Unlike a sickness, life’s pains are to be endured. See the thing with a sickness is that you can take a pill or medicine to make the pain go away.. well at least for most sicknesses. Anyway, my point is that no matter how hard we try to avoid it, pain will come into our lives one way or the other. It could be through losing a job, being rejected by loved ones or whatever pain it is that you have gone through. It hurts to be told this especially at a time when you are knee-deep in life’s challenges, but the truth is that all these challenges are all for your benefit. They are there to make you a stronger, better and braver version of you. Unfortunately, when these challenges do occur, there is no pill you can take to numb the pain or make it go away, you just have to endure.
Now that we have established that challenges are inevitable, we need to understand that some problems will keep recurring in our lives probably because we haven’t drawn the lessons that we were meant to get from such challenges. The way I see it challenges are there, we can’t avoid them but we can adjust our attitude to deal with such. They say that successful people look for opportunities in challenges. They look for ways to better themselves and the more I think about it, I have never met a successful person who was a pessimist. Most of the people I have met who are considerably successful have a peculiar way of doing things which is different from the way the rest of the people do things. See, a successful person looks for lessons in challenges, they don’t ignore that there is a challenge in front of them but then they do not allow a challenge to be bigger than them. Yes, they do get sad like everyone else but what makes them stand out from the rest is their ability to pick up the pieces and try again.
It does not take being rich to be successful, it is not about your background but just about wanting to be better than you were yesterday. Change is scary and more than that it requires determination and perseverance. In order for your life to be better than it was yesterday, you need to adjust the sail of your boat. Don’t try to adjust the wind, because you can’t, adjust your sail. Simply put, you cannot change the challenges you face in life, nor can you choose the ones you want to face. However, you can adjust your attitude. Instead of making a problem/ challenge bigger than it is, really choose to say ‘I can conquer this’. This may seem like a tiny thing but a declaration like this carries massive weight. I believe in me and what I can become but in order to be a better version of me, I must adjust my sail. I believe in you and that you are born for greatness. My request to you is to tap into that greatness and be as bold as you were meant to be. Forget life’s problems; don’t give them the pleasure of consuming you and making you feel like a failure. They are actually just problems/ challenges; you dictate how big they become.
By; Lebogang Motlalekgosi
