Learn to Love a Challenge (and Stop Being Scared)

In my last post, I discussed the idea of embracing change.

But the ideas of change and challenge are not so far apart.

With change often comes a challenge.

In this post, I want to explore the idea of embracing challenges more deeply.

Consider this example: If I’m outside in open fields, and hail suddenly begins to fall, this is a change in the environment that presents me with a personal challenge.

It may be natural for most people to feel scared in this situation.

But I have learned to be open to change, so I welcome the challenges that will likely unfold. (Though I have never been in this “hail” example, I’m using it as a point of discussion.)

This is a practice. I see a change and the challenges coming with it, and I welcome and embrace them, not getting stuck on seeing the bad, risks, and problems. Instead, I also perceive the good, growth, and solutions.

I can see the hail and think: Countless animals and people have had to deal with this. I can figure out a way forward too!

Change and challenges are going to happen either way. So it helps to have an adventurous and positive spirit toward them. Through time, I taught myself that for any challenge that comes my way, I can overcome it.

I can, and I will.

A new challenge is an opportunity to learn, grow, and perhaps even have fun. With this mindset, eventually you learn to LOVE the challenges that come your way. At the very least, you stop getting SCARED just because you face something new and difficult.

Yet, someone who closes himself off to new changes is not welcoming to the challenges that could arise.

In that case, when the hail begins to fall, he may think: Oh no! This is going to hurt, and there’s nowhere to go….

This person has likely not dealt properly with challenges in the past. Sometimes when they came up, he avoided them. Other times, he got someone else to solve the problem without learning anything new. And other times, he barely got through it while being scared and overly worried. Through time, this person taught himself that he could not deal with challenges. When new challenges arise then, he doesn’t feel ready.

For him, a new challenge is a burden, a threat, and a disaster waiting to happen.

Who is more likely to figure out the way forward and find safety from the hail? The person who is closed off to changes and challenges, or the person who is open to them?

Every day, some “hail” arises in our lives, and it is up to us to overcome the challenge. In time, we can even learn to triumph through challenges, becoming calm, focused, and energized through issues as they arise.

When the hail begins to fall…

Do we take a moment to look around for shelter in the form of trees, buildings, or any object that can protect us, or does the challenge overwhelm us, and we get pummeled by falling ice, convinced that there is nothing we can do?

How do you deal with life challenges?

• If you suffer a minor injury or illness, can you get through it smoothly?

• How do you react when you expect a friend to help you with something, and at the last moment they are unable to?

• If you are required to learn something new for school or work, and you cannot make progress in the way you expected, what do you do?

• When you work hard and do everything right and are not rewarded for your efforts, how do you feel, and how does that impact your life?

• If someone lies to you, then when you confront them, they continue to tell more lies, how do you deal with that?

If you take a moment to explore these “challenges” more deeply, hopefully, you will conclude that none of these is all that bad in the grand scheme. You can even see these situations as a good challenge because you should be able to learn something and come back stronger from all of them.

You may even take the opportunity to be grateful and think: However overwhelming this challenge is, fortunately, I am in the position to have family and friends, advisors, and resources to deal with it.

We must learn how to handle fairly minor life challenges to prepare ourselves for the larger ones.

Consider the following possible challenges, not to stress you out, but to keep some perspective and dig deeper into some larger life challenges people can go through:

• Divorce or breakup

• Death of a loved one

• Loss of life savings or a job

• Being threatened / Feeling unsafe

• Lack of basic needs such as food and shelter

In the past few months, I’ve known multiple people who needed to take on these challenges or were close to someone who did (except for the last point, though a close friend of mine was homeless for years).

For a moment, even I felt unsafe this past month when I received a call from a spammer who knew my full name without me providing it. My gut told me he was not who he pretended to be, which was a representative at Amazon.

This was an excellent opportunity for me to practice “dealing with a challenge,” as I confidently told him that even though he had my name and phone number, I would not give him any further personal details.

He became angry with me, accusing me of not trusting him. I calmly explained that anyone could access my name and phone number, so I would not give him further information.

As I spoke, he realized he could not trick me, and he hung up the phone.

Has any little challenge like this happened in your life lately? How did you handle it? Are you happy with your reaction, or is there room for improvement?

Perhaps sometimes you have not dealt well with challenges. If so, that is okay. I’ve been there, as I’m sure everyone has. I used to suffer from social anxiety – a vicious cycle of avoiding social situations and becoming even more frightened of them.

I’m not here to judge if you are still learning to deal with life’s challenges. The only reason I’m able to discuss this topic with such clarity is because I’ve been through the trenches myself. I know what it’s like, and there is a path forward.

Consider this: If you have made past mistakes and not risen up to the challenge and moved forward, then today’s post presents you with a tremendous learning opportunity.

Many of us don’t seem to understand that we teach ourselves as we go.

You teach yourself who you are through your decisions, and how you react to life’s situations.

Every moment is the chance to take a new course of action that changes what you thought you knew about yourself. One of my prior posts discussed how every moment presents a choice.

I used to be a person who was too shy to talk to someone new until I spoke to someone new, again and again, eventually with confidence. In time, I was no longer scared of facing the challenge of having a conversation with someone.

You can always take your skills as deeply as you wish. Through life circumstances, I lived in Mexico for a few years, often meeting new people while speaking my second language. Then, I lived in France for a couple of years, where I sometimes spoke to people in my third language, which was an even greater challenge.

That approach of facing challenges directly eventually made me a person unafraid and unconcerned with facing new changes and challenges. Or even if sometimes afraid, I was willing to push through anyway.

WHO are you when challenges come your way?

Are you someone who faces it, understanding that this is an opportunity for growth, and overcomes it? Perhaps even LOVING the process, or assisting others to view challenges in a positive way?

Or if you find yourself struggling, are you someone who communicates your concerns with people you trust and who want to help you, or do you stay quiet about your needs? In this case, are you willing to do the work to improve the way that you deal with challenges?

Or are you uncertain, unable to move forward, and simply stuck? Are you SCARED to face the challenge?

And as many people can be complex, your reaction to changes may depend. Maybe you are good at dealing with certain changes and the challenges that unfold. Still, perhaps you are not adaptable and effective with other types.

Ultimately, it is during times of hardship, stress, and uncertainty that we learn who we are.

How did you deal with your last life challenge, whether minor or major?

What did that teach you about who you are?

Did you like who you were when problems entered your life, or did you wish to handle them differently?

You have taught yourself who you are up to this point. Did you teach yourself something worthwhile? – That you are a person highly capable of dealing with challenges?

Or did you teach yourself something that is worth unlearning and reconsidering? – That you are a person who crumbles under the weight of new challenges, and is incapable of overcoming them.

Hopefully from here on, you can handle new challenges more directly and confidently, ask trusted people for advice or help, view the challenge as an opportunity for learning and growth, and so forth.

You have the power to change how you perceive changes and challenges. And you can triumph over them. I hope this post helps you to learn to love a challenge and stop being scared of it.

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The Problem with Solutions

The problem with solutions is that they are all temporary fixes. No problem has ever been permanently fixed.

Don’t think in the span of a year or ten years, or even a human lifetime. Think longer. What has been permanently fixed?

In the end, the “solutions” we come up with lead to more problems. We often hear that “No one could have predicted the new problems that would arise from implementing a given solution.” It’s true, except that there always seem to be some unforeseen issues that arise.

In a paradoxical sense, the unforeseeable is foreseeable. It’s almost certain that some negative effect will come out of resolving a problem. We just don’t know what it will be.

People sometimes ask me for help with their problems. I try to help, but my power is limited.

The issue is that for any solution I may give you to your problem, you will soon come back and tell me it didn’t work. You will need me to help modify the plan for you or help resolve new problems that have arisen due to fixing the prior ones.

You will also become reliant on someone else to resolve your problems for you. You will outsource your thinking and your being, looking for someone else to fix an unfixable problem, which is human life.

Human life, and what to do with this life, or how to fix any human issue, is an unfixable problem, as they all are. There is no permanent solution.

I believe a worthy path is to train the mind, to build it up to be able to handle a variety of situations, but even this does not offer a permanent solution to anything. The stronger your mind is, the more likely you will challenge yourself further and further, until you reach a wall. Then what?

Notice that people who have the “solutions” will continue to believe that they have them. When you don’t succeed or get the result you wanted, they will just say you didn’t apply the advice correctly. And that may be true. Perhaps you made some mistakes. But even if you apply all the advice correctly, eventually, it will not work. Give it time, and ultimately, you will find that advice disappointing. This is because we live in a changing reality.

The advice of a year ago is probably outdated already. And the advice everyone is following also loses its utility. For example, if a finance guru posts that you should invest in real estate right now, and his millions of followers read that advice and follow it, then the more people follow his advice, the more useless it will be. If everyone rushes to buy real estate, the prices will go up and up, making it a bad investment.

For the next piece of advice you receive, imagine if the whole world took that advice and realize that everything would collapse overnight if that happened. Then understand the futility of advice and the futility of “solutions.”

So when you realize that there is no solution to chase, what do you do then? You probably look for the solutions anyway, right? This is the human way. We won’t sit by and leave a problem alone. If a neighbor comes to me with a broken chair, I may help him fix it. But what if I make a mistake because I am not a professional, then the chair breaks under him, and he hurts his back. Then he goes to the chiropractor, which fixes his back and accidentally causes problems with his neck.

Then maybe he gets tired of the new problems caused by fixing the old ones, and he decides to live with his neck issues. In time, perhaps his neck gets better on its own.

You may say this is a pessimistic view that problems have no solutions. Maybe it is. Or perhaps it’s realistic. We are obsessed with problems and solutions. If someone gives me a problem, I usually know what to do – even if the thing to do is to ask another expert. But all of that problem-solving keeps us spinning our wheels, running in circles.

Today’s generation hopes to solve today’s problems and waits for the next generation to solve the new problems (unforeseeable ones) this generation will cause. This continues until the latest generation faces the current problems on top of problems that all the prior generations caused along the way.

At some point, there are too many problems to deal with.

Everyone that I know is a believer. Whether religious or not, they are believers. They believe in solutions. They think that the solution to the problem will fix something.

But the question isn’t really if the “solution” will work. It’s actually: when will it fail?

Consider that the “Solution” you have found may actually be the biggest problem of your life.

For example, someone prone to stress will resolve one stressor, only to have another one arise. They will find a technique that works to resolve the stress until it no longer works. They will remove themselves from a stressful situation, only to run into another one with new kinds of stresses. Stress is just used as an example here, but the problem could be anything. Given time, the solutions fail, and we chase more and more solutions.

The problem with solutions is that we become fixated on resolving one particular issue, forgetting about the larger context. Any fool can fix a specific problem and create a hundred new ones in the process. And this is what we tend to do.

Humans are masterful problem-solvers but even more skillful at creating problems.

The real problem is that we are conditioned to expect solutions all around us. We expect someone to give us an action plan to resolve everything rather than using the power of the mind. We want rote, formulaic solutions to a dynamic world that doesn’t care about our procedures.

When I talk to people in customer service and come to them with a problem, I find them behaving like robots. I get responses like “That’s not how we were trained,” “This has never happened before,” and “No one has ever asked.” They might as well say “Does not compute,” as perhaps a robot would.

The problem with solutions is that we only tend to have them for easy, direct problems and have forgotten how to seek them out on the challenging problems we face.

The challenging problems were unexpected, unpredictable, unforeseen. Yet, at the same time, it should be quite obvious that things that have never happened in the past sometimes do occur in the future. However, we behave as if that is an impossibility.

Our go-to solutions are designed to handle problems that have happened in the past, not new ones which may occur in the future. This is practical in the short run but leaves us with calamity in the long run.

However, trying to resolve the problems that have never happened and may never happen can also be a loser’s game. You can spend all your life preparing to resolve a perceived problem that may never happen. So that is not the solution either.

I am not saying we should be happy doing nothing, allowing problems to build up, and taking no action to resolve them. I am not saying we should stay on the course of perpetually “solving” problems without actually fixing anything.

I am asking you to be mindful that just because you fixed ten problems in one day, this is nothing to be proud of. For resolving 10, you may have caused 100 new ones.

The story of humanity is that we are excellent at resolving short-term problems, only to create more of them. But if we think deeply, perhaps we have never solved a single problem permanently.

Ask yourself: What problem have human societies truly solved? And what problems have we created?

Consider this: Even if we fixed all human problems, that would still introduce a new problem. What do you do with human life when there is no apparent problem to focus on? Starvation, homelessness, illness, social needs, etc., have all been resolved in this theoretical utopia.

You may see where this is going, but perhaps this utopic vision is a dystopia because no one would have any purpose or any problem to work on. Society would quickly degenerate and crumble, and we would once again have an abundance of problems.

The state of having no problems ultimately results in a plethora of problems.

Again, those are problems with no solution. The solutions would only create more problems.

This post is not about recommending that you try to fix a problem or not do so, or seek help with a problem or not seek it. This is also not about apathy and giving up on everything.

It’s about increasing your awareness and understanding. Stop running in circles, chasing your tail.

The human mind sees a problem and jumps into trying to fix it. Maybe we need to take a step back and ask ourselves if the problem is worth attempting to fix. If doing nothing is just as effective at resolving a problem as doing something, then what are we wasting our time for?

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