How to Get Through Challenges

What if you could get through your challenges with more ease and less stress?

In my personal journey, I have found inspiration studying, researching and learning about the lives of highly effective leaders, both past and present. This has allowed me to obtain first-hand understanding how these leaders made it through challenges.

And here are three important steps I learned and implemented:

#1 Accept it

It is what it is. Stop fighting it, stop resisting it, stop wishing that it wasn’t happening.

"Life is difficult" is the opening line in the personal growth classic, The Road Less Traveled. Author and psychiatrist M. Scott Peck, MD explains, "This is a great truth, one of the greatest truths. It is a great truth because once we truly see this truth, we transcend it." (1)

Similary, once you accept a challenge, the fact that it's difficult no longer matters.

Mahatma Gandhi was a man who transcended challenges in the physical world. Author Eknath Easwaran writes about the example Gandhi set when he led the people of India against the oppression of the British empire. Easwaran explains, "For him jail was not a hardship but a crown of glory, for he knew the capacity to suffer bravely for a higher ideal was the strength that would make every man and woman in India free." (2)

Gandhi accepted challenges. More importantly, he transcended challenges and used them as a force for transformation.

#2 Think like a hero

This is vital when I find myself slipping into victim-thinking when challenges arise. Pushing myself to think like a hero pulls me out of victim thinking. If you think that life is happening TO you and that a challenge is unfair, then you're thinking like a victim.

The truth is that life is always happening THROUGH me. And I have the opportunity to think like a hero, and embrace my leadership and my capacity to find solutions even if I don't know how I'm going to get through the challenge.

In 1850, former slave Harriet Tubman was living in freedom in Philadephia.  Nonetheless, she made an important decision although she was overcome by fear at the prospect of being recaptured. In The Great Work of Your Life, author Stephen Cope writes," Tubman realized that her fate was tied together with that of her family and her whole people. She came to understand she could not have freedom just for herself." (3)

At risk of being recaptured, Tubman thought like a hero. She overcame her fear and made a decision. In so doing, she helped rescue hundreds of slaves between 1850 and 1860 along the Underground Railroad from the American South to Canada.

#3 Take action to meet the challenge

Challenges require courage to take action as I learned from studying the lives of great leaders including both Gandhi and Tubman. Gandhi and Tubman each took concrete, consistent action to meet the challenges of their times, often placing themselves in great danger.

My challenges have never been at the magnitude of these civil rights leaders and I'm guessing yours probably aren't either. Nonetheless, taking action in order to meet your challenges is essential. 

Maybe for you, taking action means you need to:

-Make the call

-Schedule the difficult conversation

-Make the decision

-Consult or hire the expert or professional

Whatever those actions are for you, it doesn't matter if you've accepted the challenge and how heroic your thinking is. This third step is vital because if you don't take action, nothing happens. It can help to make a plan. Then follow through with action when facing a challenge!

And I've drawn great strength and perspective learning about how great leaders navigated challenges. They took action.

How these steps work

This approach works because it transforms my thinking from victim thinking to hero thinking, and inspires me to take action.

And in so doing, I have changed my internal landscape from limited thinking to hero thinking, and tapped into talents, abilities and courage that I didn't even know were inside of me. Now when challenges come, I've shortened the amount of time I feel upset and trust that this challenge is pushing me to my next level of growth. It always does.

(1) Peck MD, M. Scott. (1978.) The Road Less Traveled. A Touchstone Book / Simon and Schuster. P.15.

(2) Easwaran, Eknath. (1972-2011.) Ghandhi the Man. Nilgiri Press. P. 94.

(3) Cope, Stephen. (2015.) The Great Work of Your Life. Bantam Books. P. 220.

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