My blog focuses on Creating Ecosystems of Success. Life happens to everyone when we least expect it. Knowing how to navigate the unexpected is likewise a very valuable skill. The following contributed post is entitled, How To Turn Challenges Into Opportunities.
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Life has a real knack for testing us, and that’s not always a fun thing to have to go through – but it’s still something that’s going to happen no matter who you are or what you do in life. It could be a problem at work, personal issue or struggle, or anything else at all, and the main issue is that these challenges tend to just pop up out of nowhere – when that happens, all our plans can be destroyed in an instant, and that’s what really hurts in the end.
That might sound rather negative and upsetting, but since it’s going to happen, it’s really how you respond that makes the difference and if you start thinking about how to turn challenges into opportunities instead of dwelling on the negatives of it all, you’ll find you can move forward much more easily and get back on track much more quickly. With that in mind, keep reading to find out more to turn bad into good (or at least less of a problem) so you can keep heading towards your overall goals.
Change Your Perspective
The first thing you’re going to have to do if you want to have a more positive outlook when things are going wrong in your life is to reframe how you see the challenges in front of you. In other words, instead of looking at them and panicking or feeling down because you assume you can’t get past them, what about thinking about every problem as a puzzle you’ve just got to solve? In that way, you can feel better about things and come up with a positive plan of action at the same time.
For example, if you’ve got limited space it’s going to seem frustrating at first, especially if it was a budget issue that caused the problem, and even more so if you find you suddenly need more space because you want to grow your family, get a pet, or work from home, and so on. But what if you could give yourself more space in an easy and affordable way by thinking creatively and repurposing a 10ft shipping container into something you need, like an office, a shop, extra storage, or – with the right permissions and changes – a tiny home? Just by changing your perspective, what would have seemed like a setback or a limitation might actually be the chance you need to make things better for you.
Learn The Lessons
Something to bear in mind is that every challenge comes with a lesson attached, and it’s down to you whether or not to look at what that lesson is, and whether or not to learn from it. But if you’re wise and you want to turn challenges into opportunities, seeing the lesson and really learning from it is sure to make a huge difference in your life. After all, if you’re happy to do that then even when things don’t go as planned, you’re still going to get something from the experience, and that’s important.
So when something goes a little bit (or a lot, depending) wrong, take a moment to reflect on it all. What can you learn? How can you use the lessons you’ve gone through to make things better in the future? That’s the difference – if you go into everything with an eye for what it can teach you, then you’ll find there’s a lot of opportunities available even if the original plan goes out the window.
Focus On What You Can Control
When you’re faced with a challenge, as we all will be from time to time, it’s so easy to start scrolling through all the ‘what if’ scenarios in your head and you’ll start to worry about things beyond your control. And when that happens, all your energy is going to be zapped and you’ll start to get more stressed than ever before, which is the last thing you’ll want if you’re trying to find the positive in things – you’re just going to keep missing it because you’re worrying and panicking about the negatives.
Take a project at work that’s gone wrong. If that happens, ask yourself what steps you can take to fix it – don’t focus on the problem, focus on the solution instead. If you start to think about actions you can take or people you can ask for help (which can very often be the best place to start), you’ll start to get more and more control, reduce your stress, and be able to think clearly, which will give you the opportunities you need to fix the issue in the first place.
