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Friday, May 25, 2012

How to use Adversity to change Your Life

Adversity and struggle can change your life. 

If you do it right, you’ll learn how to overcome a crisis in no time and you become a better you in the process. This might just be your opportunity to change how your life has been working for you so far.

Usually when we experience struggle or challenges in our life, we either ask ourselves “Why me?” or we complain about it thinking that might actually make a difference.

Each one of us has to go through a series of difficult phases in our lives - how we deal with that is what makes us different. Your set of challenges and struggles exist because of the decisions you made in life until now.

It’s important to acknowledge first that you are where you are because of how you dealt with situations in the past.

Another insight to adversity is that it reveals you to yourself. It is only when you get pushed into bad places and out of your comfort zone that you have the most growth potential to change. As you know, we don’t usually change when things come easy, so the purpose of your problem is to turn you into someone stronger, smarter or braver.

Our bigger problems usually also have a theme for our individual life. For example my theme used to be a difficulty establishing boundaries and standing up for myself, so I had to face struggle when people used to walk all over me. For you it might be something different like creating trust, letting go of attachment or taking chances. Whatever we fail to do for ourselves will become the theme of our future struggles. There is a real purpose for struggle: that purpose is to push you into growing, leaping forward and becoming someone with skills and insights.

Once you arrived at a challenge you then have two choices:
The first choice is to face it and do what you need to develop the skills to overcome it. This might mean you have to learn to be more direct with people, to be more resilient in relationships or go and risk getting disappointed.
The second choice is the choice we usually make: to complain about it and hope your crisis goes away. Sometimes it will indeed go away, but then you also set yourself up for failure in the future and you missed your opportunity to become a deeper better personality.

Your struggle is there because you need to learn something.
It might become your biggest insight and a way for you to have a better understanding and wisdom of how to deal with challenges.
Our challenges are there to transform us into people we  don't currently think we could be. Most of us start our lives with little advantages, but we all have aspirations and hopes for our future. Facing challenges and becoming the courageous person you need to be will the only way to bring those hopes into reach.
So the next time there’s trouble in your job, family or relationships - think about what it is you would need to learn so that you can overcome it and move on.

What is it you need to learn so your struggle becomes  easy to deal with?
What is the choice you are making when you have to deal with challenges?

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