If you think about it, you are constantly fighting with life. 

You have your plans and your wishes, and very often things don’t go accordingly. You get unlucky. You fail. Others don’t come through for you as you had hoped. You miss a deadline.  Your relationship breaks down. An opportunity window you thought you had, closes. 

How do you respond when life is not your friend? 

Given that the challenges life imposes are often out of your control, life can easily appear as a hostile acquaintance rather than a friend.  With this narrative, you’ll always feel exhausted trying to dodge the obstacles – many of which hit and hurt.  Negativity and resentment build and your vision becomes murky.  It’s these feelings that fuel your next steps, the result often being a self-fulfilling prophecy.

It’s possible to reverse this cycle!

This is by no means an easy task.  You may have felt the impact of loss, grief, hurt and pain. It may have become part of your fabric.  Nobody can take that away from you and nobody can understand your journey or pretend to have a solution.  Life can be hard. It can be challenging and tiring and at times quite dark.  Sitting in this place too long can engulf you in the negative emotions you tend to get caught in when viewing life as your enemy.  The impact is more of the same.

Viewing life’s challenges as a gift.

Viewing life’s challenges as a gift may seem like a stretch.  A gift should never be painful.  I agree with that statement.  If I were to grab a hot pan from the oven without a glove, it would hurt like hell.  Gift?  Well, yes.  Without the pain of that encounter, I would not know that my hand was burning.  I would also not have learnt that next time I need to ensure I have a well padded glove on my hand to remove the pan.

That’s a simple example, but it illustrates how a challenge can be turned into a gift – how life can be viewed as a friend even amidst a problem.

In order to view life from this perspective, you need to see it as a journey of joy and pain intended for growth.

If life was viewed in this way, your focus would be on catching the gifts, opening the boxes and showing gratitude and delight for what’s within. You may turn the gift in your hand, consider what you’d use it for, or where it would work best. 

Turning something into a gift is a simple way of viewing it from a softer perspective. It’s an approach that requires a little curiosity and innovation.  It’s also a far kinder approach, one that is born out of empathy and a longing to find meaning even in the midst of crisis.  

This action requires mental fitness – weakening the part of the brain where much of the negativity sits and strengthening the sage, a perspective that is about accepting what is, rather than denying, rejecting, or resenting it.  It leads to peace of mind and focused action.

We can’t control what happens to us in life but we can control the impact by choosing how we respond.

3 ways of turning struggles into strengths.

1. Catch the thought attached to the difficulty

It’s the thought that creates the feeling. 

Acknowledge it. 

It comes from a place that is part of who you are.  It isn’t necessarily wrong.

2. Label the Feeling

When you add meaning to your thoughts, they become feelings.

What is it that you want to feel? 

What feeling will lead to the best version of yourself. 

It’s worth remembering that your feelings are often the fuel for your actions. 

3. Consider the action

Your actions create your results.  And you are responsible for your experience of it. 

It could be curiosity.

It could be determination or focus. 

The action may not result in sunshine and roses but it requires an action to figure it out.

We have a choice, to become victims of our tragedies and the struggles we find hard to overcome or to turn these same situations into affirming events that bring meaning and purpose to our lives.

Which option resonates most with you?