By Nur Afiqah Bte Mohd Azman
When I was younger, I did not understand why there were so many challenges in my life. I resisted them and tried so hard to fight against them.
It took me a long time to figure the reason why life threw challenges at me every single moment of my life.
I have come to a realization that challenges force us to adopt a growth mindset. This is to be willing to accept change and take on the challenges with an open heart. I know it is not going to easy to take on new challenges.
But I believe that the universe will give us only what we are able to face to keep us growing into better version of ourselves. If we are ready for it, we will receive it and there is always something to learn along the way. We call it “ The lesson of Life.”
There seems to be an engineered planning by the universe or we call it higher power or god. This plan is meant to guide to our true potential. If we make mistakes, we learn from it. When we fall, we get up. It is always great to take a step back and evaluate the situation. When we feel too anxious, we are not able to tap into our inner wisdom. A peer support leader once taught me that. We tend to worry too much at the expense of hurting our mental health. When we are anxious, we will lose connection with the universe and we may not be able to deliver a good result.
Growth mindset involves the ability to adapt to changes in the environment and be willing to work with self and the community towards the betterment of the humanity. The key is to move a step forward each day and believing that we are going to reach our fullest potential before we die.
Normally, I will break down my big goal into small achievable steps. I want to be a successful writer. So I will find any opportunity to practice writing in my free time. This can be a useful tool for me to network with people about my writing contributions. Anyway practice makes perfect. I live by this quote.
Once we are able to overcome the challenges, we will face with new opportunities towards self-growth. Life will give us pain for us to learn from our mistakes. Without pain, we will not grow. No pain, no gain.
Having a growth mindset also builds discipline to achieve goals in life. Then, it is possible to be successful in life. Every human being brought to this earth has a purpose to serve. Each of us has to be trusted to find meaning and purpose. I believe that I want to build that spiritual connection by serving the community, through a prayer and contemplating about the meaning of life.
Being gentle to self will help greatly towards adopting a growth mindset. When we are gentle to our inner child, we can overcome the challenges with confidence. When we are too harsh to ourselves, we tend to give up easily as our inner child is not stable and refuse to mature to an adult.
Sometimes, we don’t understand why life is doing to us and why life is so tough to us. Life is a loving entity by itself. Through tough love, we grow as a person. Through tough love, we follow the flow of life with confidence. We must trust the process and note that everything is not going to be perfect. This world is meant to be imperfect.
The poor and the rich.
The old and the young.
The sick and the healthy ones.
The yin and the yang.
There are always opposite poles to every existence in life. There is wisdom behind it. For instance, the rich is destined to help the poor by teaching them the knowledge of building their own life. And the poor is destined to help the rich to understand the real meaning of compassion amidst the glorified life of the elitist. The old teaches the young of the wisdom of the past while the young teaches the old of the possibility of a great future. The healthy ones tend to the sick and the sick taught the healthy of its caring and compassionate nature. No one is better than the other. No one is greater than the other.
Imperfection is a challenge that is meant to drive the flow of life. Imperfection is beauty. On the other hand, perfection in life is downward spiral that will not get is anywhere in life. If we are too obsessed with being perfect, then we are betraying out authentic self. Being perfect, does not mean anything. That is why we need to embrace the challenge of imperfection in our lives. Life works in its own magical way. We are meant to meet someone when we are ready to receive the wisdom for that person. We are meant to meet someone who poses as real challenges in our social space. They are meant to teach wisdom in life that we need the most.
Our healthy and driven social space is filled with like-minded individuals are driven to spread compassion in the community and serve in the community. Our society needs this social space to thrive.
I hope this post will help to champion the direction of developing a healthy social space to embrace challenges as opportunities to learn new things and to adopt a growth mindset.
Don’t shy away from challenges. Embrace it with self-love and gratitude that we are chosen to be the champion of social space to thrive. We are the chosen ones to make an impact in the community. The community does not need a superhero to kill a villain. The community needs each and every one of you to affirm your strengths and use that strength for the common good. No matter how small your contribution is to the community, as long as you are able to leave tiny compassionate footprint at the end of the day, that is what all that matters.
Last but not least, you can even turn your weakness into strength through self-awareness and the drive to learn and overcome the challenges that can turn weakness into strength. If one person builds his or her strength, can you imagine the impact we can make if every single one of us can impact humanity?
mentally blessed 