Life without challenges seems pale
“A life without challenge, a life without hardship, a life without purpose, seems pale and pointless. With challenge come perseverance and gumption. With hardship come resilience and resolve. With purpose come strength and understanding.”
Terry Fallis, The High
It’s dark outside, it’s winter and it’s -20C. Unpredictably, the noisy wind it’s hitting the windows of a tinny house, with aggressive force, like the wind it’s angry about yesterday’s good weather and now seeks revenge.
It’s the coldest day so far this year and the heating of the house it’s not working. A strange melody (phone ring) breaks the aggressive sound of the wind and makes the situation seem ordinary.
A person answers the phone with wobbly hands, probably from the cold. The voice on the phone is asking a question, a question that provokes different emotions and thoughts.
What would you choose?
What would you choose living a safe mundane life without many risks till very old age or an exciting life with challenges, growth, and fulfillment, but shorter?
Imagine you are the person on the phone, what would you choose?
If you choose the exciting, challenging, and shorter life, keep reading. If you chose, a safe and long life, then also keep reading.
In modern times we are living in a very comfortable way, we don’t have many life-threatening challenges, but you can make the argument that we have even more challenges, they are just different, not life-threatening or survival, like they used to be.
A lot of our challenges paradoxically come from not having actual challenges anymore.
Reading this, you will learn about the importance of challenging yourself for your growth. The different challenges you can take on, and how to overcome them. You will learn that risks are inevitable and challenges are crucial for your growth.
Become a challenge seeker, take risks and be ready for new adventures!
“Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming “Wow! What a Ride!”
Hunter S. Thompson, The Proud Highway: Saga of a Desperate Southern Gentleman, 1955-1967
The willingness to challenge yourself comes from the desire to grow and create new opportunities in your life. Develop the mindset of a person who wants to take on challenges and grow from them.
See the world as a playground; life should be lived and experienced. What are you trying to do with your life? Are you scared of living it?
You are alive and you have the opportunity to experience life, don’t lose that chance, life it’s short, and you don’t want to end your life with many regrets. Just imagine the feeling of getting older and realizing you didn’t take the chances and opportunities life was giving you, because of some fear you had. Regret is the result of not following what’s important to you.
Stories you can tell your grandchildren
Life should be an adventure, what’s the point of being 100 years old and not having something interesting to tell to your grandchildren, no stories, challenges, and struggles?
You don’t need to be scared of most of the fears you have in today’s world. Some of our fears are outdated. We still need the fear of heights most of the time. You don’t want to jump from a bridge; you know how this gonna end. But the fear we have of talking to a stranger, for example, or just leaving our country, it’s not rational. What so bad could happen?
Risks are inevitable
Yes, you have to take risks in almost everything. Nothing is 0% risk-free in life. Even eating a banana can kill you. I don’t want to build a new fear in you, fear of eating bananas, but it’s true, you risk in everything you do, life is a risk. Not taking a risk is a risk. So don’t be scared to take some risks. Don’t be dumb about it; calculated and meaningful risks are what I am talking about.
How do you know you are not risking your life right now? That’s the other thing I wanted to share with you. Most of the risks seem risky because you are aware of the possible consequences. But how many risks are you taking right now, that you are not even aware of them?
You don’t even realize it. Like eating junk food? Yeah, you know how bad it is right? But do you? Or you may know how bad junk food is for your health, but you still take the risk of eating it, because it’s not a challenge for you; it’s something that doesn’t require any willpower from you.
Some of the risks we take are risks that don’t require action. The risks that require action are often the ones we have to take, but we don’t, because we need to take action, and action can be stressful and hard for many reasons.
My point is, you already take a lot of risks, right now… The risk in your life is inevitable. Not taking risks, it’s a risk in itself. Seek challenges in your life, go and experience something you never experienced before, go on an adventure, and don’t be afraid to experience life to the fullest!
What does it mean to challenge yourself?
It means testing your capabilities in the world against something or someone. Action toward something that requires you to leave your comfort zone, and perhaps put yourself into scary situations, where you don’t feel comfortable, and you don’t know the outcome of your actions.
It means seeking growth, as a person and being ready to learn something new about yourself. To welcome new experiences, good or bad, accept and be aware of the possibility to discover where your limits are. It’s like seeing the bully from your childhood, looking him in the eyes, and confronting him.
To put it another way, challenging yourself means you are confident enough to test your abilities but open and aware of the possibility to glimpse where your limits are.
Why you should challenge yourself?
In some ways life, it’s a big challenge in itself. You’ve already been challenged by life, even if you don’t seek challenge, one way or another, you’ve experienced it.
But to challenge yourself, it’s different than being challenged. Challenging yourself, it’s something you decide to do and take control of. Your willingness to seek challenges and overcome what’s in the way makes you stronger and builds your confidence.
Challenge benefits
- Learn who you are as a person. You don’t know how strong you are until you don’t put yourself in situations where you need to be strong. When you face real challenges you can learn a lot about yourself, stuff you never knew. Challenges can teach you about your weakness or your strengths.
- Change your worldview. How do you develop a new worldview? Through new experiences, learning something new, etc… Challenge very often change your perception of things.
- Build confidence. Dealing with challenges and overcoming them, builds your confidence. Confidence usually doesn’t come from thin air, it comes from your knowledge, experience, or overcoming struggles.
- New possibilities. In some sense seeing new opportunities and taking action, it’s a challenge in itself. The moment you want to change yourself is the moment you see new possibilities.
- Joy. As human beings, we evolve to face challenges. They are part of our life and make life meaningful. Without challenges, life can be mundane and boring. Overcoming a challenge it’s a joyful and fulfilling experience.
- Expand your comfort zone and make you more comfortable with being uncomfortable. Comfort zones can be growth killers. It’s really important to build yourself in a safe environment, but it comes a time when you need to get out of your comfort zone and challenge yourself if you want to grow further. In some way, challenging yourself it’s getting out of your comfort zone. Dealing with uncertainty and uncomfortable situations builds resilience.
- Control of your life. When you are not scared of challenges, you can have control over your life, otherwise, you are controlled by your insecurities and fears.
- Live an exciting life. We said already, life is boring without challenges. We need challenges to feel alive. An exciting life involves challenges, meaningful experiences, and stories of struggle and overcoming,
- Improve your skills. To improve your skills you need to challenge yourself, and when you challenge yourself, you will develop or improve your skills in the process.
How to challenge yourself?
A great way to challenge yourself is by setting goals you want to achieve. Goals that contribute to your growth.
If you think about it, finding a way to challenge yourself, it’s not hard at all, it’s just something you need to put the time into and think about it.
You probably already know in which areas of life you need to take more risks and challenge yourself. Deep down we all know what we need to work on, take action, etc…But in case you find it hard to come up with new challenges to take, here is a list of some challenges you can face right now.
Note: The best challenges, are the challenges you believe will help you grow as a person.
Mental challenges:
Read a challenging book
– Books are a great way to improve your cognitive power and imagination. You can always find a book that’s interesting and challenging at the same time.
Improve your memory
– Let’s put it this way, it’s always important to keep your memory fresh, but when we age it’s crucial to exercise our memory even more.
Reduce social media usage
– That’s a hard one. Social media can be detrimental to our well-being and yet, we are so addicted. Try to reduce social media usage by 50% at least.
Learn to stay calm in stressful situations
– If you want to look more confident and mentally strong, that’s the challenge for you. Meditation can teach you how to stay calm in stressful situations.
Meditate
– Start meditating, if you aren’t already. You can increase the minutes of meditation, and make it more challenging if you are already into meditating.
Talk with strangers
– Imagine you get comfortable speaking with strangers, how confident you would feel in situations that require you to communicate with people? It’s a confidence booster because life in many situations requires you to be social, we are social human beings at the end of the day. Maybe it’s time to face your fears and go out to talk with random strangers.
Physical/well-being challenges:
Do a 30-day push-up challenge
– You can do 200 push-ups every day, depending on your level, if you are fit already, you can aim for 300, etc…
Start a new hobby or sport.
– Is there a sport you wanted to start when you were younger but didn’t for whatever reason? Hobbies are great for maintaining a balance in life between work and leisure time. In times when you work on something, you don’t particularly enjoy, hobbies are a great way to escape the mundane life of work and do something you love. Why not challenge yourself by learning a new sport?
Run a mile every day for a month.
– You can run after or before work, one mile it’s not challenging for some people, you can run three miles, choose what’s best for you and your level of fitness.
Stop eating processed foods.
– For some people, this is more challenging than going to the gym. I get it, nowadays it’s almost impossible to live a life without processed foods or already-packaged food. You can challenge yourself by just reducing the number of processed foods you eat. Yeah, that means no Mcdonowds, that’s probably the first ‘’food’’ you need to remove from your diet.
Burpee challenge
– Burpees are hard, I find it easier to do 100 push-ups in a row, than 100 burpees. It’s whole body movement, which makes them challenging. Start by doing 50 per day and every new week increase the number by 10 more, do this for a month at least.
Climb a mountain
– What better way to improve your fitness and well-being than climbing a beautiful mountain and being in nature?
Nature can heal your bad mood and make you think about the important things in life.
Professional:
Share your opinion more often
– What’s most challenging for agreeable people? They usually don’t share what they feel they need to or want to. Mostly they would agree with what’s more convenient and accepted by society and other people. They neglect their need, to satisfy other people, and rarely express themselves. Is that you?
It’s not always bad to be agreeable, but if you do it all the time and you never speak your truth, it’s harmful to your well-being and you need to learn to express your truth to people.
Learn to lead people
– Not everyone is born a leader, some people become leaders. Most people feel better by following than leading. It’s expected, to think you are not born to be a leader. But let me ask you this if you have to build your own business and you need to hire people to do what you think it’s best for your own business, would you learn to be one? Soon you will realize that when you need to be a leader, you either become one or learn to be one. If you are a follower try to challenge yourself and learn to lead.
Upgrade your skills.
– One of the most beneficial ways to challenge yourself, it’s learning new skills. I see learning new skills in 21 century as the same as learning how to hunt in the hunter-gatherer culture. Today the world is changing so fast, think for a second about how different the world was only 10 years ago… With the world changing so fast, learning new skills and adapting to what’s useful for you and society, it’s more than a useful way to thrive in the modern world.
Change your career.
– When we age, we may experience a new calling, a new purpose to impact the world. Changing, in general, could be overwhelming however, not changing when you need to change, could be more damaging for you in the long run. Think twice when you have to take really important decisions, like changing your career. It’s not an easy thing to do but may be crucial for your growth, so take advantage of the new opportunity life presents to you.
Note:
– Do what’s challenging for you, not for someone else. What is challenging for me, may not be for you.
– Focus on one challenge or two at the same time.
– Try to find a challenge from your current situation, a challenge that would make you grow.
Common challenges in life we need to face during our lifetime:
Health crisis
In life, sooner or later we have to face a period of our lives, where our health it’s struggling.
Breakups
Not many people could say ‘’I never had to go through a hard breakup’’ I hope you are one of them though.
Career downfall
In your lifetime you would experience challenges in developing a career or adapting to a new one. Change it’s not good or bad, it’s how you see it. We may need to change and take advantage of the new opportunities.
Loneliness and alienation
Now more than ever before, loneliness is raising for everybody. Yeah, who would predict it 20 years ago, when social media was becoming popular? We always had to deal with loneliness or the feeling of alienation from the world, but today, because of social media, loneliness grew tremendously last decade.
Failure
I don’t care who you are, or how good your life is, and I hope it is, but I’m sure you had at least one failure in your life. That’s okay, failure it’s part of whatever you are trying to achieve. Failure’s an opportunity to grow and see new possibilities.
Learn how to deal with failure, when you challenge yourself, you would have to face a lot of it!
Start again
You may need to change the workplace, new city to live or relationship. Starting again could be stressful and it’s challenging sometimes. It’s a challenge you need to face at one point in your life.
Getting older
Getting older it’s a challenge we all face every day. No one escapes from it, technically everyone is getting older, and no one is getting younger. Accept it and learn how to deal with it. Life can be beautiful at any age.
Losing someone
A big part of getting older is dealing with the loss of people you love. It’s something we don’t talk about, but deep down we know we will go through it at one point.
Change
Almost everything involves change. Challenge itself is mostly about changing something. Change in life it’s like flour in bread.
Traumas
Maybe not everyone experience really painful and memorable trauma in their life, but it’s hard to believe you never had to experience some type of setback or something that was just painful for you. At least 50% of the population experience trauma in their life. We still talk about trauma like it’s a rare experience, but it’s not.
How to overcome challenges in life.
One of the most important aspects of overcoming challenges and dealing with them in a better and more effective way is to develop the right mindset and attitude.
Life will throw different challenges at you, and how you respond and deal with them, will shape you as a person. If you want to gain strength and confidence, you need to face the struggle and the challenges with open arms, because that’s what builds your character and makes you mentally resilient.
You can either decide to let the challenges defeat you or make you stronger since you are already reading this. I assume you want to overcome the challenges and grow as a result.
Here are some things that will help you deal better with challenges:
Emotional intelligence
The ability to understand your own emotions, it’s crucial when it comes to ‘’controlling’’ your emotions.
When you challenge yourself, no matter who you are, you have to learn how to deal with your emotions. Challenging yourself, it’s a very emotional process. It will help you grow in any other area of your life. But you need to learn how to read your emotions.
Some questions you need to ask yourself when dealing with challenges are: How do I feel right now? Why do I feel this way? How did I feel before? How do I want to feel? Why did I choose to take this action? What motivates me? Why take action? How does this challenge make me feel about myself? Should I express what I feel? And many more, the point is to analyze your emotions and learn from them.
An emotionally intelligent person has self-awareness, empathy, social skills, self-control, and motivation.
Think in the long-run
Let’s say you challenge yourself to learn how to fight. On the first day, you go to the gym and learn some basic punches. The next day you learn how to keep your guard. The next week, you learn how to dodge punches… and then you spar with someone more experienced than you, and he beat you. Instead of thinking – oh, I can’t fight, I’m not good enough… you think – okay, maybe my skills are not quite there yet right now, but with (think long-term) time I’ll improve them.
After months/years you pick an amateur fight and you win against the same guy you sparred with and lost, first when you just started.
You will overcome the challenges with persistence and a positive attitude.
Growth mindset
When we talk about how important it is to have the right mindset/attitude, in my mind, the first thing that pops up is a growth mindset. You need to believe and know you are capable of improving yourself, period! Without this belief, most people don’t even try to improve, because they don’t even believe it’s possible.
The moment you try to challenge yourself is the right time to learn and cultivate a growth mindset.
It’s all about growth baby. I write a whole blog post about what is and how to develop it, if you want to learn more, click here!
Spirituality
Means believing in something bigger than yourself. To be spiritual means, to recognize there is something greater than yourself and that there’s more to human life than the sensory experience.
You may believe in something greater than yourself; call it nature or invisible power, whatever word you want to choose. For someone else, that means a supreme being, a creator. In many situations, spirituality can help you deal with challenges.
I’m not religious myself, but I do recognize the power it can have on people.
It’s temporary
That’s a good one… A lot of the challenges disappear with time. You don’t even have to do something. Just be tough enough to survive the painful experience.
Everything is temporary. Only change is constant. When you know the bad day, bad month, year, etc… will be over eventually, it’s easier to endure the challenge you are facing right now.
Learn from other’s people experiences.
Read other’s people stories about how they face and overcome their struggles and challenges.
It will make you believe it’s possible to overcome even tougher challenges than the ones you are facing. You can always read, and listen about someone who had to overcome similar or even bigger challenges than yours.
These stories can inspire you to face your challenges, knowing someone else already overcome them.
Ask for help.
Yes, yes… You can ask for help, yeah, you! Some people may perceive it as weak; however, I think it’s an adaptable way to deal with challenges. It’s always better to know you have people who can help you in tough situations. Asking for help, it’s not a bad thing if you don’t overdo it and rely on people all the time.
I had to learn to ask for help, because I’m usually on my own and don’t like to ask for help, but I don’t think that’s an intelligent way to deal with every challenge you are facing.
Asking for help and relying on people, however, it’s good only when you don’t usually ask for help all the time, you need to be independent in general!
Motivate yourself.
Think about what people would say after you overcome the challenge. Imagine you overcome a difficult situation in your life, imagine how most people you know see you overcoming those challenges. People will respect you. We all want and we like to be respected for something we did and overcome, it’s validating for us.
A big percentage of people’s actions and motivation to achieve a goal, or overcome a challenge, it’s to gain respect and the appreciation of others.
Make a plan.
Pick this terrifying challenge and dissect it into pieces. The step-by-step process, small goals/challenges. That’s the famous baby-step process. The big scary challenge will look less intimidating.
That’s with the long-term challenges, where we have to take action to overcome them, over a long timeframe. What if we need to face a challenge like the first interview after 10 years of working the same job?
Well, again… you can prepare for it before it happens, make a plan. You can use the baby steps process if you are fortunate and you have time, otherwise, you have to use what you have and make a plan on how to overcome the challenge.
Let’s say your interview it’s tomorrow and it’s short notice. You can prepare before you attend the interview. Research the company you apply for, what are their values, and what they are looking for. Check what’s body language it’s appropriate to have during interviews. What are the most asked questions during an interview? Plan and learn, different challenges require different skills, but almost all of them benefit from a good plan and execution.
Learn to enjoy the process.
That’s a cool thing to say. I know it sounds ridiculous. Enjoy the process? ‘’What is he thinking’’, you may ask… Yeah. Who enjoys feeling weak, insecure, dumb, and scared at the same time? Well, when you challenge yourself and you follow the path of growth, soon or later you realize you need to face your insecurities, to step outside your comfort zone, where many times you may feel scared and dumb when you try to do something you never did before.
You need to learn to enjoy the process and the challenges themselves. The way to do this is by knowing that when you overcome them, you will gain strength and confidence. It’s like you seeking challenges instead of running from them because you know the challenge benefits you, instead of harming you.
Conclusion:
Challenge yourself!
That’s it, that’s the whole conclusion. You read everything just to realize you need to challenge yourself? Ahhh, that’s all? That’s everything you need in two words.
I am convinced that you know how important it’s to grow and overcome challenges. Would you feel regret if you let your goals and dreams evaporate? Your answer is yes? Then you need to do something about it, and challenges are the way ahead!
The person you want to be it’s outside your comfort zone, you will never find it by being lazy about life and doing what’s easier and feeling comfortable.
Life’s so interesting and meaningful when you truly live it. You live life by experiencing it, following your purpose and goals. In doing so, you have to face challenges and grow. That’s what humans do, we don’t feel good by just surviving anymore. You need to strive toward something.
Risks are part of the challenge, but you already learn that risks are inevitable. You are taking risks right now, risks you are not even aware of.
character, confidence and self-respect
Challenges build your character, confidence, and self-respect. You can stay in your comfort zone and never feel insecure or scared, but once you have to leave your comfort zone, without you choosing to do so, you will feel overwhelmed and scared. Even if you play it safe your whole life, soon or later you’ll have to leave your safety shield in life, and then you will be more scared than if you just willingly chose to challenge yourself.
So what’s your decision? Are you ready to take a step into a life full of opportunities and learning experiences, experiences, and stories you can share with your grandchildren when you grow older?
What challenges do you think will be the most beneficial for you to take on right now?
