How to Overcome Adversity and Hard Times
Are you ready to overcome adversity? Hard times don't have to last forever.
When life knocks you down, what do you do? Do you dust yourself off and keep moving forward, or do you curl up in a ball and give up? Adversity takes many forms and effects each person differently. What matters most is how you choose to react when adversity strikes.
If you want to master your life, you need to learn how to overcome adversity and hard times. How do I know? I've been faced with some big challenges in my life that have tested my strength. By making the choice to overcome adversity, I was able to make room for healthier relationships, financial abundance, greater confidence, and a heightened level of personal fulfillment and joy.
You may not be able to see it now, but adversity is actually a blessing in disguise. It is an opportunity for you to prove to yourself how strong you really are. In the words of Barbara De Angelis, “We don’t develop courage by being happy every day. We develop it by surviving difficult times and challenging adversity.”
When you overcome adversity, you change your life.
Yes, hard times can be difficult to bare and can leave emotional scars that are difficult to let go of, but we always have a choice. You don't need to possess superhuman strength in order to bounce back from adversity. The secret to learning how to overcome adversity and hard times is resilience.
You may be wondering, “What does it mean to be resilient?” Resilience is the process of thriving through adversity, trauma or stress. It is not something that you are born with. Rather, it is a trait that can be developed over time.
In her book, Supernormal: The Untold Story of Adversity And Resilience, Meg Jay says that, “What I like about the word ‘supernormal' is it hints at how heroic that is — that it takes a lot of courage to go out there and rise above your circumstances or rise above the events that have happened to you.”
It's not the events of life that matter, but rather the meaning that we create from those events. Whether or not you create an empowering or disempowering meaning from hard times in your life is entirely up to you. Two different people can experience the same event but take away an entirely different meaning from their experience.
Resilient people don't focus on how hard times broke them in the first place. Rather, they pay attention to and embrace the actions that they took in order to get through the difficult times. They wake up every day and consciously choose growth and focus on what they can control.
Researchers have discovered five particular areas of growth that often spring from adversity: interpersonal relationships, the identification of new possibilities for one's life, personal strength, spirituality, and an appreciation of life. This phenomenon is referred to as post-traumatic growth. Each of us has the power to channel our pain into productive ways of living.
If you struggle with adversity, today is a new day to reclaim your power. You no longer have to drown in the ocean of despair. Now is the time to be your own anchor and ride the storms of life, with grace and ease. I want to teach you 9 strategies that will help you overcome adversity and hard times once and for all.
1. Believe In Yourself
Don't let anything or anyone make you question your belief in yourself. When adversity hits, it's easy for our self-esteem to take a massive blow, but you need to realize that you are NOT defined by your challenges. Adversity isn't a part of your identity. It's merely an experience.
Trust that you have the ability to take back control of your life when everything feels like it's falling apart. Acknowledge the adversity and hard times that you are experiencing, but know that you will overcome anything that stands in your way of success.
Don't allow your inner critic to rope you into the story that you aren't strong enough to get through tough times. Think back to all of the times in your life when you rose back from the ashes, and use those experiences as reminders of how strong you are.
2. Drop Negative Self-Talk
What you think and say about yourself will create your outcomes in life. When adversity occurs, be aware of how you talk to yourself. If you focus primarily on the negative aspects of a stressful event, then you will be more likely to replay those negative thoughts in your head. Your inner critic will feed off the negativity, further diminishing your self-esteem.
Words are powerful. Resist saying things like, “I can't do this” or “This is tough.” Don't let the story that your inner critic is trying to tell you to dictate your choices. Instead, focus on language that is empowering, positive and that inspires you to take action to change your life.
3. Practice Self-Compassion
When life knocks you down, showing kindness and compassion towards yourself can go a long way. Studies show that self-compassion is a key piece in peoples' ability to overcome adversity and hard times. Let's pull upon research to support this point of view.
Kristin Neff, Ph.D., a pioneer in self-compassion research, says self-compassion has three main components: (a) Self-kindness – replace harsh self-criticism with kinder, gentler words, (b) common humanity – acknowledge that suffering and personal failure is a universal experience; and (c) mindfulness – observe your negative emotions without focusing on them or suppressing them.
Mistakes will happen in life. Don't be so hard on yourself! If you dwell on the negative, you will never be able to move forward. When you are recovering from setbacks, do you speak to yourself like you would to a good friend that is going through hard times? If not, it's time to show yourself some more self-compassion.
4. Change Your Response
Whenever adversity looms its ugly face and tries to take you down, how do you respond? Your response is what will determine how fast you are able to bounce forward from adversity. It's not what happens to you that matters. Rather, it's what you choose to do with that negative experience.
Resilient-minded people are always growing and seeking new to ways to learn from life's experiences. When we respond to a negative event in a positive way, positive results unfold. At the end of the day, life is all about choices. We can't always choose what happens to us, but we can always choose how we will respond.
Don't react. Rather, be proactive, take ownership of your problems, and eventually, you will find that adversities and hard times are just obstacles that you can and will overcome. Robert Collier said it best – “In every adversity there lies the seed of an equivalent advantage. In every defeat is a lesson showing you how to win the victory next time.”
5. Take Responsibility For Your Life
It’s not easy to take responsibility for your circumstances, especially when they are out of our control. However, by playing the victim and taking a back seat to your life, you are disempowering yourself, leaving you feeling powerless and unable to take control of the situation.
It comes down to accepting that life is a rollercoaster ride of highs and lows. And in order to enjoy the ride, you need to appreciate the duality, without any resistance to the process. Sometimes when we are dealt an unfair hand, we assume that life is working against us.
However, every experience of adversity is designed to help us become better versions of ourselves. When you take responsibility for your life and your circumstances, you are better able to embrace the hard times that life can bring.
6. Ask For Help
When adversity and hard times strike, don't be afraid to ask for help from colleagues, friends or loved ones. Oftentimes when we feel deeply wounded by hard times, it is easy to feel like we are alone, but you aren't. The fear of looking stupid or weak stops many people from reaching out for help. These limiting beliefs are created from years of societal conditioning that teaches us that vulnerability equates to weakness. This is far from true. Asking for help is one of the most accurate measures of strength, so don't be afraid to share your story and express how you feel.
7. Find The Silver Lining
Every adversity presents an opportunity for growth. Think back to some of the most difficult times in your past. What did you learn about yourself and how did your life change as a result of that experience? Resilient people always look for opportunities in adversities and hard times.
Do resilient people feel pain deeply? Of course, but they don't dwell in self-loathing and victimhood. They recover from the blows of life and find the silver lining that allows them to become more.
It may seem impossible to look for the good when you are in the throws of a negative situation, but a positive attitude is what will allow you to get back into the game of life much faster. In the words of Marilyn Monroe, “Sometimes things fall apart so that better things can fall together.”
8. Create A Game Plan
If you want to change your life for the better, you need to create a game plan and take positive action. You create your reality. You can either choose to dwell in negativity or rise up and take back your life. Don't wait and hope for a better tomorrow.
Hard times can knock us down if we allow them to. We always have a choice to transform pain into possibility. Don't be limited by adversity and hard times. Know your strength and believe that you are capable of doing anything. If you are willing to persist, despite the odds, and rise above your circumstances there is nothing that will stand in your way of success.
9. Adopt An Attitude Of Gratitude
What if I told you that a simple change in your attitude could help you overcome adversity of any kind? This is where the power of gratitude comes into play. This is a state of mind that helps us see everything in life as a gift. In the face of hard times, gratitude is what helps us cope and gives us hope.
I believe that everything in life happens for a reason, and that negative experiences are designed to serve our higher self in some way. It's our job to find out what that is. I'm so grateful for all of the hard times I've been through. In fact, I celebrate them. Everything that I've gone through in my life has made me the person I am today.
Some of the biggest breakthroughs that I've experienced in my life happened right after I was able to overcome massive adversity. To this day, when something negative happens, I always ask myself, “What's great about this experience and what can I learn from this?” It's your job to find the empowering meanings of every experience that you face, both good and bad.
When you are in the moment, you don't always see the value of gratitude, but I encourage you to always trust that the events that have happened in your life serve a purpose that is bigger than yourself. Sometimes hard times force us to hit rock bottom so that we can reflect on our lives and grow through adversity. You can lose everything, but the one thing that can never be taken away from you is what you've learned and who you have become in the process.
There is always a lesson to be learned from every experience. If you believe that life happens for you, not to you, you will feel empowered to get through anything that tests your strength.
Are you ready to overcome adversity and hard times?
Champions look adversity and hard times in the eye and give them a wink. You are a champion. It's time to show life what you are made of. In the words of William Arthur Ward, “Adversity causes some men to break; others to break records.” Which path will you take?
by Stefan James