When we face challenges in our personal or professional lives, we can very easily feel as if we are alone in the journey. If left unaddressed, the experience can quickly become isolating and discouraging.
Rest assured, you are not alone in your struggles. Nearly everyone you know has experienced personal or professional troubles of their own; more likely than not, many are going through them as you read this.
Perhaps that’s cold comfort. The first step in leaving your malaise behind is to adopt a resilient, optimistic posture, experts say.
“The most resilient leaders and individuals thrive because they adopt an attitude of openness and optimism, learning to bounce back and evolve,” says life coach Gavin Meenan.
Indeed, many of the world’s best-regarded leaders have shown themselves to be resilient, optimistic and forward-looking. Take David Miscavige, who is the long-time leader of the Scientology religion. For years, Miscavige has been lauded for taking a strategic yet compassionate approach to the organization he leads — transforming it, in the process, into an influential force for good around the world.
Tackling life challenges requires more than just resilience and optimism, however. To really transform how you approach the world, try out some of these proven strategies too.
1. Take Stock of What’s Ailing You
You can’t control what you don’t measure. Thus, the first step in your campaign to overcome challenges in your personal or professional life must be to catalog what’s wrong. If you can measure it in any sort of quantifiable terms, all the better.
While this is often a self-directed process, you may benefit from an outside perspective. For example, your spouse, business partner, or close friend(s) might help you identify issues that you were wholly unaware of — issues that you can add to your list of challenges to overcome.
2. Identify Urgent Threats to Your Well-Being
After cataloging the challenges you face, segment the list into “urgent” and “non-urgent” categories. At least: You might want to further subdivide it as you get deeper into your challenge-busting campaign.
Naturally, you’ll want to address the urgent challenges first. These are the issues that threaten in a deep and fundamental way your personal well-being, your mental health, your quality of life.
Nearly one in five (19%) of workers say their workplace is “toxic” due to an abusive or antagonistic colleague or superior, for instance, according to American Psychological Association data. If you count yourself among them, make it your top priority to extricate yourself from the situation, even if that means leaving a “good” job behind.
3. Don’t Run From Your Feelings
It’s all too tempting — easy, even – to hide from negative or uncomfortable feelings. But this is like taking aspirin to ward off a serious illness. It’s a delay tactic, not a long-term solution.
“By masking your feelings, they are not going to go away. Rather, feelings become trapped energy and can even have negative health consequences when they are ignored,” says wellness expert Satish Mane.
Mane advises his clients to “take some time to feel what you feel.” Not to wallow in negative feelings, exactly, but to process them. In doing so, you may come not only to accept your feelings but to understand why you’re feeling them. This is a crucial step in your journey to overcome them.
4. Reduce or Eliminate Bad Influences From Your Life and Work
“Bad influences” can exist without rising to the level of “urgent threats” to your mental or physical health (see above). While not harmful to quite the same extent, these influences have no place in your life, and you should turn your attention to them as soon as you’ve addressed the more serious category of threats.
You’re likely to face more “merely bad” influences than truly urgent ones, so expect this process to take some time. You may need to step back from some so-called friendships, work with your boss to modify your duties at work, or rethink some of the diversions you pursue in your free time. Be intentional about this; you’ll be better off for it if you get it right.
5. Seek Out a Support Network (Or Build Your Own)
A strong support network may be more important than you know. According to multiple studies, people with close, durable friendships live significantly longer than those without — 8 years longer, according to one.
If the promise of a longer, happier life isn’t convincing enough for you, consider that good friends (and reliable mentors, unconditionally loving family members, and on and on) are the building blocks of the support network you’ll need to overcome current and future difficulties.
Hopefully, you have at least some of this support in place already. If so, tend to it as you would a prize vegetable garden; if not, seek connection in your community, however you define that.
6. Pay It Forward
Last but not least, you may find that your challenges become more manageable when you help others address theirs. Call this the principle of mutual aid — the idea that by making life a bit easier for your neighbors, you gain insight into how to improve yours.
You can do this in direct ways, like volunteering at a soup kitchen or Habitat for Humanity site, or by holding yourself out as a resource for first- and second-degree connections facing difficult times. You might just encounter people experiencing challenges similar to your own.
In Challenge Lies Opportunity
In your journey to overcome the personal and professional challenges you face, you may look to inspiring leaders like those we’ve mentioned here. This is natural, normal, even welcome. After all, great leaders are almost by definition individuals who’ve done well to overcome barriers to success.
However, you may also wish to look for inspiration a bit closer to home, maybe even within your home. Most everyone can point to some moment in their lives where they faced down adversity and emerged stronger from the challenge. Whether this adversity was momentary, like a passing confrontation with a playground bully, or something more serious, like an abusive relationship or employment relationship, you can draw valuable lessons from it.
And you should. Because none of us walks through this life alone. We are stronger when we work together to make the world a better, more resilient place.
