If change is inevitable, so is challenge. It seems there is no way out of taking on a challenge or two every day/week/or month depending on the season of life. How we take on each challenge when life gets hard can have a great impact on how satisfied we are with life and what it looks like. While there is no substitute for professional help (speaking from personal experience here!), insightful advice from women who have been there before and made it through can give you that extra push of motivation to overcome whatever challenge you’re facing today. 

The women below are some who have personally inspired me and that I invited to share their ideas in this blog so that even more people could be inspired. I have read their advice while in the midst of my own challenges and felt buoyed by their strength and knowledge. I hope one or more of their ideas will stick with you and help you through anything coming your way. You can do this and you’re not alone!

“If there was one thing that I always lean back on during challenges in different areas of my life, it would have to be self-trust. I have unconditional trust in myself and even when I can’t be sure of what’s coming my way, I always know I can trust myself to face it and handle it the best way I could. Building that self-trust takes a lot of honesty with yourself, but practicing this is exactly what helps nurture that self-trust. We’ve been taught and conditioned to believe that whenever we’re in a tough situation we need to go look for external advice and/or validation for our decisions. Consulting others isn’t necessarily a bad idea, but the issue is we often forget to consult with ourselves. We forget to ask ourselves, how do I want to go about this? What feels true for me right now? Asking questions like these during challenging times is key to building that self-trust. We need to stop thinking we’re not capable and start choosing ourselves over betraying ourselves for others’ opinions. I’ve learned to avoid forming my identity around bad times, or good times. Nothing external gets to create who I am, because that’s an inside job.”

Learn more from Harjot here.

“We live a lifeless life when we forget to love ourselves on the hard days. When we lie about how we truly feel. When we go after money & things instead of love, beauty and art. When we enjoy less to work more. When we allow our ego to define our friendships & our insecurities to break our marriages. And when our loyalty turns into obligation & our compassion into apathy. When our greediness blinds our hearts & our need for superiority comes in the way of empathy and understanding.

We live a lifeless life when we forget the good in people because they failed to please us on certain occasions, or because we chose avoidance over confrontation. When we become victims of our own addictions and fail to take charge of our inner powers. When we lie to avoid truth, when we avoid truth to escape consequences and when we escape consequences just to keep living a lie.”

Learn more from Pascale on her blog here.

“You have to be RELENTLESS to become RESILIENT. What does this mean, exactly? You get to fight for yourself, the life you want and the respect you deserve, because you are worth it. When you’ve struggled, have gone through traumas, have experienced chronic illness or any difficult times, your joy, freedom, and choices in life can feel like they’ve been stripped away from you. As a result, part of the healing journey will likely consist of taking your life back! It’s not always the easiest process; you get to set boundaries, hold your standards high in the way others treat you, and not let anything get in the way of creating a life you love. I’m not telling you to be selfish, but rather self-focused, in a way that helps you grow and build the life you want. You get to take a stand for yourself. If you don’t, who will?”

Learn more about Jordann here.

“Life can be hard at times and our first instinct is to run from these challenges, but truthfully, we can’t often run from them as they will only follow us. Our natural inner instinct is to take the path of least resistance and when we are faced with a fearful event our primeval brain will often try and send us down the path of running away from it, instead of facing it. This being the case, it’s truly time that we realise fighting, running and avoiding things are not helping us deal with the challenges in our lives. Accepting this will allow you to take the first and biggest step to change that I believe we can make.

Understanding that challenging ourselves to do what we need to do can often seem like the hardest choice for us. But it is time to face whatever it is that has or is happening. Accepting this is actually the most powerful and effective way to help us get through the hard times. The best way to start facing something today is to do it as soon as possible, as the longer we put things off the bigger our fears and resistances can grow within us, making it feel much harder to then deal with the challenges at hand. If our fears start rising due to avoidance and putting things off, we can find ourselves making excuses to do it the next day. Remember this will not stop us from having to do it, it will just mean that we will then have to endure another painful day of worry, as avoiding things just escalates our internal fear responses. We can’t change the issues and what we have to face, but we can change how long we spend trying to face them.”

Learn more from Sara here.

What have you learned about overcoming challenges when life gets hard? Please share your thoughts below so we can keep learning and growing together!