The Ultimate Guide for Overcoming Challenges in Your Life

Overcoming challenges is the best way to take your life to the next level.

If you want to achieve more success in life, the last thing you want to do is to find a shortcut to get around the challenge. Or to look for a way to avoid the challenge.

You must conquer the challenge ahead of you.

Overcoming challenges and difficulty give meaning to your successes. And overcoming challenges develops your character. 

It creates an inspiring story. 

Look at the stories of these super successful people:

• Walt Disney got fired from his newspaper job because he “lacked imagination” 
• J.K. Rowling lived on welfare to get by and her book was by all major publishers
• Stephen King had his first novel rejected 30 times before it was published
• Thomas Edison didn’t invent the lightbulb with the first try

Overcoming challenges make your journey inspiring. 

So the question for you is this: What do you want to be known for?

In this article, you’ll learn the following:

• Why obstacles are your opportunities for more success. 
• 3 powerful benefits of facing challenges.
• 7-Step method on how to overcome challenges.

Let’s dive in!

Why Facing Challenges is a Great Opportunity

When people think about success, it’s all about the end results. They think about owning a big mansion or driving a more expensive car than their neighbors. 

If you’re less materialistic, you likely dream about a 4-hour workweek instead. Enjoying your time under palm trees with a mojito at your favorite holiday destination. 

But these things don’t give meaning to your life.

Sure, if you can do it and enjoy it too, why not? I highly suggest you do that and enjoy your life that way. 

But also do the things that scare you. Because it’s those things that give meaning to your life.

So don’t pivot your course when life throws you a challenge. Instead, see this as your biggest opportunity right now and lean into it. 

Don’t buy a new course with a different tactic to get rich when your previous course didn’t work out. Seek the challenge that caused you to get stuck and face it. 

Your greatest opportunities are the challenges in front of you. 

Real success hides behind these challenges, among many other great benefits.

Benefits of Conquering Challenges

If overcoming challenges is such a big opportunity in life then why don’t more people go after it?

Because it’s hard.

And people tend to stick with the path of least resistance.

But you’re missing out on life’s greatest opportunities (and gifts) when you take this path.

Here are the 3 biggest benefits that I’ve enjoyed from facing and overcoming challenges in my life:

• Better results
• More personal growth
• Increased self-confidence

You Get Results

There are two possible outcomes when you face a challenge: failure or success.

Success is great and gives you the result that you were after. 

On the flip side, failure is what most people are afraid of.

But isn’t failure a great result too? 

Failure is the feedback that’s super useful to speed up your growth. And if you keep growing, the only variable that keeps you from becoming successful is patience.

Personal Growth

When you take action in spite of fear, you’re on the fast-track to growing as a person. 

You can read all the books about becoming successful. You can study the greats. And you can learn from other people’s mistakes and achievements.

But nothing trumps the experience of overcoming challenges yourself.

That’s not to say you shouldn’t read, study the greats, or learn from others. Instead, what I’m saying is that you should do all that but not use it as an excuse to delay hands-on experience.

When the opportunity arises to face a challenge, go for it.

Don’t overthink it.

Because it’s your greatest opportunity to transform your character – fast.

Do you know the reason why people still neglect this advice?

People are fearful of failure because they think that they can’t deal with what happens next.

But when you think about the most recent time you experienced failure, was it really that bad?

Most of us give too much credit to fear and not enough credit to the possibilities.

Self-Confidence

Achieving success is a great boost to your self-confidence. 

But succeeding too many times without failure may cause people to become a little too over-confident. Or it can even turn into arrogance.

To avoid that from happening, we’ve our good friend failure that strikes every once in a while.

Failure teaches humility, the art of letting go, and increases mental toughness.

It’s an important element to be more confident in life.

In the short-term, failure may cause you to feel embarrassed (when the ego is involved), but in the long run, this experience helps you grow stronger. 

Self-confidence is the combined experience of overcoming challenges plus failures. 

When you understand this, it makes facing challenges much easier. Not because you’re less fearful, but because you know what comes next. 

Once you change your relationship with failure and understand that it’s both human and inevitable, you no longer feel crippled by it.

Related: What is self-confidence?

How to Overcome Challenges

When a challenge doesn’t make you feel a little nervous and fearful, the challenge isn’t a very big one. 

Experiencing those feelings is human.

Even the best public speakers in the world say they still feel anxious or nervous before moving up on stage. Yet, they’ve done it so often that they know that the experience of being on stage beats their initial anticipation of fear.

It’s like a parachute jump where you gain more fear as you elevate into the sky. But once you’re falling, you enjoy everything about it.

The feeling of overcoming challenges is much greater than the initial fear you experience. So here are 7 steps to help you face your fears more often.

1. Increase awareness
2. Accept and appreciate
3. Create a plan
4. Create momentum
5. Take lots of action
6. Ask for help
7. Reward yourself

Step 1: Increase Awareness

When you face a challenge, have a good look at it. What really makes you fearful of that challenge?

The only real fear that people experience, is the fear that you won’t be able to handle what comes next, according to Susan Jeffers in her book: Feel Fear and Do It Anyway.

And there’s truth in that. It’s the story that we make up in our minds that keeps us from taking action. Especially when the ego feels threatened. 

The first step to change your relationship with fear is to identify what you’re fearful of. What’s the real challenge in this situation?

• Lacking knowledge or skill
• Lacking time or patience
• Lacking desire or leverage
• Lacking responsibility
• Being fearful of judgment
• Being fearful of change
• Being too perfectionistic
• Being too pessimistic
• Using excuses or complaints

Step 2. Accept and Appreciate Where You Are

How you deal with challenges makes a big difference in how you experience your life. 

The more you’re able to let go, the easier it becomes to overcome challenges.

Because whether you want to stay in the past, life’s relentlessly moving forward. And when you let go, you ride the wave rather than peddling against it.

It’s not about the fairness of life or your challenges. The nature of life is that it’s unfair.

Besides, once you start making comparisons, you set yourself up for unhappy times. Live your own life and do it with grace.

The sooner you let go and appreciate your journey, the easier it becomes to face your challenges.

Your life becomes like the brush of a painter that moves without tension over the canvas to create a masterpiece. 

To reach this flow state, accept and appreciate your journey. 

It makes overcoming challenges easier and more enjoyable.

Step 3. Create a Plan

When you dive into a challenge without a plan, it can be tough to keep going when the challenge becomes more difficult.

Having a plan allows you to keep going without having to overthink every detail along the way.

For example, you can have a plan to start writing every day for 30 days. Now when you feel that you’re not getting results after the first 3 days, you won’t give up, because you’ve set the intention to do it for 30 days.

After day 30 you can decide how the writing went for you. And you’ll often see that the first times of doing anything sucks, but that you get better over time.

Often we have to commit first to give ourselves at least the chance of falling in love with the process.

Having a plan gives you that chance.

Step 4. Create Momentum

Overcoming challenges becomes easier when you’ve got momentum. 

Imagine that you’re playing soccer and you score the first 10 shots but miss the 11th shot. How would you feel?

Now imagine missing that same 11th shot after missing the first 10 shots too. Wouldn’t that feel much different?

When you miss the first shot after hitting scoring the first 10, you still feel motivated to try again. If you’ve missed all of them, you’re much more likely to feel frustrated and give up.

Momentum helps.

To build some momentum, focus on getting a quick win.  

Step 5. Take Lots of Action

Overcoming challenges is the fastest way to achieve growth and personal success.

And the fastest way to overcome more challenges is by taking more action. 

Massive action and hard work allow you to collect more experiences. And these experiences help you to become more confident to face more difficult challenges. 

See, the goal isn’t to reduce or remove fear. 

The key is to become comfortable with fear and let it become your trigger to take action. 

Because when you take more action, you learn that you can deal with whatever comes next. This way you build a good habit and it’s a great way to develop your confidence too.

Step 6. Ask for Help

You can overcome challenges faster with the help of others. 

After all, there are almost always people who have walked a similar journey before you. And they’ve overcome the challenges that you’re facing right now.

Asking help from these people isn’t a weakness, it’s a strength. 

In fact, the most successful people in the world know that they don’t know everything. Instead of acting that way, they become curious and ask questions to others.

So if you’ve taken a lot of action already and can’t seem to work out how to overcome the challenges that you’re facing, ask for help.

Step 7. Reward Yourself for Doing

When you decide to take the leap and face a challenge, reward yourself for taking that step, no matter what the outcome is like. 

After all, taking action is the only part that you control. 

Whether you experience success or failure isn’t within your control.

Unless you reframe to see success as taking action, not getting the result. That’s why you must reward that variable in the equation, not the outcome of it.

Once you make success by taking action, you increase the chance that you will do it again.

And it’s no secret that repetition leads to mastery. And mastery to success.

Don’t beat yourself up when you fail. 

Celebrate action instead, and treat yourself when you do.

Of course, it’s easier said than done.

I notice it every time when I practice my handstand for example. When I practice my handstand, I often focus on the result of free-standing for at least 20 seconds. And when I can’t even get 5 seconds, I feel upset.

When emotions upset you at the moment of taking action and not getting the result, that’s okay. 

Let the emotion flow through you. But simultaneously understand that consistent action is more important than short-term results. 

We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.

– Aristotle

To achieve personal success, make facing challenges a habit in your life.

What are Some Challenges You Have Overcome?

In this article, you’ve learned that overcoming challenges is a great way to stay motivated. And it’s also the fastest way to achieve personal success.

Fortunately, you’ll enjoy 3 of the greatest benefits in life when you do face your challenges:

• It creates results;
• You enjoy personal growth;
• And it creates an inspiring story.

I’m curious to hear about what challenges you’ve overcome and what challenges you’re facing today.

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