"If you go through a period of discouragement, you will have a time of great personal growth." ~ Oswald Chambers
If, as is so often the case, if I looked back on my previous life, I would notice a pattern of events and feelings that resembles the activity on an EKG monitor.
There is a valley for every summit. Every time you jump forward, you stumble backwards – sometimes just an inch, sometimes like miles.
Recognizing and accepting this has brought me an enormous amount of peace because I once believed that progress requires a steady, steady ascent to perfection.
When I struggled with something that I had struggled with before, I felt somehow failed. When I experienced a personal or professional setback, I thought I had done something wrong.
For me, growing meant being better and feeling better than the day before. But I realized that this is not growth. and when I believed it, growth was not what I was looking for.
I was always looking for something better. I wanted constant happiness – a change of difficult, overwhelming feelings and the feeling of being one centimeter closer to the ideal every day of my life.
I would say life is about travel, but in the back of my mind I thought it was no use if not the goal, which made it difficult for me to really focus on it.
In this mindset that was always fixated on getting there and deeply upset by an apparent breach of impulse, I felt angry with myself all the time.
But I shouldn't be angry – I have maintained peace for years.
I shouldn't feel insecure about what I wanted professionally – I've worked on my career for years.
I shouldn't doubt myself – I had built my trust for years.
All this emphasis on where I should make it difficult to experience the elusive positive feelings I wanted to feel.
Then one day I thought that this attitude might paralyze me. I wondered if I was actually hindering my growth by expecting the growth to be linear.
In our struggles we often stretch and learn to understand ourselves better. They are part of the growth process – no deviation from it.
We grow when we do our best to learn from and overcome our challenges, rather than questioning them and holding on to them.
That may sound easy, but for a long time it was hard for me to get involved with this idea, mainly because of all the chaotic emotions that came up when I thought I screwed it up.
Shouldn't growth feel good?
However, that's the thing: Just as a muscle has to tear to become stronger, we sometimes have to wade into our own darkness to find a brighter light.
We need not worry that any setback indicates that something is wrong. As long as we make progress overall, we can be confident that we are doing well.
We all make mistakes in life. We all go through phases in which we have to learn lessons that we have already learned, and this can be frustrating when we are in the moment and feel regret, remorse or impatience.
But when we look back at our lives, we see how far we have come despite the peaks and valleys. We would see that we have learned and grown as we do every moment of every day.
We would see that we are not the same people we were before and we know that we will not be the same tomorrow.
Still, while we always will, we can never experience happiness if we are fixated on who we could or should be. We can only experience happiness when we are the way we are, because it is only now available.
We may never achieve the ideal, but maybe that's okay. Maybe we don't just want to grow, we also want to love our completely imperfect self.
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