I get it. Life is hard some of the time and life is not hard some of the time. This is just what life is. I think we’ve been fed a load of crap that many of us believe we’re not doing life right, because there are hard days. Or believe we are screwing it up because we can’t sustain the good days. This just isn’t true. You are doing life well. This is what life is. And there are skills along this journey for making that work for us. If you need to shift your thinking, because you think you’re doing this wrong, you think somehow you’ve messed it all up because life is still hard some of the time, I want to help you to shift your mindset around this.
One of the primary things that I run into, is that people really think they’re doing something wrong if their life has any amount of discomfort in it. They followed all the rules and checked every box, yet life just doesn’t feel satisfying enough. And one of the worst parts of this to me is that there is this cultural programming and conditioning making you believe you are morally wrong for feeling this way. The problem isn’t that life doesn’t feel good all the time, its that we have forgotten that we are wired neurobiologically to need struggle in order to grow. That the not so good is part of the grand scheme of life. And we aren’t doing anything wrong, we are doing it right when we are able to lean in and use this struggle to our advantage.
How can we be in the mess of our life and not feel like we’re failing? A really great framework for this is to ask “How are you using the difficulty in your life?” Instead of getting stuck in the judging of what’s happening around you, I want you just to use it. Whatever that difficulty is in front of you. How can you take this difficulty and make it work for you? Instead of getting mired down and believing you are messing things up or feeling victim to this circumstance, change the narrative. Ask yourself how you make this difficult thing work for you.
Now here’s the beauty, when it’s joy or contentment, or one of those positive emotions, its easy to use that as a way to motivate you. You use the good stuff in your life without even thinking about it. Am I right? Do you feel me? We use our successes to keep us going in a forward motion, right?
How do we do that? That’s what’s key. If we use the positives in our life to inspire us, we are staying in the moment with what is. We are liking what we’re seeing, and so it’s easy to sit in the moment with what is. We are taking that “what is-ness” to do the next right thing in our life, and it goes seamlessly. And this is what happens when positive things are happening in our life.
But when life is difficult, then there seems to be an added burden. And that added burden is that we start to judge ourselves. That morally we are somehow messing it all up because we’re in this place that doesn’t feel great. What if we changed our thinking here? Acknowledge that life left us some lemons and know we can make lemonade. That’s using the difficulty. That’s staying in the moment of what is, and turning it into our own advantage.
What I want you to do when you feel discomfort in your life, the unease of those more difficult or not fun emotions showing up, is to use that difficulty to motivate your next move. It’s harder to use the difficulty when it’s negative, yet I want you to think about what happens to you if you’re always using what’s in front of you. If you’re always just sitting in it, letting all the feels wash over you, organizing them and then using them. You will stop getting bogged down in thinking you are morally doing something wrong here, or avoiding that thought, of getting irritable or fighting off that belief. None of those thoughts will help you. None of those responses will get you closer to closure, right? So what I want you to grasp is while life is messy, it’s okay for all the emotions to be there. All are equally welcome in your life, because they’re just telling you something about what you need next in your life. Use that. Use it to motivate you into your next right step for yourself.
Even if you can use the difficulty half a percent to better your circumstances, you’ve bettered yourself. When you use the difficulty for your own benefit, it not only didn’t take you down, it will take you up! If you are in the driver’s seat, if you’re an agent of change in your own life and don’t fall victim to difficult emotions that are present, you can use them to improve your life.
Have you made the problem go away? No. Is it all over yet? No. This is the mess of life. It takes some time and it takes some work from you. Yet, if there’s one takeaway that I want you to have from this, it’s that it’s okay to be in all of it. All of it’s welcome. Don’t push away from the difficulty. Don’t hide from the difficulty. Don’t beat yourself up and think that you’ve morally doing something wrong, because you have the difficulty. Be grateful that it’s there and use it for a purpose. A purpose of making your life feel better for you. That’s it.
You are your life’s purpose. So the only person that needs to benefit using that difficulty is you. Give yourself the gift of using it like you use the positive moments in your life, because you’ll start to see yourself as an agent of change when life feels stuck and when life feels wonderful. And that, my friends, is an amazing gift. To always feel your agency and know that you have choice in every single moment of every single day, changes the game. It shifts the mindset considerably, and it changes how you approach things entirely.
I hope that this helps you. I hope it helps you to learn to love your story. And I hope you see how the mindset of using the difficult times in your life can help you live a centered life thriving.
Do any of these sound like you?
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- Feel a sense of lack, despite success in life or having done everything “right”
- Struggle to articulate how you feel to others
- Experience guilt about how you’re feeling
- Have lost your way
- Are struggling to overcome turmoil in your life
- Have become resigned to accepting a life you don’t love
Many of us are suffering like this — daily life has become an ordeal, and we don’t know where or how to find help.
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The content in this post is not a replacement for therapy and is not clinical, medical, or mental health treatment. Dr. Natalie Marr is a Licensed Psychologist in the state of Minnesota. Her work with LearnToLoveYourStory.com and all affiliate social media entities is educational and coaching based ONLY. She IS NOT offering therapeutic services of any kind on these mediums.
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