How To Rise To Every Challenge - And Succeed!
Your problems have a purpose.
What a concept! Have you ever considered the possibility that your problems are there for a reason?
This is a belief I have chosen to accept as true and I suggest you do too.
Why?
Not because it’s an absolute truth that I can somehow prove, but because of the positive impact it has on your life.
Problems aren’t problems
Problems are really challenges. A challenge set before you to encourage you to grow.
Everything you can do and cope with now is within your comfort zone. Challenges, on the other hand, are outside this comfort zone. Therefore, in order to meet the challenge, you must expand yourself i.e. learn knew skills, improve your behavior, use creativity, forgive someone…whatever the case may be.
Let me illustrate it another way. Imagine your comfort zone is a circle. When a challenge is set before you, it lies somewhere outside that circle, otherwise it wouldn’t be challenging to you. In order for the challenge to be successfully dealt with, the circle must expand i.e. you must grow. Once you have expanded the comfort zone to take in this challenge, this particular problem never causes you as much bother again.
Lifelong Self-Improvement
It seems just intuitively wrong to me that we are supposed to enter life and leave it again and the same level. I see the main purpose of life as the growth/expansion/learning - the evolution of consciousness if you will. Challenges (problems) are therefore absolute necessities in facilitating this growth.
This doesn’t mean life therefore is unavoidably stressful, quite the opposite. This would be the case if you saw problems as random obstacles that keep popping up to frustrate you. From my viewpoint though, no challenge is insurmountable. In fact, life wouldn’t put the situation into your experience if it also didn’t provide the means to overcome it – your job is to find it, your growth then occurs in the process.
This website is an example itself. I have always been a non-technical person (with a capital NON). I knew I wanted a website and didn’t have the money to pay someone to do all the technical stuff for me. At the time I didn’t even know what the following terms meant:
- Blog
- RSS
- CSS
- HTML
- FTP
- Trackback
- SEO
- Tags
- Server
I was absolutely clueless. I’m not great at it now, but I’m much improved.
So what did I do? I didn’t moan that I didn’t have the skills or money, and that I’d have to leave it to people that were ‘luckier’ than I was. I bought book after book, read article after article and made many mistakes in order to facilitate my own growth. Now, in a sense you could say I am a ‘bigger’ person.
My advice is to never shy away from your problems. If you do, you’re missing the whole point. Grow and enjoy the process, the successful outcome is assured if you just persevere and learn the lesson life is trying to teach you. 
And remember, it’s NEVER the size of your problem, it’s the size of YOU!
Your Buddy,
Mark McManus
image credit: Max Ackermann
If you're new here, please download my free workout and diet book and start transforming your body today!. Thanks for visiting!
Subscribe to comments
Standing Dumbbell Front Raises work the overall shoulders with special emphasis on the 
