Life is a roller coaster ride full of unknowns. You can either accept it and enjoy the ride, learning from your experiences along the way, or you can rebel against all of life’s problems, resenting every step of the way.
The latter prevents you from growing or developing, whereas the former allows you to learn from your struggles and grow as a person as a result of them.
While the term “better” is subjective, one thing is certain: it denotes “improved.” There is always space for progress, no matter where you are. Even a monk seeks to develop himself on a daily basis, always seeking to be a better person.
Life’s challenges are unavoidable, and you may use them to your advantage. Each one provides a chance for personal development and advancement. At the end of the day, the goal is to use what you’ve learned to become the best version of yourself.
Here are six frequent life problems to conquer on your journey to being a better person:
1. Loss
Loss is an unavoidable aspect of life, whether it’s a job, an opportunity, or a relationship.
Loss is one of life’s most difficult problems, regardless of how it occurs. It can be jarring and upsetting. Loss, on the other hand, allows you to focus on what is genuinely important in order to keep going forward.
Losing something you had or really wanted can be an eye-opening experience. When you suffer a loss, you must ask yourself, “What was valuable to me about what I lost?” “What am I willing to do to obtain what I want?” and “How far am I willing to go to acquire what I want?”
By examining your loss through the prism of these questions, you can determine the genuine value of what you’ve lost, as well as why you value it.
Knowing what you value and why you value it is essential to becoming a better person because it gives your words and actions credibility.
2. Failure
There isn’t a single person alive who hasn’t failed at something. You must fail in order to grow. Failure serves as a natural checkpoint on your journey, allowing you to assess your recent behavioral choices and make adjustments.
While you fail, you have the opportunity to reflect on your decisions and behaviors, just like an athlete does between games when reviewing video footage.
Examining the decisions and behaviors that led to your failure is a priceless exercise. Understanding how your decisions lead to specific behaviors and actions can help you avoid repeating the same mistakes.
A review like this can also disclose key nuances you missed the first time around, allowing you to handle the situation in a better and more informed manner the next time around.
Failure leads to the development of compassion, empathy, and sympathy. Your experience gives you something in common with anyone who has gone through anything similar.
Because they help others to feel comfortable and noticed around you, those three emotions are vital tools on your path to becoming a better person.
3. Setbacks
Mistakes, monkey wrenches, and unforeseen circumstances are all names for them. However, setbacks are unavoidable on our path to becoming better people.
On our voyage, we’ve all encountered a stumbling block, a stumbling block, or a stumbling block. The problem is figuring out why the delay occurred. What happened to cause our progress to stall or stop?
You can know all the right things to do or say academically, but there are times when your humanity gets the best of you.
You do or say something you regret despite your greatest attempts to be a better person. Perhaps you react negatively or in a way that is inconsistent with your goal to improve yourself. IT’S ALL GOOD!
Setbacks provide opportunities for growth. Knowing what types of factors stifle your progress will allow you to both avoid and anticipate them.
One of the great side effects of overcoming adversity is resilience. Mental toughness is required for the route to becoming a better person.
Setbacks are a natural approach to develop mental toughness while retaining integrity in your actions and an emotional awareness that fosters a safe environment where people feel noticed.
4. Establishing Your Moral Compass
For yourself, determining what is good and what is wrong is a constant challenge. You might agree with one philosophy today but not the next. It is your right to change your mind, and it is your obligation to decide where you stand. The two are inextricably linked.
On your journey to becoming a better person, deciding what you believe is critical. The foundation of self-improvement is your own particular sense of right and wrong.
The majority of people act according to their principles and beliefs. Allowing yourself to develop as a person necessitates revisiting them both. It’s likely that your principles and views will no longer be in line with your ultimate purpose.
Fortunately, your analysis of the misalignment will lead you to take the required steps to reclaim your true north. The skill to self-correct will be beneficial to you throughout your journey.
5. Mastering Your Mind
On your journey to becoming a better person, your mind can be a fierce foe. When things aren’t going well, it can come out with all kinds of negative criticism, and if you allow it, it has the capacity to derail you with doubt and worry. One of the most difficult things in life is mastering your thinking.
Your mind determines your point of view, as well as how you absorb and process information from the world around you. Unlike other things that you can learn after a set amount of time, mastering the mind can take a lifetime.
The difficulty is to show up every day willing to do the work of mind mastery while being fully aware of the boundless nature of the universe.
You are always there wherever you go, making it hard to hide from yourself. It will be difficult for you to become a better person if your mind is unruly and nasty, mostly because you are not being nicer to yourself.
Fortunately, there are a variety of approaches to mastering your mind. The idea is to make room for you to be with yourself in a healthy, growth-promoting way.
Therapy, meditation, self-reflection, prayer, deliberate solitude, journaling, and being outside in nature are all frequent ways to enable focused personal time.
6. Overcoming Your Story
Everyone used to be a kid. There are things that happened to you that were out of your control, and no matter how bad they were, they stayed with you.
Those events become part of your narrative. Overcoming the tale you tell yourself about your own life can be a difficult task.
It influences the way you go through the world, whether you grew up impoverished, didn’t have a lot of affection in your home, or didn’t feel seen. There are facts about these events, as well as hazy edges where our brains fill in the gaps.
For instance, if you state, “I grew up poor and will always be poor,” this is an example of your tale assuming command.
In comparison, suppose you said, “I grew up poor, but today I work hard.” I’m doing everything I can to make sure I have what I need and am comfortable”– even if it’s difficult, that’s an example of conquering adversity.
I grew up in and out of apartments, concerned about money and feeling unworthy as a result of what I witnessed. It became part of my tale that I felt struggling was natural and that surviving was the default mode of being.
As an adult, though, I had to choose between allowing my past experiences to form my current narrative or focusing on the current circumstances as a representation of my current reality.
While the option may be obvious, taking the action necessary to change the narrative is difficult. It necessitates self-awareness and intentionality. You must be willing to let go of stories that no longer serve you in order to fully experience the present moment.
The ability to participate in positive self-reflection, which is the cornerstone of human progress, is stifled when you carry around stale, negative narratives. When you put your past behind you and focus on the present, you inspire others to do the same.
By overcoming your tale, you have the ability to see this moment as an opportunity to build a new story—one that you can control. On the path to becoming a better person, I’m concentrating on.
Final Thoughts
These difficulties are typical throughout life. If your goal is to become a better person, you will face these 6 challenges in some way or another, no matter who you are or where you are.
Thankfully, you’re now equipped to face them with grace and strategy. As you continue on your path to becoming a better person, remember to let go of the things you can’t control in exchange for being present at the moment, make time for healthy self-reflection, give yourself permission to reexamine your values and beliefs, embrace the resilience that comes from failures, allow your failures to be a source of compassionate resonance, and let loss teach you about what you value.
Now that you know what you have to overcome, get out there and submit those peaks, life is waiting for you on the other side.