The JRNY
Resilience and Leadership, Australia
Drawn from 4 conversations on The JRNY
- Episode 1 with Dave Clare and Levi Saunders
- Episode 3 with Leon Pascarl
- Episode 6 with Michael McHugh
- Episode 7 with Maurice Sauzier
Every quote below names the person who said it and the episode it came from, so you can go and hear it in context.
Adversity is a sustained period of serious difficulty or hardship. Illness, financial collapse, the end of a marriage, the failure of a business, the loss of someone. What separates it from an ordinary bad week is duration and stakes: the difficulty keeps going, something real is on the line, and you cannot yet see how it ends.
That definition is the easy part. The harder question, and the one most people actually arrive with, is what to do while you are in it.
This article answers both. The definition and the types come first. After that, what four Australian business owners said about going through theirs, in their own words, on The JRNY. None of them are quoted here saying anything they did not say, and each quote names the person and the conversation it came from.
The types of adversity
Adversity gets sorted into categories because different kinds call for different responses. Most real situations are a combination rather than a clean single type.
- Physical. Illness, injury, disability, chronic pain.
- Emotional. Grief, the end of a relationship, betrayal, depression and anxiety.
- Financial. Job loss, business failure, debt, the loss of a house.
- Social. Isolation, a damaged reputation, the collapse of a friendship group.
- Structural. Poverty, discrimination, unstable housing, lack of access to education or care.
The reason the list matters: people in the middle of one type often assume they are failing at handling a single problem, when they are in fact absorbing three or four at once. A business owner who loses a contract is usually also dealing with the financial pressure, the social exposure of people knowing, and the emotional weight of feeling responsible. That is three types, not one.
Adversity is not the same as stress, failure or trauma
These four words get used interchangeably and they are not the same thing. The distinctions are practical, not academic.
| Term | What it actually is | How it differs from adversity |
|---|---|---|
| Adversity | The difficult circumstance itself | The baseline: extended, consequential, and not yet resolved |
| Stress | Your response to demand, not the circumstance | It comes from good events too. A wedding is stressful and is not adversity |
| Failure | A specific outcome, usually a brief one | A pitch fails on a Tuesday. Adversity is the condition you may be in afterwards |
| Trauma | Lasting psychological injury an event can cause | Adversity can lead to it and frequently does not |
The distinction that matters most day to day is the first two. Treating your stress response as the problem sends you looking for ways to feel calmer. Treating the circumstance as the problem sends you looking at what actually has to change.
What adversity reveals about the people around you
The most consistent thing said about adversity across the show is not about strength. It is about who turns up.
On the first episode, Levi Saunders described what happened when his own life came apart. He had been through a separation and a significant business shift at once.
It's haunting, especially when it happens for the first time. Adversity strikes and then people that you've almost worshipped and idolised step back, and then you still don't know who the people are that are going to step forward ... So there's that bit in the middle where it's very lonely, until people make themselves known.
That middle section is the part people are least warned about. Not the loss itself, but the gap after the people you expected withdraw and before anyone new has stepped in. Dave Clare, on the same episode, described the other side of it: he had met Levi only twice before, and became one of the people who stepped forward.
Two things follow from this that are worth knowing in advance. The people who step back are usually not bad people, they are just at a different point in the relationship than you thought. And the people who step forward are frequently people you barely know, which means your existing circle is a poor predictor of your actual support.
Why the same event breaks one person and builds another
This is the question underneath most searches for what adversity means, and the honest answer is that outcomes genuinely diverge.
Levi put it bluntly, talking about men he has watched go through family breakdown:
There's a lot of men in Australia that struggle in family related issues or whatever, and they seem to go one way or the other. Some men capitulate and they can't cope, and there's issues with suicide, depression and substance. And then there's a lot of others that get faced with adversity and it's the making of them.
Both directions are real. The research on post traumatic growth says roughly the same thing in colder language: some people emerge with more capability and clearer priorities, others are left diminished, and the difference is not explained by character. Support, meaning and eventually regaining some control over your own circumstances all show up as factors.
Which is why "adversity makes you stronger" is unhelpful as advice. It describes an outcome that is possible, not a mechanism you can rely on.
If any of this is close to home: in Australia, Lifeline is 13 11 14 and Beyond Blue is 1300 22 4636, both 24 hours. In an emergency, call 000.
Four things that helped, from people who went through it
Narrow it to one priority
Maurice Sauzier is a psychologist and works on psychosocial wellbeing with leadership teams. He described sitting with someone who was visibly not coping, listing everything she was carrying at once. His response was to cut the list down:
Right, you can only have one priority.
The point is linguistic and it is deliberate. A priority is singular. A list of six priorities is a list of tasks with no order, and holding them all as equally urgent is a reliable way to become unable to act on any of them. He then walked her through it as a risk assessment: likelihood and consequence, applied to each item, to work out what genuinely came first.
Run it through attitude, behaviour, consequence
The same conversation produced a frame Maurice calls the ABC model.
ABC. Attitude, behaviour, consequence.
Attitude is what nobody else can see: what you are thinking, what you value, what you are feeling. Behaviour is the part that becomes visible to everyone around you. Consequence is what follows from it. The use of it during a hard period is that it separates the parts you cannot immediately change from the one you can. You may not be able to shift how you feel about the situation this week. You can choose what you do next, and that changes what happens after.
Look at it honestly before you try to fix it
Leon Pascarl came to his current field late, after starting behind a butcher's counter at fourteen. His recurring theme is self examination, and being willing to take yourself apart the way you would a business.
If you don't take that time to analyse it, reflect and change, you're changing things blindly, or you're ignoring massive chunks and the dumpster fire of an elephant in the room.
The failure mode he is describing is action taken to relieve the feeling of being stuck rather than to address the actual problem. Changing something is not the same as changing the right thing, and under pressure the two feel identical.
Treat the pressure as information
Paul Cohalan, who hosts the show, left a secure job at BHP to start again in logistics and then in insurance, an industry he did not know. On episode 6 he was explicit about what he takes from difficulty:
I love adversity and the pressure, because the outcome of that is second to none.
Worth being careful with this one. It is a statement made looking back, by someone whose bet worked out, and it is a temperament as much as a technique. It is not a prescription for somebody currently in the worst of it. What generalises is the narrower version: the pressure carries usable information about what is not working, and that information is available whether or not you enjoy the pressure.
How adversity and resilience relate
They are routinely treated as the same subject and they are two different things.
Adversity is the circumstance. It arrives, often without warning, and it is largely not chosen. Resilience is the capacity to keep functioning during it and to recover after.
The practical consequence of separating them is that resilience is partly buildable and adversity is not. You cannot decide how much hardship you face. You can influence what you have in place when it arrives: people who will step forward, some practice at looking at hard things honestly, and the habit of narrowing to one priority instead of drowning in six.
That is also the reason the people quoted here talk about their support and their thinking rather than their toughness. Every one of them names other people as part of how they got through.
Where to go from here
Every quote above comes from a full conversation, and the transcripts are on the site so you can read the surrounding context rather than take a pull quote at face value.
- Episode 1: Pizza Box Commitment, with Dave Clare and Levi Saunders, on what adversity reveals about who is in your corner.
- Episode 3: Hold a Mirror Up, with Leon Pascarl, on self judgment and imposter syndrome.
- Episode 6: Risk, Growth and Building Signarama, with Michael McHugh, on calculated risk and pushing through setbacks.
- Episode 7: From Suicide Ideation to Social Impact, with Maurice Sauzier, on hitting rock bottom at fifty and the road back.
Common questions
- What is the simplest definition of adversity?
- Adversity is a sustained period of serious difficulty or hardship. The key word is sustained. A bad day is not adversity. A stretch of months or years where the difficulty is ongoing, the stakes are real and the outcome is uncertain is adversity.
- What are the main types of adversity?
- The commonly recognised types are physical adversity such as illness or injury, emotional adversity such as grief or the end of a relationship, financial adversity such as job loss or business failure, social adversity such as isolation or a damaged reputation, and structural adversity such as poverty or discrimination. Most real situations combine several at once.
- Is adversity the same as stress?
- No. Stress is your body and mind responding to demand, and it can come from good things like a new job or a wedding. Adversity is the difficult circumstance itself. Adversity usually produces stress, but plenty of stress has nothing to do with adversity.
- Does adversity actually make you stronger?
- Not on its own. Research on post traumatic growth shows that some people do come out of hardship with more capability and clearer priorities, but others are left worse off. What appears to make the difference is support, meaning and whether the person eventually gets some sense of agency back. Adversity is not automatically a gift, and telling someone in the middle of it that it is can be actively unhelpful.
- What is the difference between adversity and resilience?
- Adversity is the circumstance. Resilience is the capacity to keep functioning through it and to recover afterwards. Adversity happens to you. Resilience is what you build, partly through your own choices and partly through the people around you.