Let Past Struggles You Overcame Lead The Way
Think about your past struggles. Perhaps you dealt with something emotionally challenging, like losing a close friend or family member. Maybe you experienced a professional battle and grappled with problems at work. Sometimes, your familial struggles, such as strife or disagreement between family members.
Struggles are numerous and can be experienced in every area of life. Some battles are much bigger and more challenging to overcome than others. Regardless of your struggles or challenges, they serve a significant purpose in your life.
You can allow your past struggles you overcame to lead the way to a much better and brighter future. You can use struggles this way because they often serve as essential teachers: Even the grimmest and most challenging struggles teach you valuable wisdom as you experience them.
When you let your past struggles you overcame lead the way, you use that knowledge to make more informed decisions in the future. Because you’ve experienced your unique set of struggles firsthand, you likely learned some wisdom about those particular challenges, including how to handle (and even avoid) them in the future.
Although you did have to handle those past struggles, your suffering wasn’t in vain – that knowledge you gained is yours to keep and use as you move forward into a better future.
What are the benefits of overcoming and making peace with your past struggles?
Before letting the past struggles you overcame lead the way, you must learn to make peace with your past struggles. When you feel calm and have accepted your past struggles, you no longer ruminate over what went wrong or fret about the past. Instead, you let that knowledge you learned guide you into the future.
Learning how to make peace with those past struggles includes a variety of benefits:
- You don’t waste tons of time worrying about events that have already passed.
Making peace with your past struggles means you can pull away the valuable lessons learned from them and then leave them in the past. Instead of wasting precious current time worrying about old struggles, you can keep moving forward with your life.
- You become a more knowledgeable person because of your past experiences.
Letting go of your past struggles involves getting to understand them well. After you’ve accepted your past struggles, pulled the valuable lessons away from them, and then let yourself move on from what happened, you take that information. Because you lived those struggles, you can move onward from them a little wiser.
- You avoid a lot of excessive emotional anguish.
Overcoming your past struggles requires some serious emotional work. However, doing that vital work at the moment – and allowing yourself to process those challenging emotions as you’re experiencing them during your struggle – means you’ll avoid a lot of lingering emotional strife afterwards.
What happens if a person views their past struggles negatively?
Many people struggle to see their past struggles as anything but negative. It’s understandable – nobody enjoys reflecting on a time when they messed up or experienced a severe hardship. However, maintaining this negative image of your past struggles can lead to significant issues.
- You can develop low self-esteem.
Viewing your past struggles negatively leads to much rumination about what you did wrong or what you could have done differently in the past. As you continue to see those past struggles negatively, it’s easy to feel bad about yourself. As you focus on these struggles (and any mistakes you made during them), you lose focus of yourself in the present and develop lower self-esteem.
- You lose confidence in your ability to make good choices in the future.
When you view your past struggles negatively, you create an unhelpful image of yourself in your mind. By reflecting on all the negatives of your past struggles, it’s easy to see yourself as someone who will always struggle and experience those same hardships the same way if they happen again.
- You don’t take away the one good thing from struggle: Knowledge.
If you continue to view your past struggles negatively, you’ll never get the one positive benefit from experiencing those struggles. The knowledge you learn from any struggle allows you to avoid those struggles (or at least handle them more efficiently) in the future. If you continue to view your past struggles negatively, you’ll likely have difficulty gleaning that valuable knowledge from experience.
How can you let the past struggles you overcame lead the way?
Learning how to let the past struggles you overcame lead the way can be challenging. After getting over the initial hurdle of overcoming those struggles, learning how to take those experiences and use them in a productive, positive way takes some practice and patience to perfect.
Firstly, it’s essential to permit yourself to “let go.” Once you identify the key lessons learned from those experiences, it’s time to let the actual struggle and difficulty disperse from your mind and body. Once the struggle ends and the lesson is learned, you can shed the weight of that worry and anxiety and allow yourself to move forward.
Keep that knowledge you learned tucked away in your mind as you prepare to move forward. You can find comfort in knowing that your experiences taught you valuable information you can use to build a better tomorrow for yourself.
Adopting a positive mindset is essential for letting the past struggles you overcame lead the way. Your positive attitude should be future-focused. Keeping your perspective on all the good things to come (and the security of knowing that you have those lessons learned from your past struggles to serve as a guide) will help you maintain a positive pathway as you move forward.
