How to Bounce Forward

Change the Way You Deal with Adversity

Sam Cawthorn

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780730382041
• eBook ISBN: 9780730382065
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Personal Success

How to transform crisis into success

At just 26 years old Sam Cawthorn experienced a serious car accident that resulted in the loss of his arm and was told that he may never walk again. At this critical moment he realised he had an incredible opportunity to create a better life. His experience drove him to uncover the mechanics, tools and strategies to not just bounce back, but to bounce forward and live a greater life with greater focus and greater success.

How to Bounce Forward gives you the tools you need to successfully navigate crisis and use it to your advantage.

Part IThe bounce principles

CHAPTER 1 Principle 1: Crisis creates opportunity

In 1959 John F. Kennedy delivered a speech in which he said, ‘When written in Chinese the word crisis is composed of two characters. One represents danger, and the other represents opportunity.’ Since then this insight has entered popular culture and is widely used in politics and business and by inspirational speakers the world over.

There is no doubt that crisis presents both danger and opportunity, but this much-loved interpretation isn’t actually accurate. A more faithful translation of the two characters that make up the Chinese symbol for crisis would be ‘danger’ and ‘crucial point’. Most people take crisis to involve some sort of personal or professional emergency that must be weathered. It doesn’t. At least it doesn’t have to. If you look up crisis in your dictionary you will find that the definition usually refers to a ‘crucial or decisive moment or turning point’. In fact, the word itself comes from the Greek word krinein — to decide. A crisis therefore is a call to action — a situation or event that demands your attention and forces you to decide how to react and what to choose for yourself going forward.

Events, situations and circumstances do not in themselves create crisis. What creates the danger that is inherent in crisis is an unwillingness to face the truth and take constructive action to change the outcome.

For example, when it comes to a crisis, they don’t come much bigger, certainly in living memory, than the global financial crisis (GFC). Since it began toward the end of 2007 the GFC has caused unprecedented financial destruction to international stock markets, countries, businesses, governments and individuals. The meltdown that occurred between 2007 and 2012 is considered by many leading economists to be the worst financial disaster since the Great Depression of the 1930s. And yet, according to the World Wealth Report 2010 published by Merrill Lynch and Capgemini, there was a 34 per cent increase in Australian millionaires between the end of 2008 and the end of 2009. By the end of 2008 there were 129 200 individuals in Australia with net assets, excluding their home, of at least $1 million. By the end of 2009 there were 173 600 such individuals. The year 2007 may have marked the beginning of the GFC, but it also marked the end of one of the longest economic booms in living memory. In other words, crisis? What crisis? For some 44 400 people crisis created opportunity and they bucked the negative trend to come out on top.

And these individuals are not alone. Some of the most successful businesses in the world started out during an economic downturn of some type, including Procter & Gamble, CNN, Hyatt Hotels, Kraft Foods, Disney, Revlon and IBM. The US publication dedicated to wealth, Fortune magazine, was launched during the Great Depression.

Even the technology powerhouse Apple has weathered a few considerable economic storms. Although Apple started life in 1976 it didn’t move into hyperdrive until the middle of the dot.com crash. When all things tech were considered bad news Apple’s Steve Jobs instructed his team of engineers to develop a personal music player, and the iPod was created in less than a year.

Launched in November 2001, it became an instant hit. Two years later Apple launched iTunes, and the rest is history. The iPhone and iPad followed, and who knows what funky new ‘must have’ products they will create in the future. All because they refused to see the crisis and focused on innovation.

Still more recently, Groupon, the online ‘deal-of-the-day’ discount coupon company, started life in November 2008 during the GFC. What better time to launch a business that offered people the opportunity to buy stuff at a discount price? Within the space of two years Groupon had reached more than 200 markets worldwide and was reported to have some 35 million registered users seeking discount deals. In 2011 Google offered $6 billion for the business. The GFC created a phenomenal opportunity for this business. According to Forbes magazine and The Wall Street Journal, at projected revenue Groupon was on target to make $1 billion in sales faster than any other business in history.

A 2009 study conducted by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, ‘The Economic Future Just Happened’, concluded that challenging economic times can inspire entrepreneurial rebirth. In fact, the study found that ‘more than half of the companies on the 2009 Fortune 500 list were launched during a recession or bear market, along with nearly half of the firms on the 2008 Inc. list of America’s fastest-growing companies’.

Obviously, crisis isn’t always negative. Crises simply force us to look outside our comfort zone and actively seek opportunities that were probably there the whole time. When life is easy and times are good we don’t see these opportunities because we don’t need to. This is not just common sense — it’s biological too.

The biology of innovation

In Eat, Fast and Live Longer, a great documentary that aired on UK TV, British journalist, physician and TV presenter Dr Michael Mosley investigated the health benefits of fasting. In one particular segment of the show he visited Dr Mark Mattson, Chief of the Laboratory of Neurosciences at the National Institute on Aging in Baltimore, Maryland, USA, and professor of neuroscience at Johns Hopkins University. Dr Mattson was conducting some startling experiments on mice. The mice were fed different diets and released into a maze, where they needed to work out and remember where the food was. The mice fed a high-fat, western diet fared pretty badly: either they couldn’t figure out where the food was or they could find it but later couldn’t remember where it was. However, the mice fed one day and starved the next did really well. When the researchers examined the brains of the fasting mice they discovered something amazing — newly created brain cells. Sporadic bouts of hunger trigger the new neurons to grow, making the mice more resourceful and mentally focused. Asked why this should happen, Mattson replied, ‘If you think of it in evolutionary terms it makes sense. If you are hungry you better increase your cognitive ability. It will give you a survival advantage if you can remember the location of the food.’

This documentary was looking at the health benefits of fasting, and certainly the evidence suggested that occasional fasting might be good for you — not only with weight loss and other health benefits but also for brain function. It also has far wider implications, however. Mattson is now conducting human trials to test if the same phenomenon occurs in human beings, but it’s highly likely that it does. We already know that the brain can and does change itself depending on the environment — it’s known as neuroplasticity.

If hunger stresses the brain matter in the same way that exercise stresses the muscles, then hunger really does make the brain sharper. Hunger is a physical crisis that forces the body out of complacency and comfort; it triggers action. It’s highly likely, therefore, that a crisis of any sort that initiates a physical stress response will also trigger intense brain function. In short, we get more creative in a crisis. Why? Because we are fighting for survival!

In moments of crisis or severe adversity our mind and body will shift gear and often access resources that we simply didn’t know existed prior to the event.

On 9 April 1982 Angela Cavallo’s teenage son Tony was out in the yard tinkering under his beloved 1964 Chevy Impala. Without warning, the two jacks holding up the car slipped and the car fell, pinning Tony underneath. Hearing a loud noise, Angela went out to the yard to see what had happened and was horrified to find her son unconscious beneath the car. Angela, in her late fifties at the time, lifted the car and held it up for five full minutes while two neighbours replaced the jacks and pulled Tony to safety.

It’s unlikely that Angela would ever have known her own capabilities had she not been in a crisis. Physiologists Michio Ikai and Arthur H. Steinhaus demonstrated that human strength could be increased by up to 31 per cent in certain situations, one being panic. In an article published in the Journal of Applied Physiology, they concluded that what we ‘think’ we are capable of is nothing more than a conditioned response or habit that limits our full potential. In other words, we are all capable of considerably more than we consistently demonstrate but it often takes a crisis for us to shift gears and effectively tap into that capacity.

Considered from this vantage point, it’s easy to see crisis as a potential blessing. Sometimes severe adversity is simply the universe’s way of telling you that you are on the wrong path and need to make some changes. Crisis is good for you! Without crisis it is so easy to drown in mediocrity — a no-man’s-land where the status quo is not bad enough to change but isn’t very good either. Crisis forces our hand. It demands change while also giving you fast-track access to resources such as creativity, innovation and strength that you probably didn’t know you had.

Obviously crisis situations are not easy to handle. They can be extremely stressful and too much stress, especially over a long period of time, can adversely affect our health.

In periods of panic, for example, the body will move into fight- or-flight mode for self-preservation. All the blood will be pushed into the extremities, the limbs, ready for action — as illustrated by Angela Cavallo! Brain function can also be inhibited as the neocortex, the thinking part of your brain, effectively shuts down. When you find yourself in a stressful situation your limbic system, the emotional centre of your brain, will kick into gear and move you into action long before the message of danger has even reached the thinking part of your brain, the neocortex. In his groundbreaking book Emotional Intelligence, Daniel Goldman explains how Joseph LeDoux, a neuroscientist at the Center for Neural Science at New York University, was the first to discover the important function of the amygdala. These two almond-shaped clusters of interconnected cells that sit above the brain stem, one in each hemisphere, essentially act as our ‘emotional sentinel’. Goldman tells the story of a friend of his in England who, having eaten lunch at a canal-side café, took a stroll along the canal. After a few minutes he saw a girl gazing into the water, her face frozen in fear. Before he knew it Goldman’s friend was in the water. Only once in the water did he realise why — and he was able to save a toddler who had fallen in.

It was his amygdala that caused him to jump in the canal. Our brain is switched ‘on’ all the time; it processes all the information it receives from the five senses and makes decisions on the basis of that data. It had always been thought that the neocortex, or the conscious thinking brain, receives the information first and sends out signals to the respective parts of the brain for action. What LeDoux discovered was that the amygdala gets the information first and is effectively able to hijack the brain and initiate a reaction, often before the thinking brain even knows what’s going on. Goldman’s friend picked up a danger signal from the face of the girl looking at the water and reacted immediately by jumping into the water. It was only once he was in the water that his neocortex got with the program and he could understand why he had done it.

So while a crisis or challenging situation can sharpen the mind, if the body feels stressed over a long period this can backfire. The solution, therefore, is to engage the thinking brain as quickly as possible and get into action.

This idea of increased brain activity and function also ties into learning. For years scientists thought the brain was hardwired. It was assumed that whatever brain cells we were born with were our lot and when some died they were not replaced. In the 1980s it was discovered that we could generate new brain cells in response to certain demands. As we’ve seen, one of those demands is physical hunger. Another is learning, and again this is related to the neuroplasticity of the brain during crisis.

Neurons or brain cells are created or regenerated in response to a new learning challenge. When we are faced with a crisis of any type, the situation usually demands that we adapt and learn new ways of thinking and working in order to navigate the crisis effectively. Being challenged is therefore an important part of growth and development. We literally think differently when challenged and stressed. It appears that brain function responds favourably to demands and actually performs better in a crisis or difficulty, all of which makes sense from an evolutionary perspective. Your brain needs to be stretched and challenged. Sharp, clear and innovative thinking is therefore more readily available when push really comes to shove. It would appear that when we really need to find a solution, the brain will adapt and help us find one.

At least, it will if you foster the habits that determine whether you will be able to turn crisis into opportunity.

Habits: Crisis creates opportunity

When crisis hits or you find yourself in a difficult or challenging situation, there are certain things you need to do and actions you need to take consistently if you want to emerge stronger from the experience. In short, you need to foster the following habits:

1. Connect to your why.
2. Think impossible thoughts.
3. Direct your focus.
4. Create another crisis.

1 Connect to your why

As I mentioned in the introduction, I genuinely believe my accident was a blessing for me because it forced me to realign my purpose by looking at my life and what was really important. I got my half-time opportunity long before mid life and I consider myself extremely fortunate for that alone. Crisis is tough. It can be traumatic and extremely painful emotionally, physically and financially, but when viewed from a new vantage point crisis is one of the most powerful and effective initiators of change because it allows us to connect or reconnect to our purpose.

One of my favourite books is Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action by Simon Sinek. Sinek opens by telling the story of Samuel Pierpont Langley and how he set out to be the first man to pilot an airplane at the start of the twentieth century. Langley was a highly regarded mathematician, astronomer, physicist, inventor and aviation pioneer. He had influential and powerful friends, including Andrew Carnegie and Alexander Graham Bell. And he had money: based on the success of his previous aviation models, Langley was awarded a $50 000 grant from the War Department and a $20 000 grant from the Smithsonian Institute, where he was also a senior officer.

In today’s money that’s abo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• About the author
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: The Bounce Cycle
• Part I: The bounce principles
• Part II: The 12-day challenge
• Conclusion
• Afterword
• EULA