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Adversity Essay

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Adversity Essay

Carla G. Guzman
Penn State University
OLEAD 409 Leadership Development
Adversity Essay

Successful business leaders — or people in general — don’t give up when adversity strikes. They find the ways and means to carry on. Sometimes, it takes a trip to hell and back to really open your eyes. And sometimes, really opening your eyes can change your whole life. (Pirouz, 2015).
This essay will focus to explain how past life experiences shape leaders’ character and skills in order to leverage on adversity. Only leaders that take risks and make mistakes have the experience acumen to face hardship, overcome it or learn from it.
According to Bennis, “Experiences aren’t truly yours until you think about them, analyze them, examine them, question them, reflect on them, and finally understand them. The point, once again, is to use your experiences rather than being used by them, to be the designer, not the design, so the experiences empower rather than imprison. (Bennis, 2009)
His fundamental tenet is that leaders are made, not born. The worst problem they can face, says Bennis, is “early success. There's no opportunity to learn from adversity and problems”. (Bennis, 2008)
As humans, we define our strengths and weakness in terms of experiences. We describe ourselves by how able we are handling certain situations or learning from them. Only exploring in depth these situations and dissecting the outcome, we will be able to understand our behavior and attitudes toward adversity.
By looking back and digging in the past to find life experiences that shaped me into the individual that I am today, I discovered the roots of my current behavior. Immersing myself in my memories permitted me to classify those episodes.
In order to understand what I was looking for before going down memory lane, I pointed out the strongest aspects of my personality. Once I

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