A lack of faith and a heaping dose of fear creates the inability to grow acceptance in oneself’s ability to withstand trials. To work with discouraged and disheartened individuals and bring them to acceptance, believing in healing, and moving forward means I have helped people grow. Last night, when asked what a client was feeling during a struggling time in their life, they replied, a sense of hopelessness, or lostness. As we continued, the client shared, “I felt like the number between 0–100 was about 95, it was super intense.” We feel hopeless when we lose sight of a goal, or we lose the time with someone special in our life.
Sometimes, drugs or alcohol takes a partner away. They are distracted, and more interested in the substance rather than the person. We may not be able to change someone’s mindset or get them to stop using substances and choose us; we can choose to believe in ourselves. Hopelessness can become a shadow of the past rather than the blight of the future. In the following article, you’re going to learn about building belief in yourself and your abilities, even if the situation is grim.
The mindset you carry determines your level of success, or lack thereof. A positive mindset empowers you to abolish hurdles before they become too challenging. A negative mindset detracts you from focusing on success before you even start. Banish negativity!
No doubt, when life is hard, you’ll find it difficult to believe in yourself. The struggle mounts when everything around you seems to be crumbling into pieces and you want to quit. Keeping faith in yourself is the only way to trudge through the hard times and see yourself clear to better days.
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Try the following strategies to help you remain steadfast when you’re feeling the pressure of tough times:
Reflect on the past.
Surely, you’ve encountered seemingly insurmountable situations in the past. How have you succeeded in the most unpleasant scenarios? Clearly, your ability to overcome these situations speaks loudly for your strength and abilities. In some situations, you may be able to emulate your past solutions by adapting them to fit your current situation. Other times, you’ll be able to learn what not to do from past trials and tribulations. The past needn’t dictate your future. It’s possible to reflect without working up old, unresolved feelings. The experience is positive when you put into place some practices to help you process the wounds of yesterday.
If you begin to feel negative emotions practice a pause. Ask yourself where these emotions originate from and then make a choice to accept them as they present themselves. Sometimes the mere act of acceptance relieves us of trying to stop feeling a certain way. Once you feel stable, move onto another technique, which can help you increase self-confidence in your abilities.
Act immediately.
Rather than retreating into your personal cocoon when a situation becomes intimidating, address it immediately. The longer you allow a situation to sit without attention, the more urgent it will become. A perfect example is debt. Avoid cornering yourself with urgency by creating a proactive plan now. Or, better yet, have a just-in-case plan before the event ever happens. It’s okay to take a few hours to create a plan of attack.
However, if you’re still brainstorming weeks from today, you may be stalling. What does stalling do? The act itself is a distraction from accomplishing a goal, plan, or activity. Only you can be the source of a solution. You are in charge of managing your life and ensuring its success. Take pride in this power. After all, you’re free — no one commands you. Your life is what you create it to become with meaning and purpose. You own the power to start the day with a positive, focused approach. Plan ahead the night before, and you’ll see changes take place.
Believe it.
Remember the last time you had a tough situation and you thrived through it and onto a brighter day? Remind yourself of the small victories, and as you encounter bigger struggles, you’ll find the strength to make it through. The beauty of experience is the gift of growth. Every day is a new opportunity to practice belief in overcoming hurdles. As you gain experience, you’ll continue to keep yourself above the waves of despair.
You have a fan base of supporters. Your children, spouse, and extended family are cheering you on every day. Chances you trash your abilities, more so than others do. In fact, they have faith in your abilities because you’ve proven your strength. Maybe you’ve not listened to their cheer squad lately, so make it a point to stop and hear what they speak. Now is as good of a time as any to show yourself what you’re made of. Confirm to yourself you are as strong and tenacious as you suspect yourself to be.
As Bernice Johnson Reagon once said, “Life’s challenges are not supposed to paralyze you; they’re supposed to help you discover who you are.”
I find it rejuvenating to read the stories of those who walked the difficult trails of trying times. Their lives, legacies, and the plans they made to help others grow inspires me. Until this article, I had never heard of Bernice Johnson Reagon, rather Dr. Reagon.
What a testimony of strength and courageous voice she continues to hold. Her walk through the Civil Rights Movement inspired me tonight as I wrote the following article. Find inspiration in the history. Open up a book, look up on Google, or find historical documents to validate your courageous belief in yourself. Everyone encounters hard times — it’s simply a part of life. And dynamically major part of how you address the hard times is dependent on your mindset and your ability to believe in yourself, even throughout the toughest of times.
Mindset
Remember, your mindset is either your best friend or your worst enemy. If you allow your mindset to shift into negative territory, you’ll end up with negative results. The reality lays in the concept attracting the energy you exude.
If your mindset is negative based, you’ll need to start capturing the negativity and talk it out (mentally or aloud) and resist the urge to use either negative self-talk or judgmental statements to yourself or others.
One of the foundational concepts in my agency is catch the spark — -the space between the incoming thoughts and the feelings they generate. Once you can capture the spark, you can direct your behavior in any way you choose. While choosing to be positive doesn’t mean faking optimism, it also doesn’t mean to demonstrate false positivity. You can develop looking at obstacles and challenges in a positive light, or see the value of the struggle.
Take the following questions and explore:
Think about the biggest challenges you’ve face in your life. How did your mindset affect the outcome? How would the outcome have changed had your mindset been different? What can you do proactively to ensure the same challenge is easier to face next time?
When you take the above ideas and place them into your lens of life, you’ll begin to build belief in yourself. You can overcome hurdles, obstacles, and setbacks one at a time.
~Just a thought by Pamela
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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Photo credit: iStockPhoto.com
