11 Most Powerful Secrets To Overcome Adversity
If you awoke one day to find that your mother had been murdered and that one of the persons responsible was your only sibling....... what would YOU do? Would you lay down and give up or would you claw your way out of the pit of despair and find a way to create the life of your dreams? It would be difficult for anyone to anticipate how they might react to a tragedy such as this. Many of us will never truly know who we are or what we are made of until we are confronted with a challenge so overwhelming and incomprehensible, that it shakes us to our very core. Rhondalynn Korolak is in an enviable position because she knows with absolute certainty what she would do – not because she knows herself so well that she could predict her behaviour but because the unthinkable actually happened to her. Sometimes there are moments in life that instantly rip the past and the future apart. Everything is irrevocably divided into “before” and “after”. Life as you know it dissolves and a foreign, unwelcoming world appears in its wake. For Rhondalynn, that day was April 14, 1992. She was studying for her final exams and had just returned home when the Dean of the Law School rang. The police hadn’t been able to find her on campus. Concerned that she would discover the awful truth on the evening news, the Dean was forced to tell her over the phone. Her mother was stabbed and strangled by 3 sixteen year old boys at the instigation of her 18 year old brother. On the promise of a $500 beaten-up truck as reward, they went to her home in the middle of the night and murdered her. They rolled her body in a rug, drove her to the countryside and dumped her in a ditch. The next day, the boys cleaned up the house and went shopping to pick out the things they would buy when the insurance money came through. Rhondalynn was 24 years old and had lost her entire family. To lose a loving parent was bad enough, but to do so at the instigation of her own brother was inconceivable. The loss and betrayal were almost more than she could bear and she spent years working through the emotional pain and turmoil. Says Rhondalynn “All the victim support groups and psychotherapy in the world could not help me – they only served to further entrench the negative feelings and sense of helplessness I felt with being labelled a ‘victim’. I began to realise that I needed to make significant changes within myself.” Life’s many lessons have taught her that while we are absolutely at cause for every event we have experienced or attracted into our lives, once it has happened, there is nothing that we can do to change it in the past. The point of power is ‘now’. According to Rhondalynn “We may not be able to change the event but we do have the power to change its meaning. We can choose to attribute a meaning and adopt an attitude that supports and empowers us toward a compelling and bright future. Or we can remain a prisoner of the past and adopt an attitude of a victim, devoid of hope and possibilities.” In fact, the only thing we have absolute control over is our own mind – our ability to choose our own way. Even in the face of unbelievable atrocities, hope and love are possible if we plant the right seeds in our mind. 10 Tips It's easy to get caught up in the emotion of tragedy and adversity - you can easily lose sight of what is most important to your success and well-being. These simple tips and questions will help you stay in touch with what is most essential and will move you forward. And remember, a kite rises against the wind, rather than with it. Are you focused on what you want or don’t want? Whether we realise it or not, we are visualising things all the time – visualising either what we want or don’t want. Do you talk on and on about your problems to anyone who will listen? Begin to notice how your language pre-determines your outcomes... If you are relentlessly focused on adversity or negative outcomes you will be riddled with fear and that will impact your reality. Ask yourself a new question: "What can I do differently in order to have the result that I want?” Or “what is going right?" Notice all the things, no matter how small, that are working - write them down daily. Focusing on what you want is the first step toward changing your life for the better. Are you trying to eat an elephant in one sitting? Breaking things into bite sized chunks makes the world of difference. Having broad, high level goals is fantastic but when you are facing serious challenge and adversity, having an actionable plan is essential. A detailed, step by step plan can help you to identify how you can get from where you are to where you want to be and it will give you purpose and direction when you feel that you cannot take another step. For those of you who feel like you are wandering around aimlessly in the desert, it is comforting and empowering to remember that a journey of 1000 miles begins with taking one small step forward each day. What are you most afraid of – failing or succeeding? There is no such thing as “failure”, only feedback. It isn’t about assigning blame or beating yourself up – it’s about being responsible for your choices and actions and deciding how best to move forward to attract the results that you want. Adversity and setbacks occur – they are part of the learning process of life. Nothing was ever invented or created by people who were afraid to try because they had previously “failed” at some endeavour. Look at any successful person in history and you will find a person who continued to try and who refused to believe that their past or [perceived] limitations would foreshadow their destiny. Your biography does not pre-determine your destiny – your past has absolutely no bearing on your future. Quit comparing yourself to others When you are confronting daunting obstacles, there is little to be gained by beating yourself up or comparing yourself to the benchmark of others. The only real measure of success is how you fair against your own personal best. If you constantly ask more of yourself, make small shifts in your thinking, expectations and results every day - you can make massive shifts over the long term. Rome wasn’t built in a day – neither were you! Forget what others think and forget what you have previously expected of yourself. Compete with your own personal best and as you improve your thinking, your future will transform. The MEANING you “choose” is everything In the words of Richard Nixon “The finest steel goes through the hottest fire”. What if the challenge you are currently facing isn’t evidence of the fact you are “damaged” or somehow broken? What if you are actually being moulded by these events so that something strong, meaningful and positive could emerge as a result? We all have scars. Some of them may be visible to others through illness, accident or disability or they may be internal emotional scars that no one else knows about. But these scars are not ‘terminal’ blemishes. They are the result of enduring the ‘hottest fire’ and they will empower you to emerge with the strength and unbending determination of ‘the finest steel’. Life isn’t easy but perhaps it was never designed to be! Amazing things can happen, character and strength often develop through the most challenging of circumstances and whether the heat destroys you or sculpts you is entirely up to you. Are you grateful for what you already have? It is impossible to bring more of what you want into your life if you are feeling ungrateful about what you already have. With gratitude, the whole is more than the sum of its parts – it’s not what you say, the mere words that count, but sum of the words and the heartfelt emotion behind them. When you appreciate and give thanks as though you have already conquered your obstacles, you are giving a strong signal to your subconscious mind that you have already risen above hard times. The goal (to triumph or rise above) is not to be achieved “sometime” in the future; it is achieved in the here and now. And since the subconscious mind can only act on what it believes to be true (regardless of whether it actually is yet or not), you will have engaged the most powerful part of your brain in attracting the people, resources, events and opportunities necessary to bring that goal to fruition quickly and easily. Are you in a bad neighbourhood? Everyone has bad days and no amount of positive thinking or self-help information is going to change that. It’s part of being human. Living full time in a bad emotional place, however, is not really living at all. It’s existing. You have to be able to recognise the landscape you’re in and do something about it. Just as there are affluent and poor neighbourhoods in every city there are good suburbs in your mind and those that resemble the ghetto. When you recognise that and can work out where you are at any given time, you can make sure you don’t stop in the bad sections of town! If you are not in a good place emotionally, change your physiology immediately. That means get up and get moving, put on your favourite song or do the “dance of joy”. Whatever it takes, do it NOW. Trust your high school physics teacher – a body in motion stays in motion. Never share a tent with someone who snores The worst thing you can do when you are facing adversity is to hang around with more people who are facing adversity and talk on and on about your challenges. Instead, surround yourself with people who are enthusiastic, passionate and inspired about their lives. Read stories about people who have overcome unbelievable odds and focus all of your attention on solutions – not your problems. Be willing to put yourself out there and concentrate on how you can make a valuable contribution without expecting something in return. Success breeds success. Shed Your Samsonite Have you ever heard yourself say “last time I tried that, it didn’t work”? Even though it’s a good idea to stop doing what clearly isn’t working, it’s important to remember that the past does not necessarily equal the future. Every night when you arrive home from work, you go into your refrigerator or cupboards to find ingredients to prepare your dinner. You would never think of going through the garbage can to find produce, staples and condiments for your meal. Then it begs the question – why would you look to your past failures, essentially the garbage can of your mind, to decide what you are capable of in the future? There are no helpful resources or suggestions there, only the past and reasons why you will not succeed. What you have done up until now means nothing compared to what you are going to do to change your life right now. Stop, decide and take action today to unpack your baggage and let go of the past once and for all. Connect with your “WHY” to unleash your courage Looking to our fears for answers about to how to gain courage is a bit like getting in our car and attempting to drive down the freeway by only looking into the rear view mirror. Fear is always in the opposite direction of where you want to go. Put 100% of your focus on the present moment and what you want. You can't control or predict the future or other people's actions but you can control what you choose to do right now. Courage is not bred of fear or fearlessness but rather by the unyielding embrace of a calling that is far greater than fear. Connect with your “WHY” – your calling that is greater than your fear and impediments – and you will move easily through and past adversity and worries. Create certainty out of uncertainty We have all had times when we were faced with massive uncertainty, where we felt overwhelmed, out of control and scared. True certainty has less to do with outside events and more to do with who we are on the inside. No one can take certainty away from you. You can only take it away from yourself by the questions you ask yourself and the habits you rely on to cope. If you keep asking the wrong questions or repeating negative habits you actually create more uncertainty or doubt and you will never have the life of your dreams. When you acknowledge uncertainty but act positively anyway, the death of fear is certain - you lose both your fear and the need to have certainty at all costs. The more certain you are on the inside and the more you expand your choice of productive habits, the more successful you will become at managing your life and overcoming adversity.
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