Throughout our lives we will all face obstacles of one kind or another.
It doesn’t matter how big or small they might seem to other people, they can feel insurmountable to you.
So how can you make it easier to deal with and overcome them?
Here are the 3 questions I ask myself whenever I am faced with an obstacle.
What are the lessons I can learn from this?
Looking for the lesson in anything can help you grow.
Whenever something happens, there is a lesson we can take from it.
Hopefully, the lesson will be a positive one and help you move your life forward rather than a negative one that keeps you stuck.
By this I mean, when we get hurt by a situation, rather than cutting everyone off and never trusting again, which could be a negative lesson, we can learn to look for the red flags early.
We can learn to set and stick to boundaries.
Often when I am faced with obstacles, the lesson can come in the form of showing what I need to heal within myself to progress in life.
Write down as many lessons as you can think of from whatever you are facing and see how you can apply them to your life to improve it.
What are the positives that can come from this/What is there to be grateful for in this situation?
You do not need to think positive all the time, looking for things to be grateful for or positives in a situation can help you reframe it though.
Feel whatever you are feeling, do what you need to do to process those feelings and look for the silver lining.
For example, years ago, on the night I was robbed, I was devastated.
In the few weeks prior to the robbery my now ex husband had attempted to stab me, he was stalking me, threatened people close to me, assaulted me and I was scared for my life.
Moving to this new home I had started to feel I could start my life over. Getting robbed brought back the emotions I felt when trapped in my marriage.
I was scared, violated, vulnerable and felt I had nothing.
All my personal belongings, everything in my bedroom and bathroom, was stolen, even my underwear.
The rest of the house was untouched.
I sat in my lounge room, on the half a lounge I owned, the only furniture in that room, and sobbed uncontrollably.
Why did they have to rob me? I had nothing!
I calmed down and looked at my situation. I could choose to continue to be upset and be a victim or I could look for the positives.
I chose to look for the positives. I wrote a gratitude list, documenting every reason I could think of to be grateful for the robbery and managed to come up with quite a few.
By choosing to be grateful and look for positives I was taking control of the situation and owning my experience instead of letting it control me.
By the time the police arrived I was calm, I had my list of what I knew had been stolen and I continued to grow my gratitude list over time.
The attitude of gratitude didn’t change the fact I had been robbed.
It did change how I felt about the situation and as it turns out, I ended up needing the insurance money so it was a blessing in disguise.
How can I turn this into an opportunity?
It might sound unrealistic or awkward to try to think about our obstacles as opportunities, it can help though.
The opportunity could be the lesson you learn, people you connect with because of what happened, getting pushed out of your comfort zone etc.
You might not see the opportunity right away but keeping an open mind for it can be beneficial.
A few examples from my life:
Getting robbed of everything was an opportunity because I had insurance, I was able to use most of that money for the speech therapy and psychology my kids needed due to autism and ADHD. I was also able to buy some new clothes and start my life fresh after leaving an abusive marriage.
Abuse/homelessness was turned into the opportunity to raise funds for charities related to that as I was able to share parts of my story. I’d rather live without that background but since it did happen and I had the speaking and media experience, I was willing to use what happened to help.
Getting locked down in the Solomon Islands early 2020 was confronting but there were no cases there so we lived a fairly free life. We repatriated after the worst of the lockdowns in Queensland and were able to set up a life in Noosa. During our time we were swimming at the beach, going to weddings and had easy access to toilet paper etc while seeing the opposite in Australia.
We faced other issues such as safety and if any cases reached there, the medical system had NOTHING available to help anyone. Overall, at first what seemed like an extreme obstacle and scary turned out to be a blessing and opportunity.