Choose Your Struggle and Rewarded

When you master your internal self, you will be able to handle external forces efficiently.

The more effort that I put in in my life whether it’s exercise or training, reading books, listening to motivations videos, watching thought provoking content, working on my passion despite the limitations, journaling or even playing with my kid or helping my wife , the better I become in in dealing with external struggles in life. The more I choose and I do those things consciously that put pressure on me, I’m creating my own struggle.

I feel like there’s a lot of benefit and creating your own struggle rather than experiencing something that is forced upon us. Things that are external are out of our control. We would be better positioned to handle external pressures when we are able to deal with our own internal challenges. We would be better equipped to take on the uncontrollable difficulties when we become efficient to deal with the challenges that we impose upon ourselves.

Like in ancient times, we do get into situations where we must go for a hunt to find food, where we have to be alert to protect ourselves form an animal attack, ready to fight with other tribes, protect ourselves form natural environmental forces. These are the activities that our forefathers had to endure which made them durable and gave them the sense of reward for overcoming difficult circumstances. We do not have all those possibilities now. Hence we need to choose certain organic daily conflicts that satisfies our brain’s expectation of overcoming some hard challenge daily and experience the feeling of reward.

If we do not work on getting ourselves into some positive self-development conflicts which helps us to release energy in overcoming that challenge, then we are  building some negative energy in us. We tend to trip on minutest of irritations and trivial anomalies because we are unknowingly craving for some struggle to unpack ourselves. When we lack certain amount of pain, conflict and pressure for a period of time, we subconsciously try to look out for such opportunity in our normal life like getting into conflict with colleagues or creating trouble in our personal relationships.

Let us take the example of training, through exercise and just rigorous physical struggle where you push your muscles to a complete failure. The more I do that, the more I feel like it minimizes those other struggles in life. You get mature to be able to handle external conflicts or can even prevent or avoid them altogether. Doing hard stuff everyday and taking control of your struggles daily trivializes other conflicts and frustrations. We are in a better position to handle the external circumstances efficiently. You better create your own struggle, else you would suffer forced struggle from other sources.

Like waking up early morning at 5 when your body is resisting and forcing you to sleep, like overcoming all the negative limiting thoughts that are generated in your mind at that time and all these thoughts suggest you to choose only one thing that is comfort and easy route, like then getting ready and going to gym and doing some hard training , doing HIIT where you gasp for breath, or doing that incline treadmill run which forces you to give up every second.  Doing it can squeeze out all the excess energy and angst that our body might be putting on.

Sometimes it is absolutely required to have some alone time and retrospect in solitude. It is during this time we get a chance to look into ourselves. Our brain behaves in a strange ways where it tries to dig deep into some actions and behaviors which we are not proud off. We think that we buried them long back but we can clearly feel at that moment that we did something wrong at that time, we were not authentic at that time, why was so mean with them, why did I act immaturely . So those are the harsh truths which we have to align with and overcome.

It is good not be distracted with huge barrage of information and news hammering us for our attention. It is only when we talk to ourselves isolated form all the distractions we can realign ourselves. 

When you have discipline in life and keep doing what must be done irrespective of your personal situation, not giving excuses, it keeps building your self-confidence. You are kind of prepared for most of the adversities thrown at you because you know that you can handle it. You can handle it because you have control over how you do stuff that is hard and difficult . You will have confidence that you are most likely going to overcome the testing times because you never allowed the situation or your limiting thoughts control you. You would most likely resolve the situation because you have been doing what is right resisting negative temptations.

You have to start doing something for better wellbeing. Anything you do for transforming yourself is going to be hard and difficult initially. You might have to build up a lot of strength to not to give up in the middle. Most of the times you start with some healthy or productive activity that you have been avoiding form long time but we need to remember that we will be hit by all the non-sense self-limiting beliefs we have in our mind. When the things get tough and painful you will search for all the validations to give up. Like why I am I doing this, is this going to be beneficial, I tried it in the past but did not work after a while, I do not deserve this, I am not good enough to stick to this plan, I might not get expected results so why to go through the trouble now and it goes on till you say that it is not worth it and I will fall back to my usual life which is normal and mediocre and predictable. This is a very common pattern for many people when they tend to lose control of stuff. We need to be careful in those moments to be mindful and take control of our thoughts. We need to say no to our limiting believes and believe in ourselves that we have got what it takes to be an achiever.

~Praveen Jada

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