October 5, 2022
There Must Be Some Way:
How to Overcome Life’s Adversities and Struggles
to Achieve Emotional Strength
Kathryn Perciful
Aviva Publishing (2020)
ISBN: 978-1-944335-20-5
New Book Reveals That There’s Always a Way to Overcome Adversity
Kathryn Perciful knows what it is to overcome adversity, whether it be stuttering as a child or coping with Parkinson’s disease in her seventies. In There Must Be Some Way: How to Overcome Life’s Adversities and Struggles to Achieve Emotional Strength, Kathy tells her story in an engaging and entertaining way, while sharing her hard-won insights into life’s struggles and, ultimately, its joys.
Now in her seventies, Kathy has experienced terrible lows and terrific highs. Those lows, which most would see as adversities, she has chosen repeatedly to see as opportunities, leading to her coining the term adversitunities. By turning those adversities into opportunities, she also ended up reaching many of her highs, and she’s had some wonderful highs, including running successful businesses, becoming a respected Toastmasters speaker, and enjoying twenty years of marriage to jazz legend Jack Perciful.
In There Must Be Some Way, Kathy tells her life story chronologically, highlighting the various adversities she has overcome, beginning with her profound stuttering as a child that often made her an outcast among other children and which hindered her career, placing her in invisible roles when she entered the business world. Later adversities she faced included a bad marriage, debt incurred from her ex-husband, business setbacks she had to turn around, the loss of her second beloved husband, and her recent illness. But this book is not all about her. As she tells her story through a series of episodic chapters, Kathy never loses sight of the book’s purpose—to help the reader learn how to overcome adversities like she has.
The book’s chapters are sprinkled with helpful exercises and insightful questions so the reader will pause to think about what they have read and consider how to apply it to their own life. The exercises also cause the reader to reflect back upon their own life to understand their past and how to move forward by finding strength in that past. For example, just a couple of the powerful questions Kathy asks the reader are: “Think of a situation that stumps you right now. How would one of your heroes resolve it?” and “Describe a time you thought changing yourself would change another person. What are the drawbacks of this approach?”
Kathy also outlines the eight key elements for creating adversitunities and then shares how she applied them to various obstacles she’s faced to achieve success—situations that many of us would consider difficult, such as becoming a singer or overcoming fear to go skydiving.
Of course, Kathy has used many strategies to achieve success. Some of those strategies include positive thinking, supporting others, perseverance, and problem-solving. She gives examples of how she has applied each of these strategies to various situations in her life. She also offers wonderful quotations from famous people to provide additional inspiration. One of my favorites she quotes is by George Bernard Shaw: “Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.”
Most importantly, Kathy has relied upon her motto, which is the title of the book: “There must be some way.” She states, “No matter what your struggle might be, there must be some way to become who you want to be in this world.” She used this motto first to overcome stuttering and then she applied it to the rest of her life. She is even grateful for her stuttering, stating, “I believe that, in many ways, I was fortunate to experience the challenge of disfluency at a young age because I developed skills over a long period rather than having to recover from a sudden illness or debilitating accident.” She adds, “I began to help myself. With a combination of persistence, resilience, determination, and problem-solving abilities, I turned my affliction into lessons to be learned. I believed there was a way for me to talk like everyone else. I just needed to figure out what to do. I knew I couldn’t avoid living my life, so I started slowly and added skills as I discovered what worked best for me.”
What Kathy has to say about overcoming adversity may in many ways be common sense, but when adversity hits us, we usually need a reminder. No one knows that better than Kathy. While she was writing this book, she was diagnosed with Parkinson’s, which sent her into a tailspin. She lost energy and motivation, but eventually, she found a way to turn that around too. One morning, it hit her what she must do—read her own book!
Reading There Must Be Some Way helped Kathy, and now it can help you. Today, Kathy is enjoying what she calls her “encore life.” She knows many adversitunities still lie before her, and she is ready to explore and conquer them. There Must Be Some Way is our opportunity to join her in doing the same.
— Tyler R. Tichelaar, PhD and award-winning author of Narrow Lives and The Best Place
