Fighting Your Way Out

Some times when everything is moving along fine you run into setbacks or reminders of areas where you are not achieving the results you want. This can be a blow to your confidence or it can be motivation to work harder.

If you are truly dedicated to the goal of creating the life you want you cannot allow setbacks and cruel reminders of your flaws to cripple you. This journey you have set for yourself is not an easy one. The ground is unstable; one moment you might find yourself in a pleasant valley then with a rumble and a quake the ground collapses from under you and you are lost in caverns of doubt and bad habits. If you stop traveling every time this happens you will never reach your destination.

What is worse is that there are monsters that live in the caverns of self doubt that want to rend the confidence from your heart and mind. These monster attacks come in many forms. "Why do I bother?", "I will never succeed", "If I don't feel sorry for myself who will?" We can run from these monsters trying to ignore our weaknesses and limitations but the wounds they inflict as we retreat will fester. We may not notice the disease creeping in to our bodies but some day these wounds that never healed will be yet another fault line to drop us back into the caves, and the monsters will be there waiting.

Fortunately the monsters are easy to hold at bay. Acknowledge them, let them know you see them there and start arming yourself to deal with them. The monsters have many names: Unemployment, Homelessness, Loneliness, Loss, Poor Health, and even Low Self Worth. These beasts may be the thing its self or the fear of the thing. Each monster requires the correct weapon to put it down. A commitment to job hunting or finding a job steals the claws from unemployment.

If we know the monsters that plague us then we can face them, develop strategies for dealing with them and overcome them. When we overcome them we build our confidence and on finding the exit to the cavern we find ourselves closer to our destination then we were in the pleasant valley.