Overcoming Adversity: Turn Challenges into Opportunities - Rachel Devine

Everyone encounters adversity at one time or another in life. However, the many hurdles life throws your way need not break you; viewed properly, they could empower you. Hardships can excavate fortitude and wisdom you never knew you had. With faith, courage, and perseverance, you will transform trials into triumphs. Overcoming adversity can lead to new strength and new learning experiences.

Maintaining Perspective

When adversity strikes, acknowledge the obstacle while also maintaining perspective. As President Lincoln weathered the storm of civil war, he stated, “We can complain because rose bushes have thorns or rejoice because thorn bushes have roses.” Look for the hidden roses; they’re always there. This is where the lessons are.

Reframing Setbacks

View obstacles as detours rather than dead ends. Each obstacle can become a stepping stone to success. Each failed solution or roadblock creates feedback to refine your approach going forward. Thomas Edison famously required 1,000 attempts to perfect the lightbulb. He stated, “I didn’t fail to make it work; I learned 1000 ways it could not work.” Adjust your trajectory and persist.

Control your response

You have control over how you view a challenge. You retain power over how you perceive hardships. Do not permit external events to dictate internal reactions from the past. Stand tall in the solution. As Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl wrote, “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances.” Your response determines your growth.

Ask for help

During dark nights of the soul, we all need support. This is when our faith is not within our reach and we need to have support. Perhaps you can reach out to loved ones, communities, or experts. Help-seeking requires courage, not weakness. As Helen Keller put it, “I cried because I had no shoes until I met a man who had no feet.” Maintain perspective to transform your life.

Look inward

Adversity often signals time for inner work. Reflect on what needs healing. Examine unconscious beliefs that exacerbate the situation. Conduct an honest spiritual inventory. Let challenges push you deeper into your character strengths. You can do some meditations to look within. Remember, there are spiritual solutions, that can emerge, in our connection to God through meditation.

Have faith

Remember, this too shall pass. Have faith that, while you may not see the solution now, you will emerge wiser with time. Stay the course and stay in prayer. Keep your focus on the solution, not the problem. As the Bible counsels, “Consider it all joy when you encounter various trials, because the testing of your faith produces perseverance.” Allow your trials to deepen their roots.

By standing firm through the storm, you earn the right to shout from the mountaintops, having conquered the climb. Challenges awaken courage, resilience, faith, tenacity and empowerment, that can be forged no other way. Adversity often prepares you for destinies you can’t yet see. Learning the lesson in the storm is a gift. With vision and vigor, your obstacles will empower you.

Rachel Devine is the author of, The Third Road & Lessons from the Needle in a Haystack.

Devine Intervention - The Inner Healing Center