How To Succeed: 3 Steps to Overcoming Adversity

Life gets tough at times, and most of us have our ways of dealing with problems. But what happens when the going seems too tough to cope?

What happens when you don’t see the light at the end of the tunnel, and you feel like you will never succeed at achieving your desires, be they for weight loss, health, relationships, finances or finding your purpose in life?

This is a tough situation to be in because when we are at this stage, it feels to us as if we have nothing to be grateful for. We focus on what we lack instead of on what we do have. It is a downward spiral that feels will only end in failure for us.

So what can be done at such times to get ourselves headed in the right direction towards a better future for ourselves?

There are three steps that we should and must take for our obstacles to transform into opportunities for our future success, in any field.

So, what are those three steps? Let’s dig in…

1. Make a plan. Yes, this basic step is the basis towards getting anywhere in life. Try to examine your life situation (by using your imagination) from the point of view of someone who is smart, but not sensitive. This is important because this imaginary person will not give you grace and will not feel sorry for you. Someone who has absolutely no sensitivity to your problems and is oriented towards helping you break free from your stressful situation. Write out your plan for overcoming your difficulty from their view point. In order to write the right plan, you need to educate yourself as to the steps you need to follow from being where you are today, to where you would like to be. Read articles and books written by people who have gained your trust to educate yourself on what can and should be done to improve your situation. Read stories of other people who have succeeded with what you are attempting. What did they change that allowed them to succeed? What characteristics can you identify in them that are different from your own and how can you make slight alterations to your character to become more aligned with the thing you would like to achieve? Write all of these things down and have them available for you to see throughout the day to keep you focused on the path towards achieving your goals. While you are writing your plans, you can also focus on things that you do have that perhaps others don’t have that can help you to succeed, but even you don’t find anything that you believe that is better then what others have, then what you certainly do have that 95% of the population don’t have is persistence. If you just continue on the right path and don’t give up, then you are already in a better place than most other people!

2. Take some time off from the world by going into an hour or two of solitude. Leave your responsibilities behind for a couple of hours and do an outdoors light endurance sport without having any distractions such as music, people, telephone calls, etc. Just walk continuously, even at a slow pace, and let your mind wander. This is important to do after you have begun creating a plan for yourself, because if you take the solitary time off when you have no plan in place, then you may tend to feel sorry for yourself and feel a victim to the circumstances, and this time will not only be unproductive but will rather be destructive for your attempts. I recommend doing exercise, even if only light continuous movement such as walking while in solitude because exercise makes you think better and more clearly. Take a pad and paper and write down any ideas you get while on your walk. This will free your mind for new ideas instead of just remembering the ideas you have come up with.

3. The last step to follow is to show up and follow your plan. Once you have the plan in place and you have tweaked it following your solitary time off, then you know where to go and what to do. It’s not good enough to have a plan sitting in a drawer. You have to take the right actions, be they large or even very small, and keep going towards your target. Persist! Remember the tale of the hare and the tortoise. Who won the race? The one who didn’t give up and persisted until he reached the finish line. There is no rush to succeed today or tomorrow, so don’t let yourself or anyone else or any belief you hold to make you stressed about succeeding at a certain period. Just keep doing the tasks that need to be done daily, and you will already be in a better state than most people. It’s not easy to continue to persist while you seem to see no results on the outside world. But just know that a bamboo tree needs to be watered daily for five years before it emerges from beneath the ground! After five continuous years of care, it will shoot up from the ground to become 5 feet tall or more in just a few short weeks. So don’t lose hope. You will succeed if you persist!

These simple steps for transforming obstacles into opportunities are good for any aspect of life. I have personally used these steps to get me out of difficult situations that I overcame successfully in health, weight loss, finances, and relationships.

The key to your success is to never, never, never give up on what matters most to you and is in line with the overall good, because what happens to you in life is less important than what you take from it and what you build from your experiences.

If you are not sure about your goals in life, check out my article to help you define your goals HERE

Thank you for taking the time to read this. If you are serious about improving any aspect of your life no matter what your age or circumstance, and are ready to achieve better results in all life aspects, guaranteed, then join my mailing list where you will receive my weekly newsletter with groundbreaking health, motivational content, recipes, inspiration, as well as many FREE bonuses and special offers. Click HERE to subscribe. Or visit the Obstacle2Opportunity Website for advice, offers, programs and free information HERE.

Featured image by Mathias Erhart