Struggle is a Superpower for Making Decisions and 5 Ways You Can Harness Yours
Written by Justin Matley, Professional Coach
Justin Matley is an award-winning professional development coach and consultant who has spent over two decades working with individuals, Fortune 500 companies, and everyone in between. Through Matley Coaching, he helps individuals and organizations strengthen communication, improve time management, and develop practical strategies for personal and professional growth.
We’re all dealt a messy hand one way or the other. Some are born with it, handed the cards at birth. Some acquire it over time, through a tragedy, a mistake, or perhaps a very rational judgement that took on a life of its own. Like a shifty poker game, we are given a set of cards. With the hand we are given, we then make a series of calls, balancing our own sense of right and wrong with decisions influenced by centrifugal forces largely out of our control. It can make life both maddening and interesting.
Starting with myself, I’m a bit of a bulldozer when it comes to making decisions. This has led to both successful resilience and epic whiffs in judgement. One of my personal challenges is the fact that I am a stutterer. I think I’m so affixed to its dragooning that sometimes I think I’ve almost written it off in a way. But that’s not true: stuttering is a struggle that in many ways defines aspects of me, even if it does not define me.
When the condition, the struggle, comes face to face with making decisions, I’m reminded that these characteristics, my tendency to (sometimes carelessly) plow through something and my persistent, frustrating vocal blocks and tics, are intertwined at the root. My impatience, impulsivity, and restlessness feel genetically bound to my psyche, much like stuttering is bound to both my overt verbality and my covert communication processes.
In fact, the majority of the battle with disruptive speech is happening between the ears, out of sight, wildly steering a litany of firing neurons toward a result that often looks, sounds, and lands awkwardly. This is because the stuttering is forcing the stutterer’s hand in more than just the verbal. It’s widespread. Long before another person hears or sees anything, there is an internal negotiation taking place.
I have realized my physical ability to communicate directly impacts how I make decisions because, quite literally, my ability to communicate is itself a series of messy decisions. This gets to my point. Most of our struggles exist between the ears, relegated to a place where we must coexist with them in some way to get through the day.
By wearing them on our sleeves, we let them have power, and our tendency is to sap them of this strength. When faced with a choice, how do deeply personal characteristics, such as disability, fear, neuroticism, conscientiousness, and trauma, intervene in our ability to execute a decision? What is it about who we are that impacts the critical moment of “now do the thing”?
We’d like to think of a decision as a relatively clean transaction: gather the information, weigh the options, determine what matters, and hit the gas. But we aren’t neutral arbiters. We bring us with us: our fears, our history, our insecurities, our habits, and our impulses. Sometimes we bring a disability. Many times it’s something we have gotten very good at pretending isn’t there.
Perhaps the most consequential parts of those things are the ones nobody else can see. Perhaps the way we make decisions is driven, in large part, by our communication skills, internal or external. That distinction seems applicable far beyond speech.
A person who is naturally averse to risk may experience the same opportunity differently from someone who is impulsive. Someone who’s experienced failure deeply and intimately may assign a different weight to the possibility of it happening again than someone whose experience has mostly reinforced their confidence. A highly conscientious person might deliberate long enough to miss an opportunity that an impulsive person would seize. Hell, the impulsive person might also make three decisions in the time it takes the conscientious person to make one and ultimately regret them all.
No single person is necessarily making a “better” decision than another. They are making a decision through the machinery they have. Consider that perhaps our greatest challenge is actually our most intuitive skill.
I think stuttering gives me a sense of empathy I’m not sure I’d have otherwise. It gives me an understanding of daily struggle (and yes, others have it far, far worse than I do). It exposes me, for better or worse, as authentic. As much as I try and weave and bob around speech, there’s no getting around the fact that there’s something there, and I think this is curious to some people, even if they are bewildered.
Also, my stuttering reminds me that maybe I do actually need to listen to the abbreviation of speech. Maybe my brain is telling me to stop, by force, to consider being more thoughtful, to listen to the world around me and express myself more earnestly.
It’s important to recognize that we all have a superpower disguised somewhere in there as a nuisance, or even a demon. By claiming this new power, we may reshape a decision we might make or avoid. I think, in that sense, we should welcome our struggles, perhaps not with open arms, but with a curiosity we may have long sought to avoid.
5 reminders of how our struggles can invite us to activate our own superpowers
Pain is learned empathy: What’s beautiful about it is that pain is a direct path to someone, perhaps a friend, a loved one, even a stranger. You may just not know it yet. By being transparent, just a little, and allowing yourself to share a bit of your story with someone, you can oftentimes dramatically help someone just by being you. This goes so much further than trying to solve their problem with a series of “do this” and “do that” instructions.
Insecurity sparks curiosity: What makes us feel vulnerable is an invitation to educate ourselves because we’re already admitting the presence of a void. It doesn’t matter if the void doesn’t feel intellectual in nature. It’s still an opportunity to broaden our knowledge. A willingness to learn, to help fill the void with information and a new sense of perspective, creates a more rounded sense of self and the world. That makes us better parents, friends, employees, just better people.
Adversity creates adaptability: While the ways in which we have dealt with our struggles may not always have been stellar, those judgements, our lapses in judgement, created improvisation. Our ability to coexist with the challenges, fight them, dance with them, be buried by them, or kick them to the curb has empowered our ability to roll with the punches. Our ability to be nimble in times of strife is a gift because it shows us there is not a single path to an outcome.
Anxiety informs risk: There’s ample evidence that anxiety does a good job of preventing us from doing things, but when recognized as anxiety and managed as part of the assessment equation, it is incredibly good at determining risk level. This allows our brains to assess which scenarios may just be temporary obstacles and which may become problems over the long term. Our anxiety is a physical manifestation of a very healthy power, and the trick is relegating it to the role of a friendly advisor.
Failure, and the fear of it, opens our eyes to patterns: Regret, disappointment, perhaps a history of decisions that didn’t turn out as you hoped, these shape our sense of self and can instill in us a sense that we’ll never get it right. But they also help us discover opportunity where others may not see it. With the perspective of failure comes experience.
This lived hardship is empowering as long as you use it as something to build upon, not bury yourself within. It gives you the ability to advise others too, a child, a mentee, or a friend, which can be incredibly empowering and rewarding in itself.
We all have experiences or a part of our identity that makes us feel a certain way, and we do have control over how these direct, impede, or inform our decisions. I hope some of my struggle can help you navigate your own in a way that feels more productive than burdensome. The best way to start is to be yourself, warts and all.
The more you can begin from a place of authenticity, the more directly you can navigate decisions in a way that leads to intentional outcomes. The more people can know you without you having to concoct the persona cocktail you present to them. That doesn’t always mean you will make the right decisions. It’ll just mean they were the ones who fit who you were in that moment. Oftentimes that’s about as right as we can get.
Where it leads us, who knows? I’m still figuring out how my struggle shapes the choices that I make, and writing this piece was one of those choices. I hope it can help inspire a decision of your own.
Read more from Justin Matley
Justin Matley, Professional Coach
Justin Matley is an award-winning professional development coach and consultant and runs Matley Coaching, focused on effective communication, time management, and planning for individuals and businesses. He has spent over two decades working across media, production, advertising, and news industries, and a decade teaching in higher education. Justin is deeply committed to community and the ability of people and organizations to find balance, resonate authentically, and connect empathetically in a world rapidly making it more difficult to do so. He coaches individuals and consults with businesses across the country remotely and from his studio in Connecticut.
