Have you ever begun to prepare for a test and wanted to be sure you knew everything that would be asked or get as close as possible? I have.

I remember a time when I was studying VERY hard in college. It was a subject that I thought was pretty easy and I thought I was studying the right information. I believe I devoted about 4 hours studying for this test alone.

As it turns out, I got a 63 or a 62%. I was not expecting that at all. I was expecting an 85 or higher. What happened? I studied the wrong concepts and I was telling myself the information wrong. I was assimilating the information incorrectly and didn’t realize it. I got the grade that I got and in that case I just had to accept it and move forward.

When we think of challenges we may think about trying to avoid them. A lot of people spend a lot of time preparing and setting things up as much as they can so they can avoid challenges.

I’m not saying that preparing is not a good thing to do. We don’t want to walk into everything unprepared but we also need to realize that life is 50/50. 50% will be positive and 50% will be negative or challenging. It’s what’s supposed to be.

We can prepare in our lives and do the work to get the desired result that we want but we will still have a 50/50 experience.

What do we do with the times that are challenging?

We can do whatever we want. We can use them to give ourselves evidence that life sucks and always goes this way or we can use them to grow and overcome. We’re in control of how we will move forward and what we will do with the challenge.

I’ve been able to use my relationships as opportunities to grow through the tough stuff. I’m married for a second time now. Being divorced was not something I expected or wanted. It was very challenging to go through. I wanted to sink into a thought that I wasn’t good enough on many occasions. If I’m being brutally honest, I bought in a few times to that idea. Not only did it challenge me because I believed that I wasn’t good enough but it challenged me because I thought I had failed. I thought I had become a bad person. No one had to tell me any of this. I was filling my head with all of these things on my own. Many times our brains will offer us unkind things and others don’t even have to pitch in.

When I was going through that time I was trying to find a way to understand what I did wrong. What was going wrong? What was happening? I didn’t realized at that time that I had the power to love me regardless of the circumstances. I would have skipped a ton of pain had I known this as deeply as I do now but I believe it was the pain that has allowed me to grasp tools of self mastery so tight.

I think that the challenge is what has had me dig so deep. I feel so passionately about helping others because of the level of pain I felt from the circumstances in my life and the decisions I made during that time.

Challenges changes us.

I am now able to look at relationships and be very compassionately aware that there are two sides to every story. No one is innocent and everyone is amazing all at the same time. I know that because I was.

I realized that I was amazing the whole way through and I also wasn’t innocent. There were things in my relationship that challenged me and I got to decide what to do. I didn’t do it perfect. I sucked sometimes. But I also did as good as I could each time. I tried harder than I thought possible. I learned how to say no to what I don’t want and yes to what I do. I learned what I was made of. I hadn’t taken the time before I got married to think about what I wanted in life on a deeper level. I had only thought through it on a superficial and basic level. Because of the challenge I learned what I wanted in life. I had to figure it out or I was going to sink deep. It was a challenging time and I was changed.