How to Retrain Your Brain to See Every Crisis as an Opportunity

Although I’m not the world’s number one Miley Cyrus fan, I can get behind some of her lyrics. Specifically:

“There’s always gonna be another mountain. I’m always gonna wanna make it move.”

The song climbed the charts many years ago, but the idea behind it hasn’t aged a day: Growth demands effort, and progress rarely comes without resistance.

I didn’t become CEO of an industry-leading dialing software platform by waiting for opportunities to knock. And while I’ve been lucky in many ways, my life hasn’t always been easy.

Even when the world is at its most daunting, you have a choice in how you handle difficulties. And you can’t spend your life avoiding those difficulties, because there will be obstacles standing between you and almost anything you want out of life.

You pay for every corner you cut

My advice is to think about every shortcut you take and every problem you avoid the same way you would think about taking out a loan: It might make your life easier now, but it creates a new challenge you’ll have to deal with later.

When you skip a step, dodge a difficult conversation or ignore an operational issue with your business, you’re not actually eliminating; you’re deferring. And when you defer payments on a loan, the amount of interest you owe on the principal goes up. The longer you wait, the deeper in the red you get.

This doesn’t always happen in a way that’s explicitly financial — at least, not at first. It could look like ignoring early warning signs in your pipeline because revenue still looks strong on paper. It could look like tolerating mediocre performance because having a hard conversation feels uncomfortable. If you wait long enough, the cost will show up in dollars and cents.

Learn to see challenges as opportunities

How you react when a problem first arises can have a major impact on whether you successfully handle it. The right instinct in a crisis is to actively search for solutions instead of freezing up or catastrophizing.

Unfortunately, most people experience a fight-or-flight response when confronted with serious hurdles. They either overreact or avoid the issue, neither of which is an appropriate response. When you’re unable to think beyond the immediate moment, you increase your odds of making a costly mistake.

But there is a silver lining. In one of my previous articles for this website, I wrote about trusting your gut — because instinct is the product of experience and pattern recognition arriving faster than conscious thought. That means instinct is something you can train.

My crisis instincts helped PhoneBurner navigate a high-stakes regulatory issue that surfaced less than a month after I became CEO. My quick thinking wasn’t luck or something innate. It was the result of accepting challenges as a kid while working on my parents’ farm, honing my problem-solving skills as a young adult building apps and inventing in my workshop, and organizing conferences early in my career. None of these experiences were easy, but they taught me how to react when things weren’t going my way.

Retrain your brain to embrace crisis

When I look back at those experiences, I can identify a few key principles that helped me change my approach to problem-solving over time. Here are the most important ones:

• Move toward problems instead of away from them: Crisis is a sign that you need to take action. Assuming disaster is the only outcome makes it a self-fulfilling prophecy.

• Build relationships before you need help: Some of the solutions to my most pressing and urgent problems have come through friends of friends. You can’t have strong crisis instincts if you don’t know who you can trust when things go sideways.

• Take time for faith and stillness: The farm I grew up on was a busy environment with constant tasks that needed attention. Running a software company is like that, too. The pace can pull you into constant reaction, but hard problems require clear thinking. Deliberately stepping back has helped me navigate tough moments and create major breakthroughs.

• Name current challenges vs. worrying about worst-case scenarios: When facing adversity, say out loud what’s happening. Separate the reality from your fears about where it might lead. I’ve done this countless times when facing a product or business challenge, and it’s always helped me identify the right next move.

The life you want requires the person you’re becoming

Those lyrics I quoted earlier aren’t some empty glorification of hustle culture, at least not to me. They’re about the fact that what you want and the work it takes to get it cannot be separated.

Adversity is part of any pathway that leads to meaningful success. Since avoiding it isn’t an option, the only question is: Who do you want to be when you encounter it?

That philosophy shows up in how I run PhoneBurner. When hard problems surface, I’m not looking for a way around them. I’m energized by them. My team sees that. It’s how we’ve continued to innovate in a telecommunications landscape that’s only grown more complex over time.

So before you do anything else, let me leave you with this challenge: Ask yourself what’s the hardest thing you’ve been working around in your life or business. Name it clearly. Then take a step toward it instead of continuing to avoid it.

It won’t be easy. But that’s the point.