. Not for motivation, but for perspective, a reminder that the life of a builder is lived inside the struggle, not outside of it. 

To choose this path requires a willingness to accept the cost of blood, sweat and tears.  Over the years, I’ve come to see that cost not as a burden, but as part of what gives the work its meaning.

It is realizing that facing challenges in life is not a bug but rather a feature. Our problems are not obstacles to a good life….they are evidence of one.

If we are dealing with hard things in our business, our relationships, or our own internal world, it means we are engaged. We are building something and we are in the game.

The people with no problems are not problem-free; they are simply deferring them. Numbing out or choosing to become a victim does not make the hard things disappear; it only delays them to a bigger problem later.

Covey argues that we are not born complete; we are forged through a process of lived experience. The challenges are not interruptions to our growth; they are the mechanism of it.

The danger is not in having problems. The danger is in staying in a state of "you" when problems arrive; staying in blame and letting the weight of difficult circumstances convince us that we are victims.

We were not designed for that; our Creator made us to live a life of being at cause; not living in effect. However before we can change how we live, we first have to change how we see ourselves within our circumstances. It is in accepting that the mess is not a detour, rather it is part of our path.

As for the business, the story is still being written. We do not know how it ends, but we have chosen our response and have acted with integrity. 

We made the decisions that gave the enterprise its best chance. That is what living at cause looks like; not a guarantee of the outcome, but full ownership of the effort.

And knowing that taking responsibilities for our actions is all we can control….that is enough.

So this week, ask yourself:

Where are you defaulting to "you" language when the harder work is shifting to "I"?

What problem in your life right now might actually be evidence that you are engaged in something that matters?

What would it look like to hold your actions tightly and your outcomes loosely, just for this season?

‍