It is often our most challenging moments in life that offer us the greatest opportunities to grow and expand. Take a real honest look at any challenges you have faced in the past. Are you better or worse off for having faced those challenges? Start to view all challenges as delayed opportunities waiting to be exploited.
There are many things you can do to keep yourself motivated during uncertain times. One of the most important is to reframe your perceptions of the challenges we face.
Challenges as Opportunities
How we respond to any situation reveals a lot about our attitude and perception. So, when we see challenges as opportunities, it means that we have a healthy degree of optimism, self-confidence and openness, along with an adventurous spirit. It would indicate that we enjoy life and look forward to whatever comes next.
The surprising thing is that there is often only a small degree of difference between a positive, optimistic perception, and a negative, pessimistic one. Even though these two attitudes are polar opposites, they both often start with the same challenges.
When you don't meet a particular challenge in a way that makes you proud, ask yourself, "What can I learn from this that will help me grow?"
Sometimes you come through a challenge with a huge success. Other times the success seems insignificant, but it's a success nonetheless. When you achieve a success of any size, what do you do? If you are like most people, you ignore it. Big mistake!
To motivate yourself, you have to be willing to recognize yourself.
If you are like most people, you don't have many formal opportunities for self-recognition. That doesn't mean you can't recognize yourself anyway. Tell others about your accomplishments.
Correspondingly, if our first response to any given situation is negative, it makes a positive outcome much more difficult to achieve. That initial negative response to new challenges triggers a negative response patterns, and we will begin to follow the ingrained neurological pathway established by previous negative experiences. In essence, we will switch over to autopilot in the wrong direction.
Here's the important point: training ourselves to respond positively, or at least neutrally, will have the opposite effect. An optimistic response to new challenges will trigger a completely different set of established response patterns. Our subconscious will look for similarities between this situation and our initial response to positive experiences from our past. This will initiate a neurological chain reaction that will help move us in the right direction. Now we will be operating from a much more resourceful state.
Liberate yourself – Accept responsibility! The first step is to recognize that we are in control. We need to accept responsibility for our responses, and recognize that they assert a powerful influence on our life. Accepting responsibility is a wonderfully liberating experience. It puts you in the driver's seat of our own life. It is one of the most empowering things you can do for yourself.
Use leverage. Leverage means that you exert the greatest amount of control with the least amount of effort. The time to do this is during the first few moments whenever you are faced with new challenges. Once you start down a negative road, it is much more difficult to reverse your course. If you control your first step, you start out in the right direction, and it is much easier to maintain that direction.
Turn it into a game. When we take life too seriously, it's easy to overreact to situations. Why not turn it into a game instead? If you tend to react negatively to challenges, try imitating somebody who always reacts positively. Make a game out of it, put yourself in character, play the role until you establish a new response pattern.
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