Hear me out on this one. Yes, it’s a challenging title in its own right, so let’s explore what is intended behind the statement.
- Do I mean I have so many challenges they are familiar with? Yes
- Do I mean, like best friends, they ask me to look at what is really going on and challenge me, as a person, to get clear and step up? Yes
- Does it mean challenges will always be there, no matter what, and show up in the way I need them at the time? Yes.
Challenges help us tap into the best part of ourselves if we work with them. Besides, what we resist persists and gets loader, so we might as well take stock early in the challenge.
This is why challenges are so fricken good. The gift is received when challenges are approached with an open mind, heart, and self-compassion—leaning into the feelings, exploring the components, and unpacking them at a pace that works for you. Sometimes, it does mean sitting in the pain until, like a festering boil, it explodes, leaving a gaping hole, and the risk of either localised or systemic sepsis:
Critical erosion and damage to friendships, relationships, careers, opportunities, and even our wellbeing.
Doing this is a common, unhealthy strategy of avoidance, denial, and a pollyannish refusal to take an accurate stocktake of what is happening in one’s life. A reality check includes doing the assessments in mind, body and spirit. How is your health, thinking, feelings, and connections to self and others?
Being super honest about what one feels and interprets their world to be, and matching it against one’s early dreams, hopes, and a deep drive to be who they indeed are drawn to be.
This is the space where challenges show up – the dissonance or difference between what is being lived, felt, and experienced vs what one is deeply drawn to be. The gap between what one believes ‘should’ be their life, but isn’t working for them, and so, little challenges show up as part of the biggest life challenge – to be-come the person one is destined to be.
Yes, this does sound too far-fetched for some. It did for me, too, for an extremely long time. But, here is the thing….. Why do some people seem to have it all, be happy, live a life on purpose, and have experiences that bring even more joy and blessings to themselves and others? Are they blessed, different, and somehow embalmed with magic exclusive to the club?
Yes, and no.
Yes, they are these things, and one of the most common threads is that they choose to be and live the way they do. They said no to ‘convention and rules’ given to them in their early time. They decided at some time to go all in and learn how to do what they needed to achieve, grow, face their challenges, and engage others to help them do so. They believed in themselves to be greater than the restrictions, fears and stories of lack, limitations, and restrictions.
They learnt how to tap into the magic and use it to their will.
No, they are not that different from anyone else. They still bleed the same, have the same functions and, in many cases, fears. But, they have learnt how not to let these fears dictate and tame them into the box of lack, can’t, shouldn’t or must not. They have embodied challenges and opportunities and, in many ways, painted their life through actively owning their life in advance and using tools that raise their thoughts, feelings, and beliefs to match their dreams.
How about you?
- Where do you sit in this spectrum?
- Where do you desire to sit on the spectrum?
- Are you aware of what is holding you back from even the smallest of changes?
- Do you desire to start with the small steps towards learning how to meet your challenges with curiosity and befriend them to enhance your life experiences? Or,
- Are you choosing to deep dive into core issues that feed the challenges, to begin with?
Remember, everyone is, in essence, the same. What makes the difference is some have learnt, and yes, started at different aspects of experiences, but all of us need to face and work through fears, limitations, and insecurities. Wealth does not remove these. If anything, it can magnify them.
Your call. Who do you choose to be-come, and by who rules do you choose to live by? Does fear-induced, lack, and limitations, or Possibility and expansiveness?
