Power of challenges

Unexpected challenges, enormous change, or pressing deadlines are very real and happen to all of us. The secret to surviving them or rather thriving in them, is not to get ruffled but to maintain your equilibrium and enthusiasm and to stay centered. By relaxing and staying calm, you’ll be able to handle things more effectively. Involve your family and your colleagues in these challenges. You won’t feel alienated and they’ll also help you overcome these challenges.

How do you stick to your priorities when put to the test?

These are choices you make in a moment of integrity, and they determine your balance or imbalance. The more you exercise wise choices, the easier it is to continue to do so in the future.

When you succumb to temptations you are less likely to withstand the real tests that are bound to come in life.

As you become successful, you face more challenges. With each success, the test gets bigger. As you overcome the first hurdle, a new one is put in its place.

This is the universe’s way of honing your capacity and ability to succeed.

There is nothing wrong with this, since most of us never make use of our full potential. The key is to strive for balance as you tap into your genius.

Make Life Balance your choice at every step of the way. If you have to choose between success and Life Balance, choose Life Balance. Success is empty without it.

Temporary Defeats

“Pain is inevitable, suffering is optional,” said the Dalai Lama, quoting an old Zen saying. Life inevitably brings pain and temporary defeats, even on the road to success.

Develop a good sense of humor; nothing is better for softening blows. Learn to laugh at yourself. When you see humor in embarrassing situations, they cease to be stressful. The person who can laugh often, can keep going when others fail.

You can’t win all the time. Michael Jordan, considered the greatest basketball player of all time, scored on fewer than half of his field goal attempts.

Great athletes know that they will fail often on their road to victory. They also know that every failure carries the seed of success.

In my younger days, I didn’t do well academically. In fact I did poorly in grade 12.

My lackluster grades made it difficult for my uncle, who worked in the education department in Tanzania, to place me in a college in England.

But once I was admitted to college, I excelled in my studies and went on to gain three professional accounting degrees. So don’t worry about temporary defeats. They’re part and parcel of success.

Every failure makes room for future success, if you let every failure teach you a lesson. In a particular week, you may miss your deadlines or have an argument with your spouse.

This may make you lose hope and become fearful. Respond with faith and persistence, and it will go away.

Respond to your temporary defeat by affirming that though this week did not go as planned, you still felt centered and balanced as you kept your principles and core values of family, health, and spirituality at the forefront.