You know, the challenge in front of you. The one you are facing (unavoidably) or considering. The one that is difficult, kind of inspiring, but intimidating, too. Here’s why you should go for it.

And yet, only challenge causes growth. Only challenge will test our skills and make us better. Only challenge and the self-motivation to engage the challenge will transform us. Every challenge we face is an opportunity to create a more skillful self. So it is up to you to constantly look for challenges to motivate yourself with. And it’s up to you to notice when you’re buried alive in a comfort zone. – Steve Chandler

1. Challenges keep your life from becoming an exercise in boredom.

How exciting is it to do the same (normal) thing every day, to walk the same (comfortable) rut every week? Oooh. Goose bumps. Can hardly contain the excitement. Hold your enthusiasm. Wow, it’s those mundane things that really bring the zest into your life, isn’t it? Um, wait. Maybe not. Shake yourself up. Do something new.

Don’t be boring until you’re dead, and before you die make sure you try all sorts of wacky, impossible things that will give people plenty to talk about at your funeral.

Consider it your gift to a world full of boring people.

2. Challenges help you to grow.

As our friend Mr. Chandler pointed out above, “only challenge causes growth.” And have you heard that other one about when you cease to grow, you begin to die?

3. Challenges show you what you’re capable of.

Struggling with confidence? Burdened by a string of failures in your (recent) past? Not sure what you can do, or even why you would try? The longer you sit around with your self-defeating, fatalistic thoughts, the more you become a pseudo-emo-child and world knows we don’t need any more of those.

Get off your emofied bum and go do something challenging.

4. Challenges help you let go of the old dead stuff you didn’t even realize you were carrying around.

S’true. You have baggage. It might be in terms of old dead habits (they are no longer serving you) or old dead relationships (they are not longer vital, viable, or sustainable) or old dead ways of thinking… or just in terms of physical stuff (clutter = old dead stuff stinking up your space). When you commit to and begin pursuing a new challenge, you start reaching forward.

You put a new priority on the new habits and new relationships and new ways of thinking required to achieve the challenge. As a result, you begin, often unconsciously, letting that old stuff fall away.

And it’s good. You feel lighter, you feel better, and you realize that you didn’t need all that old dead ick infringing on your life.

5. Challenges motivate and inspire other people around you.

Want to help a friend who’s stuck? Do something challenging and share the challenge. DON’T tell her to take on a challenge. Take on one yourself, and let her see your struggle and your success. We all need to move out of the small window of our own view and see a bigger world. You take on a challenge, you expand your own view, and you let the people around you share that. It’s good for everybody.

6. Challenges give you a chance to get closer to who you actually want to be.

Even challenges which seem directly unrelated to your long-term goals or life plan or what-have-you still bring you closer to reaching those goals, to becoming that person you (secretly?) want to be. Why? Because challenges help you grow, help you see how capable you are, help you let go of old dead stuff… hey, have you been reading this list?

7. Challenges give you something worthwhile to talk about.

Grace us with interesting Facebook status updates. Please. In the age of endless, constant communication, we’re all dying for something interesting to hear and discuss. Something besides the latest Youtube video or how much people hate Mondays or what we all had for lunch. Verbal refreshment, in the form of challenge updates. Bring it. We’re waiting.

8. Challenges call out the better part of who you are.

You know what part of you is resisting the challenge before you now? The fearful part. The lazy part. The hesitant, indecisive, self-indulgent, self-conscious part. In other words: not the good part. Don’t give the weenie-half any more power than it wields (for a wimpy part-of-self, it’s a power monger; don’t feed that).

Bring forth the best.

9. Challenges give you more sympathy for others who are struggling.

It’s easy to be deconstructively critical and snarky and all-things-culturally-acceptable-but-rude when we feel comfortable in our own lives. It’s easy to look down on others when we feel we have the high ground in our own lives.

But when you yourself are staring at a mountain, when the climb is sapping your energy, when you’re putting your all into something that’s tough but rewarding, then you can see a little more clearly.

You can sympathize with the struggles – and the successes – of other people in your life. Your high horse isn’t so high, after all, when you get it in perspective. Get that perspective for yourself or life will hand it to you, painfully, one way or the other.

10. Challenges equip you to be more useful and helpful to others.

At the end of any challenge, even a challenge which you might technically fail but still put all your heart and soul’s effort into, you will be a better, smarter, more knowledgeable, more helpful, more empathetic, and vastly more interesting person. Which means you have more to offer to other people, to the people closest to you, to the world in general. This is a good thing. Good for your self-esteem, good for your social life. Also, good for humanity.

So go for it.

Image: Me on top of a mountain by Blogging Bookshelf

“What I must do is all that concerns me,

not what the people think. This rule, equally arduous in actual and in intellectual life, may serve for the whole distinction between greatness and meanness. It is the harder because you will always find those who think they know what is your duty better than you know it.”

“Insist on yourself; never imitate.

Your own gift you can present every moment with the cumulative force of a whole life’s cultivation; but of the adopted talent of another you have only an extemporaneous half possession. That which each can do best, none but his Maker can teach him.”

“Whoso would be a man, must be a nonconformist.”

-Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Men are anxious to improve their circumstances, but are unwilling to improve themselves; they therefore remain bound.”

“Man is buffeted by circumstances so long as he believes himself to be the creature of outside conditions, but when he realizes that he is a creative power, and that he may command the hidden soil and seeds of his being out of which circumstaces grow,

he then becomes the rightful master of himself.”

“To put away aimlessness and weakness,

and to begin to think with purpose,

is to enter the ranks of those strong ones who only recognize failure as one of the pathways to attainment; who make all conditions serve them, and who think strongly, attempt fearlessly, and accomplish masterfully.”

-James Allen

—Photo by aprilzosia.

Everything is going to be okay.

Not to rain on your parade, but, well, your definition of okay and the reality of what actually happens in your life are not going to line up.
Bad things will happen to you. Sometimes because of you, sometimes because of other people, sometimes just because. No good reason that you can see.

We don’t acknowledge the truth that things aren’t always going to be okay. Instead, we drift along with this mentality of inevitable triumph, regardless of the signs telling us otherwise. And we reinforce this (false) idea in each other.

• “Don’t worry, everything will work out.”
• “You’ll figure it out.”
• “Things will get better.”

There is, however, no guarantee of things working out or getting better or even not getting worse. When you assume that no matter what, it’s all gonna be okay in the end, you remove personal responsibility from the picture. You also remove reality from the picture.

Drop the Okay Lie

The Okay lie: You assume your kids are going to turn out okay… so you don’t take your job as a parent seriously, you let things slide, you don’t deal with bad attitudes when they first appear. The result: your kids end up rebellious, unhappy, and lost and you shake your head and wonder how that happened.

The Okay lie: You assume that if you work hard and don’t mess up too bad, you’ll end up with a good career and stable finances…. so you don’t pay attention to economic problems, industry lay-offs, small business closings, cutbacks, or even the great opportunities (involving risk) that come along. You don’t take charge of your own career/money in a proactive way. The result: you become a victim of economic shifts and don’t know what hit you until you’re 6 months into unemployment.

The Okay lie: [here's one from my personal experience] You assume that your cancer-stricken Mom will make it. She’ll fight it off, the chemo will work, she’ll get better, and she’ll be there in your life the way you expect, and God won’t let her die yet. Life is a right, after all, and God owes us this much. Right? The result: When you lose something that matters this much, you can’t avoid being shaken. But if your core belief is “I deserve an okay life and God better work it out,” then the not-okay stuff will shake you through the center and put your very faith in God into question. I spent a year not sure if I wanted to believe in God again. I finally came to this conclusion (basic, I know, but it took me a while): Life is a gift, not a right. The good things that we receive are blessings, privileges, not automatic rights that we can demand.

Rights vs. Gifts

It goes against Western culture to talk about our inalienable rights not being rights. But the concept is bigger than government-for-the-people; it’s more about created-and-Creator.

“Woe to him who quarrels with his Maker, to him who is but a potsherd among the potsherds on the ground. Does the clay say to the potter, ‘What are you making?’
Does your work say, ‘He has no hands’? Woe to him who says to his father, ‘What have you begotten?’ or to his mother, ‘What have you brought to birth?’
Isaiah 45: 9-10

Now, here’s the good news.

You can’t (and shouldn’t) walk around expecting Death to drop on your head at any moment. You can’t live in fear (well, you can, but it won’t be much of a life).
But when you drop the everything is going to be okay just because belief system, you can handle what does happen much better. Pretty quickly, you’ll see that 99% of life falls into 1 of 2 categories:

1. Stuff you can control
2. Stuff you can’t control

For the first category, losing the Okay Lie means you start taking responsibility for what you can control (how you parent, what you do with your money) and doing your best at it. Guaranteed better results with that approach, no matter what the area is.

Riches, Peace, and Freedom

For the second category, losing the Okay Lie means two things:

First, you start receiving every good day, every good things as a gift, a blessing, a privilege. You are thankful. You are grateful. You see how rich your life is, already. [Guess how thankful I am for good health. And for the fact that I have my Dad and sister. And for a mother-in-law and a stepmom who are such loving grandmoms to my kids.]
Second, you start trusting God the way He should be trusted, as Creator, not as giant-Santa-in-the-sky. And with that trust comes peace and freedom. Peace: I don’t have to fight the inevitable truth that I will experience pain. I just have to remember to come to God with my pain. Freedom: I don’t have to be in control of the things that I can’t control. It’s beyond my ability to guarantee a good life for myself and the ones I love. I am free to live, do my best, and trust God with whatever else happens.

Everything is not going to be okay. But that’s okay.

seemingly effortless beauty of movement, form, or proportion. …A sense of fitness or propriety. …Good will, mercy, clemency. …A temporary immunity or exemption; reprieve. …Divine love and protection bestowed freely on people.

GRACIOUS:

Marked by kindness and warm courtesy. Tactful. Merciful or compassionate. Marked by elegance and good taste.

Speak what distributes grace to those who hear. {Ephesians 4:29}

Grow in grace. {2 Peter 3:18}

A gracious woman retains honor. {Proverbs 11:16}

But he giveth more grace. {James 4:6}

God giveth grace to the humble. {1 Peter 5:5}

Grace and peace be multiplied unto you through the knowledge of God, and of Jesus our Lord. {2 Peter 1:2}

…it is upon the mothers of the present that the future depends… because it is the mothers who have the sole direction of the children’s early, most impressible years.

…And they [must] take it [motherhood] up as their profession – that is, with the same diligence, regularity, and punctuality which men bestow on their professional labours.

Nothing is trivial that concerns a child.

{Charlotte Mason, Home Education}

Image courtesy of adreson.

Zeke is sleeping rather well at night; he usually gets a last feeding at 9 or 10, when I go to bed, and then wakes up once around 1 and again around 4.  I’m hopeful we can work our way past needing that 1 a.m. feeding pretty quickly. It’s kind of an unpleasant interruption in the middle of dreams, and it cuts the sleep really short, especially if I don’t go to sleep right after I feed him at 9 or 10. Which I hardly ever do…

I’m so much more relaxed with him, far more than with Mara and even more than with Robbie as a newborn. I’m not sure what the difference is. Maybe letting go of some perfectionism. Maybe trusting myself as a mother more. It helps to look at Mara and Robbie and think, “Hmm, they’re happy. They’re healthy. They’re relatively well-behaved. We must be doing okay.”

Actually what I’m struggling most with is staying consistent with Mara and Robbie while caring for Zeke. Since they are relatively well-behaved most of the time, I tend to just let little things slide. But then those little things become habitual behaviors, and I know they’re not good. How do you stay consistent and motivated when it’s not a BIG deal?

Yesterday I could hardly get Robbie to come when I called him, and he was crying (his version of pitching a fit) every time I told him no on anything. We were with my sister-in-law and niece at her house, then out at MacDonald’s – it wasn’t really the time for a training session. But obviously I’ve been letting some things go over the last few days if he feels comfortable with ignoring my commands. How do I see that coming? How do I keep myself consistent with him?

Perhaps I will put a Post-It on his forehead today, saying something like, “Hey, Mom, PAY ATTENTION!”

Ideas? Help?

If you have an hour, will you not improve that hour, instead of idling it away?
Lord Chesterfield

Every day do something that will inch you closer to a better tomorrow.
Doug Firebaugh

Success is the sum of small efforts, repeated day in and day out.
Robert Collier

The difference between a successful person and others is not a lack of strength, not a lack of knowledge, but rather a lack in will.
Vince Lombardi

We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, therefore,
is not an act but a habit.
Aristotle

Improve Your Life: If you (like me) are having difficulty getting up in the morning, try a different set up for your alarm lock. Perhaps you need to purchase a new one, with a louder or different alarm sound, or perhaps you should move yours to a different location (where the snooze button is out of your arm’s reach). You could also try getting an alarm that will play cds, and burn one on your computer with songs that help motivate you. Little changes can make a big difference.

Be Open-Minded: Are you taking responsibility for the “little failures” in your day? It is easy to put blame on circumstances or other people, but it is only in taking responsibility that you find the power to change.