Seeding Innovation

8How to Handle the Curveballs

“For those who thought they were putting water on my fire, you were really adding gas to it.”

—Coco Gauff

WHEN I SPOKE with Nicole Poindexter about her work building Energicity and the challenges she faced, she shared how condescending people can be and offered, “You are leant wings by the storm.” Resistance builds strength. Connie Schwartz-Morini, who works with Deion Sanders, Snoop Dog, and others says, “The more people who tell us why we can't do something just puts the battery in our back of why we can do it” (Feldman, 2023).

It's true that strength and determination are developed during some of our hardest times. And challenges are part of the human experience, especially in business. Rarely does anything go as planned. You may find yourself in situations where you have to downsize your team. You may find yourself in a legal situation in which you are dealing with an unethical attorney. Hard times are inevitable. I learned early in my career to not fight pain but to feel it in order to understand what lesson I was meant to learn from it. If putting yourself out there is hard, ask yourself why. If saying “no” is tough, get to the bottom of why and behaviors you may have learned when you were younger. If setting boundaries is difficult, explore your people-pleasing tendencies and where you first started behaving this way. If fundraising is hard, what lesson can you learn? If a team is in conflict, what can this teach you? Identify your patterns ...