These are some of the challenging life situations where you feel the world is coming down upon you. Adversity is present in everybody’s life to a different extent, being struck by an illness or surviving an accident are the most unexpected events where it feels that you have absolutely no control over what is happening to you.
The stories of people surviving in the hardest of circumstances: climbing mountains, pioneering ways in Antarctica or making great achievements in sport without limbs are an inspiration to all of us, but how do you get up and rebuild your own life when adversity comes to you?
Adversity makes us look deep inside and find the inner resources we did not think we had. When things that we love and treasure the most are taken away from us, it makes us feel uncomfortable.
The moment we are born we have to deal with things that are uncomfortable including the birth itself, going to school is uncomfortable and almost every day we have to engage in activities that we have to do as opposed to enjoy doing.
The modern life demands from us that we not only fulfil our duties and earn a living, we tend to strive for self-realisation and self-expression. It is especially important for business owners where the pressures are coming from all directions – the internal desire for fulfilment, the external expectations to perform, to improve, to be better than the competition.
We are under conflicting pressures to cooperate on one hand and to compete with one another on the other hand. Living in this duality we realise that no matter what area of life or business you look at we cannot do it alone, so we join clubs, networks, societies, groups.
At the same time searching for our own identity and trying to define who we really are and what we are here to achieve. The big challenge comes when we are confronted with a loss – a loss of a job, relationship, money, health. That’s when we go deep inside searching for the answers.
Why is it happening to me? What went wrong? Where did I make a mistake? How could it get so bad? Who am I? Who did that to me? Amongst all these questions there are some that can really help you to discover the right answers and there are others that contain the blame. Who is there to blame in difficult circumstances?
You can spend your whole life looking for the people to blame, you can blame the individuals, the circumstances, unfortunate events but unless the offenders need to be brought to justice, blaming others very rarely helps to improve your own situation.
Quite the opposite, you are giving your own power away to someone else as you put them in charge of the events in your life. Being a victim is not a very powerful position to be in. In those defining moments of your life you need to make a decision, make a choice, and make a resolution: are you a victim looking to others to save you, or do you accept the mistakes and misfortunes of the past and take control over what happens next?
Being at the crossroads is never easy and the right decisions to take charge of your own power will make you stronger. It is in circumstances like these that you can discover the strength, talents and abilities that you didn’t notice before and develop a new respect for yourself.
That is a time when many people discover their spiritual path because we are always bigger than the sum of our flaws. And it is when we look back at the events that we can see the true meaning, the real learning we needed to get from them. In our pursuit of happiness we often forget that it is the process of growth, the way we learn to deal with challenges and ordeals that makes us stronger and define our personality.
Dealing with adversity is like exercising the muscles in our body, the more pressure we put on them, more we stretch them and challenge them the healthier and stronger they become, so that when time comes to perform in the extreme conditions they are ready and flexible and really powerful.
Anya Haldey runs Positive Coaching & Therapy. Email: change@positivecoaching.com.au
