Coaching practices for Helping Others with Adversity

Describe almost anything you are working through and IX Coach finds the practices whose real-world fit is closest. For Helping Others with Adversity, these are the strongest matches in the current practice library.

Does this sound like the set of challenges you might be facing?

  • I’ve come far enough through my own version of this that I want to be the person I needed back then for someone just entering it
  • Going through the worst of it showed me exactly who actually showed up for me
  • When everything fell apart, a few people really showed up for me and we got so much closer
  • I’m staring down something hard now and I feel like I have no idea if I can handle it
  • Everyone brings their problems to me to solve, I jump in and fix each one, and now I’m the bottleneck for everything while my people never grow

Practices that may help

  1. Share your benefits with others who are facing similar adversity
    Once you have found genuine benefits, sharing them with others in similar situations extends both your benefit and theirs.
    Benefit-Finding in Adversity, Made Practical
  2. Domain 1 — Deeper relationships
    Adversity can reveal who truly shows up and deepen the capacity for closeness and compassion.
    Post-Traumatic Growth, Made Practical
  3. Recognize and reinvest in deepened relationships
    Notice which relationships grew closer through the hardship, and deliberately invest back in them.
    Benefit-Finding: Locating Meaning and Growth in Adversity
  4. Identify the strengths the hardship revealed
    Name capacities you discovered in yourself only because the situation demanded them.
    Benefit-Finding: Locating Meaning and Growth in Adversity
  5. Give the work back without abandoning people
    Resist taking ownership of problems that belong to the people facing the adaptive challenge.
    Adaptive Leadership, Made Practical
  6. Benefit-Finding: Locating Meaning and Growth in Adversity
    Benefit-finding is the coping process of identifying genuine positives — closer relationships, new priorities, personal strengths — that emerged from a hard experience. Research, much of it in health and illness, associates it with better adjustment, though the effects are modest, time-sensitive, and only helpful when the benefits are real rather than forced.
  7. Benefit-Finding in Adversity, Made Practical
    Benefit-finding — the cognitive process of identifying positive outcomes, lessons, or changes that emerge from difficult experiences — is associated with better psychological and physical health outcomes in observational research on illness, loss, and trauma. However, positive psychology researchers are careful to distinguish genuine benefit-finding from forced positive reframing, which can backfire. Timing, authenticity, and the type of adversity all matter significantly.
  8. Direct tonglen toward a specific suffering person
    Bring a person who is suffering to mind and breathe in their pain; breathe out whatever would give them relief.
    Tonglen: The Tibetan Practice of Taking and Sending
  9. Accumulate mastery experiences as confidence deposits
    Small wins in a domain you control build the self-efficacy that makes adversity feel survivable rather than catastrophic.
    The Resilience Bank Account, Made Practical
  10. Let adversity reorder your priorities
    Use the clarity that hardship brings to permanently re-rank what actually matters to you.
    Benefit-Finding: Locating Meaning and Growth in Adversity

Related concerns

Describe your situation in your own words to search the complete practice library.

Practice this with IX Coach

Try this practice