To successfully deal with a difficult experience or period; to survive a hard time.
To successfully deal with a difficult experience, period, or challenge and come out the other side. If you get through something hard, you manage to survive or endure it, often with effort or help from others.
Type
Inseparable
Collocations
get through a difficult time — survive or endure hardship
get through to someone — successfully communicate with someone
get through an exam — pass or complete something demanding
⚠️ Watch out
Can mean survive, succeed at a test, or successfully communicate — clarify the meaning with context or a specific object.
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In the winter of 1914–1915, Ernest Shackleton's ship Endurance became trapped in the pack ice of the Weddell Sea, Antarctica. By November 1915, the ice had crushed the hull entirely and the ship sank. Shackleton and his 27 men were left on the ice with three small lifeboats, dwindling rations, and no means of rescue — no radio signal could reach civilization. Over the following months, Shackleton made a series of {{extraordinary|adjective|hard}} decisions: he kept a {{rigid|adjective|medium}} daily routine to maintain morale, {{organized|verb-various-tenses|easy}} sports on the ice, and refused to let panic take hold. In April 1916, the men sailed the lifeboats to Elephant Island. Shackleton then took five men on an 800-mile open-boat journey across the most {{violent|adjective|easy}} ocean on earth to South Georgia Island to get help. Every single member of the expedition survived. No plan had gone right. Everything had gone wrong. {{But|connective|easy}} Shackleton's insistence on discipline, small goals, and collective purpose is precisely how the expedition {{managed|verb-various-tenses|medium}} to get through what should, by any reasonable measure, have been a {{fatal|adjective|hard}} ordeal. {{So|connective|medium}}, they {{get through|phrasal-verb|medium}}, {{indeed|connective|hard}}, against every rational expectation.
To survive or cope means to successfully manage a difficult situation, period, or experience without being defeated by it. It implies resilience and the ability to keep functioning despite pressure or hardship.
Type
Intransitive verb / verb phrase (survive and cope function as standalone intransitive verbs, or appear with prepositions such as 'cope with' when an object is introduced)
Collocations
cope with something — used when a specific challenge or difficulty is named (e.g. 'cope with pressure')
survive a difficult period — emphasises endurance over a defined stretch of time
manage to cope — adds a sense of effort or near-difficulty (e.g. 'she managed to cope alone')
struggle to cope — highlights that the process was hard but ultimately successful
help someone cope — suggests external support in overcoming difficulty
⚠️ Watch out
Be careful not to use 'cope' without 'with' when a specific object follows — 'she coped the situation' is incorrect; it must be 'she coped with the situation.' Additionally, 'survive' can sound more dramatic than intended in everyday contexts, so consider whether 'cope' is the more proportionate choice depending on the severity of the situation being described.
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When the café where Priya had worked for six years suddenly closed, she felt lost. She had built her whole routine around that place — the early mornings, the regulars, the rhythm of it. For the first few weeks, she wasn't sure she could cope. Bills were piling up, and the job market was slower than she had expected. But Priya was determined. She took on some freelance catering work, enrolled in a short business course, and leaned on friends more than she was used to. Slowly, she found her footing again. Looking back, she often says that surviving that period taught her more about herself than any good year ever had.
THE QUIET STRENGTH OF COMMUNITIES THAT COPE
When a factory closure wiped out over 600 jobs in the market town of Hartwell last spring, many observers feared the community would fracture under the weight of it. Unemployment in the area had already been rising, local services were stretched, and the psychological toll on long-term workers was visible almost immediately.
But something unexpected happened. Neighbours started leaving groceries on doorsteps. A former manager launched a free CV workshop from a church hall. A local credit union extended low-interest loans to affected families. Within weeks, an informal support network had taken shape — not organised from above, but grown from within.
"You find out who people really are in moments like this," said Diane Okafor, a community coordinator who helped set up the town's emergency advice service. "Hartwell had to cope with something that would have broken a lot of places, and it did so because people chose to look out for each other."
The economic recovery is still far from complete. Several families have relocated, and the high street has not fully bounced back. But Hartwell's response offers a reminder that the capacity to survive serious disruption often lives not in institutions, but in the relationships between ordinary people who simply refuse to give up on one another.
In work English, 'endure / overcome' means to successfully deal with a difficult professional experience by persisting through it and managing its challenges. It conveys both the act of withstanding hardship and the achievement of moving past it.
Type
Transitive verb (used as 'endure [something]' or 'overcome [something]')
Collocations
overcome challenges — used when difficulties have been successfully resolved
endure pressure — describes sustained exposure to demanding conditions over time
overcome obstacles — common in project and performance reporting contexts
endure uncertainty — typically used in change management or restructuring scenarios
overcome adversity — a broader, often more formal expression used in leadership communications
⚠️ Watch out
Note that 'endure' and 'overcome' carry subtly different emphases: 'endure' highlights the act of persisting through difficulty, while 'overcome' stresses the successful resolution of it. Using 'endure' alone in a formal report may unintentionally suggest that challenges were merely tolerated rather than resolved, so pair it carefully with positive outcome language.
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When the merger was announced, no one in the finance team knew what to expect. Weeks of ambiguity followed, and the team had to endure a prolonged period of uncertainty about roles, reporting lines, and job security. Morale dipped, and several senior members considered leaving. However, under the steady guidance of the incoming CFO, the team ultimately overcame its most difficult phase. Clear communication, honest town halls, and a revised team structure made the difference. Six months later, the integrated finance function was outperforming its pre-merger targets. They had overcome something that could easily have derailed the entire integration.
When Carla Mendez joined Vantage Consulting as Head of Delivery in January, she inherited a portfolio that was already under strain. Three flagship accounts were behind schedule, the delivery team was operating at full capacity, and a key technology partner had just announced it was withdrawing from its service agreement with thirty days' notice.
In the weeks that followed, Carla worked closely with her team to restructure workloads, renegotiate interim support arrangements, and communicate proactively with affected clients. There were difficult conversations, long evenings, and moments when the path forward was far from clear. Nevertheless, the team demonstrated a level of professionalism and determination that drew praise from the executive committee.
By the end of March, the delivery function had managed to overcome what had initially appeared to be an unmanageable accumulation of risk. All three accounts were brought back on track, and the technology gap had been filled through a newly negotiated partnership with an alternative provider.
In her end-of-quarter address to the team, Carla was candid about what the period had demanded. 'We had to endure a great deal of pressure in a short space of time,' she said, 'and I am genuinely proud of how every one of you responded.' The episode would later be cited in the firm's internal resilience framework as a model for crisis delivery management.
In academic English, 'navigate adversity' means to successfully manage and overcome a significant challenge, hardship, or difficult set of circumstances through sustained effort and adaptive strategies. The expression is commonly used in scholarly discourse to describe the process by which individuals, communities, or institutions effectively confront and move beyond obstacles.
Type
Verb phrase (transitive)
Collocations
successfully navigate adversity — emphasises outcome and competence, used when affirming effective coping
navigate adversity with resilience — pairs the verb phrase with a key academic construct from resilience theory
capacity to navigate adversity — noun phrase construction common in research discussions of individual or institutional potential
navigate adversity in the context of — situates the expression within a specific domain or setting
students/communities/organisations navigate adversity — subject-verb collocations typical in empirical and theoretical literature
⚠️ Watch out
Avoid using 'navigate adversity' in contexts where the difficulty is minor or routine, as the expression carries an implicit weight of significant hardship; applying it to trivial challenges may undermine scholarly credibility. Additionally, ensure that 'adversity' remains the grammatical object — constructions such as 'navigate through adversity' are occasionally encountered but are considered redundant in formal academic prose.
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Dr Amara Osei had spent three years collecting field data in conflict-affected regions of West Africa. When a funding withdrawal threatened to halt her project entirely, colleagues observed how she navigate adversity with remarkable composure — restructuring her methodology, securing emergency grants, and maintaining the trust of her research participants throughout. Her department head later cited her case in a faculty seminar on researcher resilience, noting that the ability to navigate adversity under institutional pressure was not simply a personal quality but a skill the university had a responsibility to develop in all early-career researchers. Amara's experience ultimately shaped a new mentoring programme.
The concept of resilience has occupied a central position in developmental psychology, sociology, and educational research for several decades, yet scholars continue to debate what it truly means for an individual to navigate adversity successfully. Early theorisations tended to frame resilience as a relatively stable personality trait — something a person either possessed or lacked — a view that positioned successful coping as the product of innate psychological fortitude. This deterministic understanding, however, has been substantially challenged by more recent ecological and systemic perspectives, which emphasise that the capacity to endure and recover from hardship is profoundly shaped by the relational, cultural, and institutional contexts in which individuals are embedded.
Contemporary scholarship invites us to ask not merely whether a person can navigate adversity, but under what conditions and with what forms of support this navigation becomes possible. This reframing carries significant implications for policy and practice. If resilience is a dynamic, context-dependent capacity rather than a fixed attribute, then institutions — whether universities, healthcare systems, or social services — bear a meaningful responsibility for creating environments in which individuals are not simply expected to endure difficulty, but are genuinely equipped to do so. The shift from an individualist to a structuralist understanding of resilience thus represents one of the more consequential intellectual developments in recent applied social science.