If It Doesn't Challenge you, It Won't Change You

Learning that my challenges were my friends was quite a journey for me.

I used to get discouraged and despondent if something went wrong.

I often thought it was a ‘sign’ that something wasn’t for me, that something wasn’t ‘meant to happen’.

That life / god / fate / the universe was telling me to stop and give up.

But that was a MASSIVE misunderstanding on my part and one that cost me a great deal.

Instead I learned (because I had to) that the challenges were my friends, in fact my very best friends.

That I was being given EXACTLY the experienced I need to learn what I needed to learn in order to progress to the next stage of my journey.

To gain the experience, the wisdom and the skills I needed in order for that next stage of my journey to make sense.

That without those experiences and the new understandings they gifted to me, I wouldn’t be ready or prepared for what was to come.

So my choice was simple.

To accept and then EMBRACE my challenges and extract every fibre of value from them.

Or to take all the baggage (pain, regret, sadness, upset) and leave all the value and resources behind.

This was and is a choice we all face all of the time, with every challenge.

The question is whether we make the choice that helps us on purpose or the choices that harms us by accident.

Whether we USE our challenges or become DEFINED BY THEM.

Whether we grow from them no matter how daunting and difficult they may be. Or whether we shrink back and draw in our horizons a little more.

But without those challenges we wouldn’t grow, we would never explore our untapped potential, and never see quite how far we could go.

Because we cannot become who we truly are and unleash all that we are capable of if we cling to the version of us that wants stay stuck and play small.

Those talents and that potential are revealed through our challenges.

That’s why they really are our best friends.