Difficult Times

“The pessimist sees difficulty in every opportunity. The optimist sees opportunity in every difficulty.”
—Winston Churchill

Times of difficulty may challenge our inner core. They may cause us to lose faith in God and everything else we believe in. When difficulties continue, when we can see no end in sight, it is very easy to fall into not only a pessimistic viewpoint of the world, but also we can find ourselves falling into depression.

Trying times can be dealt with even when it seems there is no solution. The first thing we can do is take things one at a time. We can take each moment and each day at a time and not put the whole world and all of our issues on our shoulders at once.

If we continue to seek something and we can’t quite grasp it, perhaps a job or relationship, we may need to really think about things and see if we are causing our own failures.

If, for instance, we have been seeking employment for an extended period of time, but we cannot seem to get hired, even when we are qualified and get interviews, there is something going on that is in our control. Is it something we are not being truthful about on our resume that is picked up on in the interview? Or maybe we push too hard and say what we think the interviewer wants us to say, whether it’s what we really believe?

If we continue to run into walls, in whatever we are attempting and failing at, we may need to seek advice from a trusted friend. We can keep spinning our wheels and insisting the problem lies outside of us, or we can look within and see if we are causing our own stumbling blocks in life.

Some difficulties are things that are not in our control. If the economy is bad there’s little we can do about the cost of necessities, but we can control our spending on things that we just do not need.

When faced with hard times, it is important to reach out for help from those we trust. We don’t have to face everything alone, and often others can see things that we just cannot see when we are in the midst of difficulty. Asking for help is not a sign of weakness. Whining about how bad things are is not asking for help.

When we seek help from someone it’s important to be completely honest and not withhold certain information. If we truly want help we can’t expect someone to be there if we cannot be honest.

Difficult times happen to everyone, it’s your choice how you deal with it.

Learning By Doing

“As one goes through life one learns that if you don’t paddle your own canoe, you don’t move.”
—Katharine Hepburn

No matter how spoiled and coddled a person is in their childhood, or some even as adults, real life experiences both with successes and failures, are what propel us through life, growth and recovery.

We may lament every time we perform at a level less than we expect of ourselves, but for every supposed failure we learn and grow. We don’t gain wisdom or strength through other people’s lives and experiences. We learn and grow when we attempt and fail and even when we do something with success because we did it.

Just as an athlete cannot become a professional or set a world record simply by watching how someone else did it, neither can we live our lives and make it on our journey with only observation as a tool. We learn what we can from others, sometimes we may avoid certain failures when we see another experience them. But as a rule our growth is ours from doing rather than seeing.

We may feel as if we paddle upstream at times. And perhaps we want others to do for us, but in the long run we gain much more wisdom, strength, and growth through our own actions. Even when the going gets tough, we can rest assured that we will come out on the other side of it with the experience that taught us something.

Even when the current is rough, you must paddle if you want to get through it.

False Limitations

“Argue for your limitations and surely they will be yours!”
—Marshal Sylver

Even for those who may have been blessed by parents who provided them with an almost perfect life growing up, there are no perfect families and we all have our limitations. Being raised in a nurturing and loving environment is ideal, but even those who experienced that may have difficulties in life when they are met head on by less than ideal conditions outside their family of origin.

Any one of us, from those raised in abusive homes, to those in near perfect conditions, can argue forever that we can’t do this or that because of something that we see as limiting. We use excuses like: I just don’t have enough talent; I don’t have a degree, or the right education; I’ve never been good at that; I always mess up; last time I tried that I failed; I am no good at relationships; and so on.

When we glorify our limitations we manifest them. What we believe about ourselves will basically be what we do with our lives.

If we can turn around our self-defeating thoughts, we will find ourselves having self-fulfilled prophesies of success, rather than utter failure. “I think I can,” may be our new motto. “I think I can do this, maybe not perfectly, but I’m going to give it a shot.” Maybe it didn’t work last time we tried, or we never tried because we’d already doomed ourselves to failure by saying we could not do it.

We really do not have anything to lose by taking the positive angle on life. We may try and fail, but that’s always better than never trying. Life is meant to be lived, not merely tolerated until we die.

Limitations are just excuses to never give all we have to life.

Failure is Not Trying

“I am not judged by the number of times I fail, but by the number of times I succeed; and the number of times I succeed is in direct proportion to the number of times I can fail and keep on trying.”
—Tom Hopkins

No matter how hard we have tried to reach goals in our lives, but have fallen short, the only time we truly failed were the times we gave up and let go of our goals. Life is a series of events that we label success and failure, but we all know that the difficulties in life are what teach us and the times in our lives when we felt the most distressed usually turned into the most spiritual growth.

If we feel ashamed or guilty for our past mistakes, or for failing to reach a particular goal, it’s time to let go. We let go of the guilt and shame and move forward. We must forgive ourselves for not being perfect because that is not expected of any human on this earth.

To fail is to give up. To fail is to never try. Not reaching a goal just means we need to try harder or set a new goal. It’s good to set our goals high, but we may need to set them a bit lower in order to achieve them. They need to be realistic or they are not worth striving for, and only set us up to not reach them thus setting off feelings of being ashamed.

Remember that we never fail if we continue to grow. We may not have reached goal A, but we learned to be more patient along the way. Or goal B eluded us, but along the journey to try to reach it, we learned a new skill or way of coping. Just as people are placed in our lives to help us grow and to meet our needs, so are our plans and goals means of growing and learning even that which we may not have strived for.

Do not feel ashamed for failure; instead let it give you momentum for the next goal.