How to Embrace Life’s Toughest Lessons and Come out on Top

Have you ever had one of those days/weeks/months where it felt like one darn thing after another?

It has been said that there is nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come. But these ideas enter into us long before they are ready to be brought into the world. They prepare us, transform us, and lead us through a myriad of experiences that allow us to develop what we need in order to manifest them. These experiences are not always pleasant. We suffer disappointments, setbacks, frustrations. During times like these it is easy to feel as though life would be just fine as soon as these turbulences subside. But what if these little disturbances are the very things we need in order to breathe life into these visions that lie within us?

“The future enters into us in order to transform us, long before it happens.” ~ Rainer Maria Wilke

How many of the world’s greatest healers once experienced some kind of malady that they needed to overcome on their own before they had what it took to help others through the same challenge? How many people transcended their suffering by finding meaning in it and then went on to help others do the same? How many leaders rose to great heights charged with a mission of improving an organization or a community after having experienced something that needed to be changed?

If your journey as a leader will require you to exercise courage, you may find yourself in several situations that scare the hell out of you. If it requires you to show compassion, you may find yourself in situations where you must learn to transform your anger into something more constructive. You will continue to draw to yourself the experiences you need to develop what is required to bring your vision into the world. The blessing and the curse in all of this is that those experiences will continue to present themselves until you finally learn the things you need to learn.

“Sometimes what’s in the way is the way.” ~ Eckhart Tolle

Early in my career as an instructor and developer of courses and workshops, I realized that an effective learning experience required a balance of lecture and discussion with some kind of experiential activity that would allow participants to translate into action what they just learned in theory. Life has a beautiful way of doing this for us. The funny thing is that in the classroom no one ever much seemed to enjoy breaking into pairs and triads and having to practice something they were not very good at yet, and the same thing seems to be true when those experiences present themselves in our daily lives.

But life doesn’t give up on us. If it doesn’t go so well with one person or situation, we get another to practice on. And it doesn’t even matter so much how well we do with these challenges, as long as we show up and do what’s in front of us. We will continue to be given opportunities to choose different responses, learn from them and adapt our behavior once again.

Think about anything you ever had to learn. You began at the beginning. You started with the easy stuff. Then when you became stronger and more capable, you went onto a more advanced level, where the challenges were tougher and you had to apply greater skill, muscle and intellect. You emerged from each of these lessons with something you didn’t have before. And you couldn’t have acquired it through any other route than your own experience.

“Eighty percent of success is showing up.” ~ Woody Allen

As I began coaching executives several years ago, the emphasis in my work shifted from trying to impart a lesson to helping people learn from their own experiences and see the perfect order in which things are unfolding in their personal and professional lives to help them get where they truly want to go. The pertinent thing was no longer to give people answers, but rather to help them find their own and to recognize they already possess everything they need to get them through whatever challenge is before them. And this is something each of us can do as leaders to help those around us on their own journeys as well.

What is life trying to teach you or prepare you for right now?  And how can you seize these opportunities in front of you to bring out your very best so that you can help someone else do the same?

Notice the people that you have feelings of admiration or annoyance with. They will tend to demonstrate qualities you have in yourself that you are in the process of developing or addressing in some way. When I ask people to identify the qualities in leaders they most admire, what they see is a reflection on some level of what is already within them at some level. Similarly, those who annoy us could represent something that we either need to integrate within ourselves, or resolve at some level.

Soft spoken people who get annoyed with those that are loud and assuming may need to integrate a bit of outspokenness to achieve a better balance. Overly aggressive people who find fault with others that are constantly trying to steal the stage may need to look at and tone down the ways they do this when they are with others.

Pay attention to the advice you find yourself impassionedly and repeatedly giving to others. It has been said that teachers teach best what they most need to learn. Often you will attract others to you that may need to learn it as well, however that doesn’t exclude you from the lesson. In fact, it is not uncommon for us to be surrounded by people who mirror our own issues and states of mind. Sometimes this annoys us, but it is only because we have difficulty accepting and addressing these things in ourselves.

Often, when I am at my most frenzied, I will have a meeting with a client that is having difficulty relaxing and letting go. As my clients recognize what they need to do to overcome their obstacles, I get great insights into my own as well.   There are also meetings where clients feel as though someone else needs to start or stop some kind of action. It is not unusual to hear them identify the exact thing they really need to do for themselves, as they project it onto what they think others should do.

 “We see the world not as it is, but as we are.” ~ Rainer Maria Wilke

Think of the most difficult people in your life as your teachers. I know, this is a tough one. But a funny thing happens when we try to avoid the difficult people in our lives. We can change jobs, organizations and even marriages, but over time we find ourselves surrounded with the same personalities and situations we fled from, only with different names and faces. In these situations, we need to show up even more fully to the challenges these people and situations present.

Life only gets more difficult when we resist them. Once we accept these people for who they are and ask ourselves what we can do to make the best of the situation, we find that we inevitably begin to discover qualities and resilience within us that we didn’t even know we had. Low and behold, we grow and evolve into better people because of it.

“The best way out is always through.”

~ Robert Frost

As we recognize and embrace the ways in which life teaches us, we stay in a flow that allows us to get where we need to be with less resistance and more ease and satisfaction. As leaders, we can help others do this for themselves as well. We need to resist any temptation to “save people” from challenging situations and instead help them find and unleash the qualities within them that will most assuredly allow them to rise above their difficulties and discover themselves to be greater than they realized.

For more on how to embrace life’s toughest lessons and come out on top, check out my book, The Pinocchio Principle: Becoming a Real Leader, available at Amazon.com and BarnesandNoble.com.