Overcoming Challenges To Fulfil Your Dreams

The ways in which you tackle the problems you face are largely going to define the outcome of your life. Getting to the places we want to end up, transforming into the people we want to be and achieving what we want to achieve will all be determined by how we grapple with challenges every day, big and small.

Knowing that this will be one of the biggest influences on the direction of your life as a whole, shouldn’t we be a little more mindful about how we deal with problems, understanding what gets in our way and what lets us thrive in front of them? There might be several factors which mean you are dealing with challenges sub-optimally, perhaps you don’t deal with the stress they cause, meaning you avoid them or ignore them. Maybe it makes you put them off and shy away from them, choosing to see them as less important than they are, or perhaps you take the other approach, worrying about more than you control and shutting yourself off from blessings which are available to you. Maybe you are not using your full capacity of thought when dealing with challenges, shutting yourself off from new possibilities and failing to think outside the box. Or perhaps the way you treat yourself when you are successful in completing a challenge is ineffective, you are too easily satisfied with achieving what you knew you could achieve or maybe you don’t let your achievements compound into successes the way which they could.

The important thing to recognise is that there are multiple tools for taking a more effective approach to life’s challenges, and once you begin to reflect and identify some of your possible shortcomings they can help you to fast-track your life towards greatness. Here are some of the most useful tips we have learned along the way.

1. The key of ‘perhaps’ opens many doors. 

One of the most important challenges we grapple with is how we face criticism and praise. It is all so easy to be led down the wrong path based on what others think without seeing our potential mistakes. On the one hand, we can hear other people’s opinions of us in a way which is limiting, which diminishes our spirit and self-belief, and yet on the other hand there is criticism that is absolutely vital for us to hear which we can too easily choose to ignore out of our own arrogance. What is even more worrying is that often this criticism we need comes subtly, since others do not wish to offend us.

This means our willingness to hear it needs to be especially heightened. The reason why we might be led astray in each case is fundamentally because of fears that we hold, and this fear comes from a lack of belief and certainty within ourselves. And the thing is, a lot of the time it would be wrong to have the certainty which would save us from such a fear. So instead, I would like you to reflect on this, that we should hear as many perspectives as we can, entertaining possibilities and being open minded but telling yourself ‘perhaps’ to what is being told to you, rather than immediately believing in one way or the other.

The greatest gift of taking this approach is that you do not have to take a certain perspective to heart straight away, within the next hour or even the next week, you can entertain the possibility with a lucid mind and extended thoughtfulness. Rather than trying to master all of your emotions in a single, uninformed moment out of instinctual reaction you will begin to train away the knee-jerk reactions resulting from fear and anxiety. Even the most troubling or hurtful ideas will be comfortable to entertain and learn from, because you will learn the true meaning of ‘perhaps’. I believe with enough time and mindfulness, the good within you will provide enough to give you a stable base, ready to play your next best move with reduced anxiety and higher clarity. If you do not believe me, at least try! Say perhaps.

2. Play the best hand in front of you.

In a game of 21, seeing what cards are coming next will be of no hope if the dealer is stuck on 20. No matter what you see, you will either hit 21 or you won’t. No matter how much you might want your fears to be squashed and to have that sense of certainty, it won’t save you. The best at games of chance understand this perfectly, stock market traders, poker players. They know that playing the game optimally will help them in the long run, since their competition by and large allow their emotion to cloud their judgement.

There are things you might be doing, ways which you might be reacting, which are of no help to you. They happen because you fear that your best might fail. Feeling your emotions is great, but sometimes your emotions are obscuring the path of action you should truly embody. Once you reach the battlefield, you best shake off those cold feet. This practice isn’t just about ignoring your fears and gunning for every opportunity, it's about mindfulness and realising what you can and can’t control. At the end of the day, you are trying to make things better for yourself and for your life and the best hand you can play is best because it will be of the most help to you.

Where I have learned this in my personal life recently has been when dealing with uncomfortable situations; extreme spice, cold water, the sweltering heat of a detoxifying sauna. I’ve felt how my freaking out is exactly what gives the discomfort its reality. Instead, humans have a remarkable capacity to adapt. The next five minutes in this water, in this heat, aren’t going to hurt me, they are going to help me. I can enjoy these five minutes, I do not need to let the discomfort rend me. I choose not to let it rend me, I can see it is not the best hand in front of me.

3. The warrior inside.

Jung’s work on archetypes picked up on something crucial about the stories and myths that captivate us. Rather than merely being entertaining tales, he explored how they gripped us because they were representations of deep psychological powers within us. The archetype of the warrior is a great example of this. Most of us are far from Achilles in daily life, yet nonetheless you face challenges and adversity each moment to moment, and characters such as  Achilles are representations of that untapped potential you have within you.

Your mind, body and soul responds overwhelmingly positively to developing these forces within you as your soul sees yourself proving that you can overcome difficulty and expand your limits. If you are not occasionally setting yourself challenges which frighten you and bring out your best, just for the sake of it, you are missing out on that untapped development and potential. Challenges you set yourself like this don’t need to make sense to the outside world, no one needs to know you are doing them, no one needs to approve of them, so long as you know they are pushing your limits and testing yourself.

Do it occasionally in big ways, and as you feel yourself getting stronger let it seep into more and more facets of your life. Keep pushing yourself and don’t get too comfortable. I can comfortably say that nothing aside from a clean diet has helped my mood more than these two things; martial arts and battling myself in cold showers. Grow the warrior in your psyche, you will start a rolling ball forwards that make you adaptive, confident and ready for the challenges which are inevitably coming.