Mind-Body Health

How To Face & Overcome Challenges In Life With Confidence

How To Face & Overcome Challenges In Life With Confidence
Life is full of challenges. Some people seem to meet every challenge with confidence, while others struggle to overcome them. Pittas especially get a sense of satisfaction from facing challenges head on—it brings a sense of accomplishment and can be very fulfilling. On some level, you actually seek challenges. Your highest self wants you to learn and grow, and life’s most effective tool toward growth is experience.

The problem is that all too often you might find yourself faced with the same challenges over and over again, and that’s when you start to lose motivation to face the issue and lose sight of the potential lesson. At that point, challenges can become problems that can spiral you into despair and frustration.

As a co-creator of your own reality, you have the ability to overcome these challenges. It is with this sense of responsibility and awareness that you can begin your journey into a higher state of consciousness where challenges are no longer challenges, but opportunities to get a glimpse of your highest self.

Here are some ways to better accept and meet your personal challenges, whatever they may be.

Face the Challenge

In many cases this is the most important step, the most obvious step, yet it is also the most often missed. People spend time looking for a way around the issue, or wallowing in despair at the enormity of the challenge, instead of facing it. Even mundane things, like a pileup of laundry or work, get ignored. Putting a challenge off doesn’t make it go away. This is true of big challenges, as well as the small ones. The most important thing you can do is face what’s in front of you head on.

Be Present

Do not underestimate the power of being present. If you make a practice of facing your challenges—even in failure—with full presence and awareness, you will find most challenges are not challenges at all. Instead life’s challenges become messages from the universe. Meditation can help you cultivate silent awareness and is a good tool to help bring that focus to yourself during difficult times.

You can ask yourself questions that help you better understand the problem and how it affects you.

  • Why is this a challenge?
  • Do I believe that I am capable of being successful at this challenge?
  • What are the possible outcomes if I succeed?
  • What is the outcome if I fail?

These questions are not meant to solve the problem, rather they are meant to help bring you into fuller awareness of the challenge itself and your emotional reaction to it.

Look to Your SELF for the Solution

Others can help you arrive at your own understanding, but no one ever solves your problems for you. Even in circumstances where someone else is acting as an authority or partner, only you can decide for yourself how you will process the situation. The longer you spend searching for guidance outside of yourself, the longer you spend ignoring the problem. Asses the situation, your resources, and your abilities, and then act. Your action may include enlisting help from others, but it will be your challenge to solve. The sooner you take up the challenge, the quicker it stops being a problem.

Know Yourself

Challenges are opportunities to grow. That growth takes place out of potentiality, your potentiality, which is infinite and highly active in every moment of life. Come to know yourself as that. You are pure potential experiencing life through what seems like limitation. Challenges are spikes in that imaginary limitation barrier that guide you to awareness. You decide: Are you limited or are you an ever-expansive growth of consciousness and love? Choose the latter, and take another look at that so-called challenge you’ve been facing.

There is a reason why certain challenges seem hard to you while others breeze right through the same situations. It’s not because they are better than you. It’s all about consciousness. Those who face challenging tasks have found a way to avoid seeing those activities as challenges.

Detach From the Outcome

Stressing about the potential outcome is often what turns a molehill into a mountain. Once you shift your focus to the thing you’re actually doing, instead of the result, the most intimidating parts of the trial start to disappear. If you simply perform the task at hand without worrying about the outcome, you have power over the situation.

Some challenges seem enormous and harsh, but if you remain centered and full of awareness, no challenge is too big to meet with power and grace.

Tune into the Boost Your Confidence program for more tips to develop trust and faith in yourself, available now in the Chopra App.