740 words / 4 min read
The stories we tell ourselves about our past can either gatekeep our future — or point us toward it.
For many of us, the stories we tell ourselves about our past become gatekeepers, dangling the key to our future just out of reach. But your future is rightfully yours, and there is hope on the other side of adversity. Getting there starts with understanding what adversity actually asks of us — and what it doesn’t get to decide.
It’s the same lesson resilience keeps teaching me– not a single dramatic comeback, but the steady work of deciding what your past gets to control.
This piece was inspired by a series of interviews I recently had the privilege of conducting with people who’ve lived through genuinely life-changing situations. Their honesty about what adversity actually looks and feels like, from the inside, shaped much of what follows.
The Privot Pivot
We all have moments when we know we have to make a choice. But that decision — the private pivot, the one no one else sees you make — is only the beginning. The first move toward real change happens within, in the stories you start telling yourself differently. What follows is more visible: choosing different surroundings, forming new relationships, building a life that matches the story you’re now telling.
Finding Your Exit
Getting to that decision isn’t automatic, though. Along the way, it’s fair to ask: are you unsure how to find your exit? Which turns should you take, and who will you trust to come alongside you and help you find your way? Nobody navigates adversity alone and calls it easy. The right people beside you change the entire shape of the path.
Adversity on a Sliding Scale
Adversity isn’t one fixed thing — it sits on a scale, starting very low and running all the way off the charts. Starting something new, a job or a class where you’re learning something unfamiliar, sits lower on that scale. It still counts. It’s still adversity, just a smaller dose of it.
Earlier in my career, I had many of these lower-scale moments. There were times when these moments felt significant. Looking back, I can see them for what they really were: stepping stones, quietly building the capacity I’d need for the far more difficult situations still ahead of me.
Failure, Fear, and Courage
A few words tend to show up whenever we talk about adversity: failure, fear, courage. They can all live in the same moment, and yet each one means something distinct. Living in fear and taking action anyway — that’s courage. When we face a difficult decision, or get swept up in circumstances outside our control, feelings of fear and failure show up right alongside it. That’s not a contradiction — that’s just what adversity feels like when you’re standing inside it.
We still have choices. If we can sit with what’s in front of us and pull from past experience — the stepping stones — we can keep ourselves from freezing and choose to act instead, even when fear is telling us to hold back.
What the Travel Industry Taught Me
Before I started Hartmetrics, most of my career was spent in the travel industry — an industry that faced adversity more than once, at a magnitude none of us could have prepared for. The decisions that came out of those moments weren’t failures. They were difficult calls made under real impact, and impact like that often shows up wearing the mask of fear and uncertainty even when it isn’t either of those things at all. Learning to tell the difference is part of what carried me here.
Setbacks will always be part of your story. That doesn’t change. What changes is you — the new version of you looks for the next step instead of the exit. One day at a time, you keep going, and eventually you realize the person who once lived managed by fear and uncertainty is now the person who guides others to find the best version of themselves.
That shift doesn’t happen by accident. It happens one choice at a time — which brings it back to you.
So, what’s the next chapter you’re ready to write?
What is stopping you — is it you, or is it your story?
Self-doubt doesn’t have to be removed all at once — just one stretch, one win, at a time.
If any of this feels familiar, let’s talk. Book a complimentary discovery call and let’s find your next step together.
Until next time, — Michele Delgado, Founder Hartmetrics