Only rebel not ye against the Lord, neither fear ye the people of the land; for they are bread for us: their defence is departed from them, and the Lord is with us: fear them not. – Numbers 14:9, KJV

Eric Barker’s blog posts from his site, Barking Up the Wrong Tree, have been featured in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Wired Magazine and Time Magazine. For his blog post, New Harvard Research Reveals a Fun Way to be More Successful, Barker interviewed Shawn Achor, the bestselling author of The Happiness Advantage. As Barker reports:

Shawn did a study of bankers right after the huge banking crisis hit. Most of them were incredibly stressed. But a few were happy and resilient.

What did those guys have in common? They didn’t see problems as threats; they saw them as challenges to overcome. Here’s Shawn:

What these positive outliers do is that when there are changes that occur in the economic landscape or the political landscape or at an educational institution, they see those changes not as threats, but as challenges.

So those people are just wired differently and our duty is to envy them, right? Nope. Shawn did an experiment that proved this attitude can be learned.

Just by showing the normal bankers a video explaining how to see stress as a challenge, he turned sad bankers into super-bankers. Here’s Shawn:

And we watched those groups of people over the next three to six weeks, and what we found was if we could move people to view stress as enhancing, a challenge instead of as a threat, we saw a 23% drop in their stress-related symptoms. It produced a significant increase not only in levels of happiness, but a dramatic improvement in their levels of engagement at work as well.

Not only does seeing problems as challenges yield earthly benefits, it yields spiritual ones as well. In Numbers 13-14, after the twelve scouts of Israel returned from their inspection of the Promised Land, it was obvious the land was exactly as God had described it – flowing with milk and honey. But on the heels of praise for the land came proclamations of “we can’t.” “We can’t” take the land because “we can’t” beat the people of the land, especially the giants. Pessimism ruled the day, causing a rift between God and His people that resulted in God forbidding most of Israel from entering the Promised Land.

In contrast, Caleb and Joshua saw the “giant problem” not as a reason to fear but as a challenge to overcome, with God leading the charge. Both men trusted in the Lord’s ability to keep His promise. Their trust strengthened their relationship with God, and God rewarded their faith forty years later with entrance into the Promised Land.

For the non-Christian, the difference between seeing problems as threats and seeing problems as challenges is a choice – a choice between thinking negatively or thinking positively. For the Christian, however, the difference between seeing problems as threats and seeing problems as challenges is trust – trusting in our natural abilities versus trusting in God’s supernatural ones. The ten pessimistic scouts and the people who followed them focused on their inadequacies. Caleb and Joshua focused on God’s super-adequacies. He is able to do anything, even conquer the giants living in the promised land we’ve been told to take.

So the next time you feel stress and fear well up in your soul, remember to look at the problem at hand not as a threat but as a challenge of trust. Trust in God’s ability to enable you to overcome. If you do, then you will, sooner or later, stand on the other side of the problem as the victor.