Face Your Challenges With Confidence

Life is full of challenges. Some people seem to meet every challenge with confidence, while others struggle to overcome them. Determined people especially get a sense of satisfaction from facing challenges head on, it brings a sense of accomplishment and can be very fulfilling. On some level, you actually seek challenges. Your highest self wants you to learn and grow, and life’s most effective tool toward growth is experience.

The problem is that all too often you might find yourself faced with the same challenges over and over again, and that is when you start to lose motivation to face the issue and you lose sight of the potential lesson. At that point, challenges can become problems that can spiral you into despair and frustration.

As a co-creator of your own reality, you have the ability to overcome these challenges. It is with this sense of responsibility and awareness that you can begin your journey into a higher state of consciousness where challenges are no longer challenges, but opportunities to get a glimpse of your highest self.

Here are some ways to better accept and meet your personal challenges, whatever they may be.

Face the Challenge

In many cases this is the most important step, the most obvious step, yet it is also the most often missed. People spend time looking for a way around the issue, or wallowing in despair at the enormity of the challenge, instead of facing it. Even mundane things, like a pileup of laundry or work, get ignored. Putting a challenge off does not make it go away. This is true of big challenges, as well as the small ones. The most important thing you can do is face what is in front of you head on.

Be Present

Do not underestimate the power of being present. If you make a practice of facing your challenges, even in failure,with full presence and awareness, you will find most challenges are not challenges at all. Instead life’s challenges become messages from the universe. Meditation can help you cultivate silent awareness and is a good tool to help bring that focus to yourself during difficult times.

You can ask yourself questions that help you better understand the problem and how it affects you.

• Why is this a challenge?
• Do I believe that I am capable of being successful at this challenge?
• What are the possible outcomes if I succeed?
• What is the outcome if I fail?

These questions are not meant to solve the problem, rather they are meant to help bring you into fuller awareness of the challenge itself and your emotional reaction to it.

Look to Your SELF for the Solution

Others can help you arrive at your own understanding, but no one ever solves your problems for you. Even in circumstances where someone else is acting as an authority or partner, only you can decide for yourself how you will process the situation. The longer you spend searching for guidance outside of yourself, the longer you spend ignoring the problem. Even those who appear to help are only acting as instruments in the greater process of love and grace that is the true nature of your relationship to the universe.

Stop looking for the easy way out or the wise words that will show you the way. Assess the situation, your resources, and your abilities, and then act. Your action may include enlisting help from others, but it will be your challenge to solve. The sooner you take up the challenge, the quicker it stops being a problem.

Know Yourself

There is a reason why certain challenges seem hard to you while others breeze right through the same situations. There is a reason why you put off a task for weeks that can be done several times a day by someone else. It is not because they have anything over you or are better than you. And it has nothing to do with a particular skill set or know how. It is all about consciousness. Those who face challenging tasks have found a way to avoid seeing those activities as challenges. 

Challenges are opportunities to grow. That growth takes place out of potentiality, your potentiality, which is infinite and highly active in every moment of life. Come to know yourself as that. You are pure potential experiencing life through what seems like limitation. Challenges are spikes in that imaginary limitation barrier that guide you to awareness.

You decide: Are you limited or are you an ever expansive growth of consciousness and love? Choose the latter, and taking another look at that so called challenge you have been facing. With your potential, you can turn a mountain of a challenge into a speck of dust. Take that dreaded project and turn it into that thing you did before lunch today.

Detach From the Outcome

Stressing about the potential outcome is often what turns a molehill into a mountain. Once you shift your focus to the thing you are actually doing, instead of the result, the most intimidating parts of the trial start to disappear.

When you attach emotions to the problem, it has power over you. If you simply perform the task at hand without worrying about the outcome, you have power over the situation.

Some challenges seem enormous and harsh, but if you remain centered and full of awareness, no challenge is too big to meet with power and grace.

With thanks to Leo Carver 

https://chopra.com/articles/how-to-face-a-challenge-with-confidence 

Turn Crisis Into Opportunity

The coronavirus lockdown has been a crisis in itself. Coming out of lockdown, after being safely cocooned in our homes, mixing with other people, is going to create another crisis for us.  How we cope with it is the important thing.     

Crises come into our lives, no matter how we may try to avoid them. They are troubling, unwanted experiences or events that take us way out of our comfort zone. Typically, crises result in some type of loss. The very nature of a crisis is antithetical to our core values of certainty and predictability as they vanish in an instant.

We desperately try to restore order to our lives, as chaos seems to prevail. Yet, if we learn to reframe how we see crisis, we might actually take advantage of it. There is the potential for alchemy as the crisis unfolds into a gain, provided we learn to stop resisting the unwanted change.

The crisis may be of a financial, relationship, health, or spiritual nature. Those crises that are internally driven tend to be relational, psychological, or emotional. Ordinarily, we try to avoid these upsets as best we can. Yet, upheavals are at times leveled upon us and may not be of our making. We may feel like victims of the circumstances, as we struggle to hold on to life as we knew it.

Typically, personal change requires our motivation and intention to serve as the catalyst to power the transition. Crisis, on the other hand, removes the self motivating requirement as it places us squarely outside of our familiar zone. The crisis literally removes the boundaries that have circumscribed us.

It is as if a tornado has swept in, and when we open our eyes, everything has changed. The maelstrom places us well beyond the bounds of the known. We typically find ourselves wanting desperately to get back inside the comfort of the known. But the crisis precludes that option. There is no going back. But that is where the opportunity lies.

Breaking Free 

Growth and fundamental levels of change only tend to occur when we are out of our comfort zone. We can refer to this as being far from equilibrium, where certainty and predictability no longer reign supreme. So we might look at the crisis as a blessing in disguise, albeit an unwanted one.

Steve Jobs might have felt self defeated and victimised after he was fired from Apple many years ago. He chose otherwise. After his dismissal, he grasped the crisis by the horns, seeing opportunity where others did not. He went on to lead a small animation company and turn it into the juggernaut that is now Pixar. When The Walt Disney Company bought Pixar in 2006, Jobs immediately became the largest shareholder in Disney. The moral of the story is that unwanted change happens, look beyond it and embrace the discomfort.

The crisis is but a snapshot of a moment in time, and one we would prefer to avoid. But to achieve self empowerment requires looking beyond that snapshot and envisioning what door of potential has just flung open.

The individual whose spouse initiated divoce or left them for another person feels betrayed and perhaps heartsick. After a time, though, they may, in fact, come to feel thankful to be freed from an unworthy and inauthentic relationship. This is particularly true if they evolve through the loss and benefit from a new and healthier relationship.

Every crisis presents an opportunity. Crisis and opportunity are merely different aspects of the process. Do we choose to focus on the crisis and freeze in fear, or do we inquire as to what the opportunity may be? 

Illuminating Crisis 

Crises tend to present themselves as either acute or chronic circumstances. For example, the fall out of the coronavirus is not just the heartache and pain of the loss of thousands of people, but also an economic upheaval that is driving the world economy into highly volatile perturbations, with both wealth and employment literally disappearing. In the lives of most people, this is an external crisis raining upon them, typically not of their own making. Yet, through these losses, many people are coming to reflect on their values and choices and are making adjustments due to the crisis, that in the long run may actually benefit them. 

Take for example the high powered Wall Street executive, who had hardly a spare moment for his family, as he was ever consumed with achieving more and more. The loss of his job at first paralysed him with fear. After a time, however, he was able to re-evaluate his priorities. He now works from home in a small business he founded, and he and his family have greatly benefited.

An unexpected health issue or the death of a loved one may bring anxiety and/or loss. However painful and stressful these challenges and losses may be, the opportunity to be in the moment and value life from a differing perspective can prevail.

Chronic crises are more personal as they manifest thematically throughout one’s life. Relationship struggles or battles with self esteem or depression tend to recur throughout life. These patterns are perpetual mini crises awaiting a more fundamental resolution.

Learning to look at the larger themes and patterns that set up these challenges will help develop a vantage point from which you may break through the struggle. In other words, what are the recurring stories of your life? What is your participation in this storyline?

Likewise, relationship difficulties tend to self-perpetuate until a turning point is reached. Often, the relationship crisis launches the couple into new territory, whereby growth may finally be achieved. The pain endured through the crisis may actually enable this gain. For example, infidelity can be a horrific experience, but it may also open the door to a more authentic examination of the marriage and the possibility of a hopeful resolution.  Couples who are prepared to take the time to work through this travail can transform their relationship in a healthy way.

Where Is the Opportunity? 

Let us delve a bit deeper into the opportunity that prevails through these hardships. A crisis is defined in Webster’s Dictionary as: “a crucial or decisive point or situation; a turning point.” If we focus on the phrase “turning point,” we might ask ourselves, “Toward where are we turning?”

It is in this non reactive contemplation that we may elect to seek opportunity. This potentiality becomes obscured when we are mired in the loss of the familiar as opposed to venturing into the new. This tipping point is precisely where transformation occurs.

Do we gaze into the unfolding potential of change, or  focus on the loss of the familiar? Your answer reveals your relationship between loss and opportunity. Ultimately the question is whether we choose to freeze in the panic of the unfamiliar or seek to opportunise the new territory that is unfolding for us. The former presents anxiety and retreat, the latter evokes growth. Release your hold on loss and embrace your relationship with opportunity. They are inversely correlated.

The only constant in the universe is flow. What we call crisis is simply the occurrence of change. We are not the masters of change, and if we release our need to control it, we can ride the waves of change and often turn it into opportunity.

As George Harrison sang, “Sunrise does not last all morning.” Change happens. Prepare for it.

With thanks to Mel Schwartz L.C.S.W 

https://www.psychologytoday.com/gb/blog/shift-mind/201110/turning-crisis-opportunity