Life is full of challenges and hardships.
When everything seems to be going right, there is always something that arises that forces us to have to take a step back and solve some kind of problem.
These challenges disrupt our focus and can often wreak havoc on our mental, physical, and emotional well-being.
Life's natural challenges throw us curveballs and take us by surprise most times.
Our ability to deal with these challenges is a great testament of our character.
If we just sit back and let whatever the challenge is wreak havoc on us, we are never truly going to learn how to overcome the next one.
This is also how one can find themselves in a downward spiral.
In other words, when it rains, it pours - when one bad thing happens, it seems as though there is a chain of other bad things that soon follow.
While life's natural challenges may catch us by surprise, there is a way for us to prepare ourselves for when these things do occur.
We prepare ourselves by embracing life's greatest challenge: the ability for us to challenge ourselves.
By forcibly putting ourselves in difficult situations, we test our mental, physical, and emotional fortitude.
Testing our limits will place us in uncomfortable situations and these situations is where we learn to gain the most strength.
It does not go without mentioning that this is also why it is important to try new things because trying new things brings us out of our comfort zone.
When we have no knowledge or skills for something new, it activates a primal response of fight or flight - we fight to learn how to make ourselves useful, or we quit before we ever truly learn anything useful.
The stress of being outside of our comfort zone serves as the ultimate battle with the self.
it is a matter of thinking "am I going to see this through? Or am I going to give up?"
We simply cannot control when life decides to throw us curveballs.
We cannot control external circumstances or the thoughts and behaviors of other people.
But what we can control is how we deal with them.
By accepting life's greatest challenges (challenging ourselves), we further reinforce our ability to learn how to deal with stress.
New environments and experiences will naturally create stress for us to have to overcome.
We must be willing to learn from these experiences!
If we can openly accept our self-inflicted challenges, the more we will be able to accept the natural challenges and hardships of life.