Challenges are all around us. Some people face them while others ignore them. While challenges may not seem ideal and stressful, they are very important for growth. You can only grow when you put yourself outside your comfort zone. That’s when you are challenged. These challenges can be at a small scale to a large scale such as a colleague having performance issues, a project not getting the funding, kids misbehaving to divorce or life threatening injury. If you think back on your past days, you will notice that you did not get a day without some sort of challenge. Nor do you want one because it keeps you growing and feeling alive. It will keep you learning and that is essential to have a fulfilling life.
When challenges come at you, they need to be dealt with as quickly as possible. The challenge needs to be evaluated to understand why this is a challenge for you. How you can overcome this challenge and how to avoid it in the future. It will happen that some challenges that you face daily will get to you and be ignored for awhile. They will linger and you will keep swatting them away like a fly circling you. Nevertheless, with time these challenges will keep coming back until you confront them. Challenges have there way and when they are ignored for an extended period of time they can morph into what seems an unsurmountable mountain. Luckily, like anything in life, there will be a way to conquer that mountain. You just need to evaluate the challenge and break it down into manageable steps. Therefore, it’s better to take them on right away because that is when they are at their weakest and you are at your strongest even though it might seem the challenges seem difficult to overcome at the beginning.
The more challenges you overcome, the better you become at solving them. Some common skills to develop to help you conquer challenges are problem-solving and critical-thinking. These skills will enable you to reflect, learn and find a solution to the challenge. Asking questions is a great technic, such as asking why it’s a challenge for you. This will identify the gap in what is needed to overcome the challenge in addition to finding the root cause.
Specifically asking why this is a challenge over and over goes beyond the surface level reasons. By understanding the root cause of the challenge you can create better solutions and have mechanism in place to avoid these challenges and easily overcome them when they arise again. Consequently, it encourages you to have an overview look at the challenge, the depth of the challenge and the shape it holds. You can see the heart of the challenge and face it head on without going through the surface level issues. It saves time and energy. Face your challenge right away and you will be surprised how you come out of it.
Take care.