WHEN FACING DIFFICULTIES

What happens inside you—in your mind, emotions, and body when you face difficulties? Regardless of the difficulty, whether it is physical like a sport or at the gym, or if it is mental difficulty which you are trying to understand, or emotional or inter-personal, or at work in your career—how do you face and deal with difficulties? After all, difficulties is a fact of life that none of us can escape. You cannot buy insurance against it. There’s no place on this planet where you can move to avoid difficulties. Wherever you go—there will be difficulties. Geography is not the answer.

Thinking is the answer. So now for this critical and inevitable question—How do you face difficulties? It determines how you will experience your life, yourself, your relationships, your future, just about everything. This question speaks about your inner resources and how you generally cope with life, especially when something becomes tough. How do you face and deal with difficulties?

Here are two polar choices with lots of positions in-between the two. Each describes a way of thinking about difficulties which leads to how you then feel about difficulties which, in turn, leads to how you respond to them.

1) Difficulties mean you should quit and do something else. On one side is this attitude: When a difficulty arises my first assumption is that if something is difficult it means “I’m not good at this.” “It means I can’t become good at it, that it is not for me.” Therefore, in the face of difficulties, we can predict what you will do and feel. You will almost immediately feel discouraged and more than likely you will give up.

You will think that putting effort into trying to deal with, or overcome, the difficulty will not work or be worth it. From the start you are convinced that you are not good at it and won’t be good. This is the fixed mindset that Carol Dwerk speaks about which refers to assuming that everything is fixed, fated, and determined from the beginning, so why try? You also assume that your performance in struggling with something difficult reflects on you as a person. So if you struggle, you interpret that struggle as it is a reflection on your and on your inadequacy as a person. Consequently that’s why you do not struggle with it, and will not struggle with it. For you it is an existential threat.

2) Difficulties means jump in, go for it, find out what’s possible. If, however, you assume that when a difficulty arises, it means, “Here is something to learn, something to discover,” then you will actually be excited by the difficulty. You will think in a more optimistic way, “My ability can grow incrementally when I devote myself to learning this and taking it on.”

We can now predict how you will think, feel, and act. The effect that this will have is that you will actually be challenged and delighted by the difficulty. You will step up to take it on. You will think, “Effort is the road to improvement.” “Frustration is simply a challenge” so you will keep trying and learning.

How about you? To which side of the continuum do you lean? When it comes to difficulties in life and facing them, do you tend toward the pessimistic side or the optimistic side?

Here’s another reframe. Difficulties means that life is real and serious. Difficulties say that how you live and what you do counts. So take on difficulties with curiosity and without judgment. The curiosity will enable you to understand how things work, what’s going on, and what solutions you can create. The ‘no judgment’ about your performance frees you up so that instead of judging things and feeling bad, you look for solutions and feel good that you are engaged in the adventure of life. Think this way and you can learn to laugh at difficulties.