Think about it for a moment, life has its ups and downs, moments of despair, heartbreak, and turmoil, but also joy, happiness, and euphoria.
Isn’t that what makes life so great, the fact that we get to experience this range of emotions? The depth, the intensity. There is the saying, “How do you know if something is good if you’ve never experienced the bad,” but the secret is learning to fall in love with and embrace the journey.
You may roll your eyes and say, how do I do that when I’ve just lost my job, or I’m struggling to pay my bills, or in some more drastic cases, facing imminent danger or threat? How can I possibly learn to enjoy the journey?
Well, what if it was happening for you, what if it was part of the learning you were meant to experience in this lifetime? You may have heard the saying, “If I had never made you uncomfortable, you would never have moved,” and that’s the same sometimes for life’s painful and difficult moments.
We often don’t realise what we’re capable of until we have to do something.
So if you hadn’t lost that job, how would you understand how resourceful or resilient you were? If you hadn’t struggled to make money, you wouldn’t have pushed to find a way. It’’s worth recognising and understanding that our idea of “tough” may be someone else’s dream life, there is always someone in a worse situation than you, and it’s showing gratitude and empathy in those moments for the immense privilege we have, to even be sitting here reading this.
But it’s in life’s tough moments, those dark chapters, that we learn the most, we become introspective, we reflect, and then we rise.
Humans are so magnificently resilient that even when you think you can’t go on, the next day appears, and somehow you manage to put one foot in front of the other and keep going.
Every day we wake up is a chance to try again,
A chance to try a little bit harder, to try something different, or new. Open our minds up to possibilities that we perhaps once hadn’t even considered. When we surrender to those feelings and emotions, that’s when we truly change, with an open mind and an open heart; anything is possible.
And when we have been metaphorically ‘cracked open’, so to say, what happens next? You re-emerge, you re-emerge as a new and evolved version of you.
You learn from that heartbreak, you learn from that job loss, you learn from being burned by someone close to you. You learn, and that’s what life is all about, learning.
We are all learning every single day.
We may not always realise it, but we are learning what works for us, and what doesn’t, we are learning new skills, we are learning how to communicate, how to empathise, how to love, and how to be.
So it’s important that in life’s dark chapters, to remember that that is exactly what it is, a chapter. It’s a chapter for learning, it’s a chapter for growth, and it’s often the darkest right before dawn.
What keeps me going when I’m in a chapter of learning or growth is reminding myself that this is the story that I will one day tell.
Your life is your story.
No matter what chapter you’re in, whether it’s the euphoric, joyous chapter or the growth and learning chapter, regardless of where you are in your story, there is always something to be grateful for and how lucky we all are to get up today and get to write another page.
Your life is your story, it is your book, there will be good and bad chapters, but it is what you learn from them and how you emerge that matters most because, at the end of your book, the page you’re writing today will just be part of the story that you will one day tell.
Ready to write your next chapter? Here’s how I can help:
- Follow me, Natalie Neilson, on Instagram/TikTok/LinkedIn/Substack/YouTube. Tune into my podcast, The Power of You (Available on Apple/Spotify podcasts) or sign up for my emails: https://natalieneilson.com/
- Enquire about speaking/workshops
- 1:1 growth sessions (limited)
- Coaching approaches at scale for your teams and organisation through TTM Coaching:
https://ttmcoaching.com/. You can also follow TTM Coaching on LinkedIn, Instagram, and YouTube.
DM me or email for more info: Nataliej@ttmcoaching.com