You grow with your challenges - whatever they are …
We all know the feeling of life turning against us sometimes. When we believe to be invincible and riding on the wave of success, some obstacle just comes our way and hits. This is the principle of life developing in waves. There will always be ups and downs, the only question is how we react to them. This is a mindset question.
Following from the mindset angle, how is it possible that some people always see challenges as opportunities for becoming stronger, better and develop, while others see them as large threats and try to avoid them at any costs? Again, what matters is the mindset.
We must understand that we ourselves are the key holder and main influencers when it comes to facing challenges. The reaction to them begins and end with us, not with others or circumstances around us. We hold the key to either live in fear towards facing challenges or accepting they will occur and learning to live with them, maybe even start seeing them as opportunities to progress in the long term. This, will really let us move forward, be less stressed and face a happier and more fulfilling life in the future.
Secondly, we have to understand that obstacles and unforeseen circumstances will always with absolute certainty occur while we walk our way through life and there is nothing, we can do about it to prevent this, if we don’t just want to never leave our homes, to avoid any potential threats we might face. We therefore cannot prevent things to go wrong, we can only influence on how we react to those negative experiences. Our reactions is the key, to learn to live with risks, unforeseen circumstances and to reach a balance for taking calculated risks, without loosing the fun in life as we are driven by our fears for things to go wrong or off plan.
If we spend the rest of our lives thinking about avoiding threats that we hypothetically might face one day, we will hinder our self – development and progressing in a drastic way. We cannot build a life on hypothesis of challenges we might face just to prevent things from going wrong. We have to therefore stop thinking about challenges primarily as threats, rather than seeing them as opportunities to become stronger.
Once a situation hits us, we have an active choice of how our mind reacts to those new circumstances. We can either face depression, or we can accept the new circumstances quite quickly, get orientated in the new situation and learn to see the new opportunities and options we now face to make the best out of the situation. This is our choice and the only thing we can actively influence, as it is certain the unforeseen challenges will hit us all either one way or the other anyway.
Once we understand that our reaction is the key, we also won’t ask questions like “Why me?” anymore, which are always backward looking. We will switch to asking question like “What now?”. This is exactly the shift of mindset that is necessary in an ever-changing rapid world we are facing today. This has to be trained, however it can actively be learned and applied by us all, everyday in any situation we face.
We have an active choice here, let’s use it to be able to face challenges in a much better and rewarding way for ourselves and others around us.
