Overcoming Challenges of Life

“Life's challenges are not supposed to paralyze you, they're supposed to help you discover who you are.”

The first step you need to take is to get a complete picture of whatever challenge you are facing, including the good that will come out of it when properly handled. One example is improved relationships.

“Accept the challenges so that you may feel the exhilaration of victory.”

The second step is to pinpoint the specific challenge area or areas where you need strengthening.

Using the example, let’s say that after careful analysis of all the factors, you look at the following:

• The seriousness of your efforts to meet and befriend new people and, then, to generate interest in your product, service, or opportunity.

• The degree of discipline you demonstrated in following up with interested prospects.

• The leadership ability, or lack of it, you showed in helping those people come on board as associates or clients.

• Your caring enough about the people you are working with to help them in whatever way they needed assistance and encouragement from there on.

“Don't be afraid to fail. Don't waste energy trying to cover up failure. Learn from your failures and go on to the next challenge. It's OK to fail. If you're not failing, you're not growing.”

The third step is to brainstorm about your specific challenge, and write down some solution ideas.

• Analyze it from both your viewpoint and that of potential prospects’.

• Analyze it relative to how you are handling the situation and how successful leaders in your industry are handling it.

• Compare your success at it now with your success at it a year ago, two years ago, or even five years ago. Are you improving? If not, is this maybe one of the reasons you might be stuck in your progress?

• Take into account all the factors, some of which you need to deal with to reach your goal, that you may have carelessly ignored before now.
  

“Opportunities to find deeper powers within ourselves come when life seems most challenging.”

The fourth step is to give the analytical half of your brain time to compute the pros and cons of the possible solutions.

Each time your subconscious pops a possible solution into your mind, jot it down and save it. Give your subconscious mind time to analyze the full scope of the situation.

“We choose to go...not because [it is] easy, but because [it is] hard, because that goal will serve to measure and organize the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win.”

The fifth step is taken one to three days after your brainstorming session.

Analyze your best options, while focusing on win-win solutions. This requires compassion, understanding, humility, and forgiveness so you can heal any broken relationships that may exist.

Using our business expansion challenge as an example, you may have had such responses as:

• Strengthen your desire by focusing on your dream.

• Make a list of opportunities to meet new people and schedule them into your planner.

• Learn to meet new people and make more friends.

• Explore continuing education opportunities in your industry to better prepare yourself to present what you have to offer in an appropriate, interesting way.

The sixth step and final step is the most obvious one: Choose what you believe is the best win-win solution and get behind it with dedicated, focused effort so you can make it work. Press forward with action, and have confidence in your ability to succeed while striving for an excellent result. But, if you don’t attain it, keep going. At the very least, you learned what doesn’t work and you can begin again, more intelligently, with increased vigor and renewed commitment.

Cure Yourself of Excuses Disease -The Failure Disease

"You may be disappointed if you fail, but you are doomed if you don't try."

“Keep on beginning and failing. Each time you fail, start all over again, and you will grow stronger until you have accomplished a purpose - not the one you began with perhaps, but one you'll be glad to remember.”

Excuses appears in a wide variety of forms, but the worst types of this disease are: health excuses, intelligence excuses, age excuses and luck excuses.

Vaccinate ourselves against excuses:

1. “But My Health Isn’t Good”

Health excuses ranges all the way from the chronic “I don’t feel good” to the more specific “I’ve got such-and-such wrong with me”, bad health in a thousand different forms, is used as an excuse for failing to do what a person wants to do.

Four things you can do to defeat health excuses:

• Refuse to talk about your health. The more you talk about an ailment, even the common cold, and the worst it seems to get. Talking about bad health is like putting fertilizer on weeds. Success-minded people defeat the natural tendency to talk about their bad health.

• Refuse to worry about your health.

• Be genuinely grateful that your health is as good as it is. There’s an old saying, “I felt sorry for myself because I had a ragged shoes until I met a man who had no feet.”

• Remind yourself often “It’s better to wear out than rust out” Life is yours to enjoy. Don’t waste it

2. “But You’ve Got to Have Brains to Succeed”

Intelligence excuses or “I lack brains” is common (95% of people). Not many people will admit openly that they think they lack adequate intelligence, rather, they feel it deep down inside.

Most of us make two basic errors with respect to intelligence.

• We under estimate our own brain power.

• We over estimate the other fellow’s brain power.

What really matters is not how much intelligence you have but how you use what you do have. The thinking that guides your intelligence is much more important than how much intelligence you may have. Interest, enthusiasm is the critical factor.

Three Ways to Cure Intelligence Excuses.

• Never underestimate your own intelligence and never overestimate the intelligence of others. Remember, it’s not how many brains you’ve got that matters, it’s how you use your brains that counts.
• Remind yourself several times daily “My attitudes are more important than my intelligence.”

• Remember that the ability to think is of much greater value than the ability to memorize facts.

3. “It’s No Use. I’m Too Old (or Too Young)”

Cure for age Excuses is:

• Look at your present age positively.

• Compute how much productive time you have left.

• Invest future time in doing what you really want to do.

It’s too late only when you let your mind go negative and think it’s too late. Stop thinking “I should have started years ago.” That’s failure thinking, Instead think “I’m going to start now, my best years are still ahead of me” that’s the way successful people think.

4. “But My Case Is Different, I Attract Bad Luck.”

Two Ways to conquer this Excuses:

• Accept the law of cause and effect,

• Don’t be a wishful thinker, Instead, just concentrate on developing those qualities in yourself that will make you a winner.

How about you? What are your excuses not to succeed in your endeavors in life?

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