Driving Forward Through Pain: How to use Adversity to Achieve Greatness
"True self-discovery begins where your comfort zone ends." - Adam Braun. At some point in our lives, we all feel pain, it is simply an inevitable part of life. Throughout my life, I have constantly felt pain. As a young adult, it was the self-inflicted pain of repeated mistakes, living an unsavory life and losing sight of the things that truly matter. I had a family that loved me but didn't like me as a person at all.Pain can be a crippling adversary. At the time, the pain I caused myself, pushed me into the darkness. It cultivated thoughts in my own mind that the world is unfair, that I was dealt a bad hand, and that there was no use in trying to right things because I was already too far into the darkness to ever see the light.Through a very eye-opening string of events, not the least of which was my own mother, a woman I love beyond words beginning to give up on me, I began to realize that I, me and me alone was the one responsible for the pain I was experiencing. That is the truth with most of the pain I personally ever faced in life. It is true that there are circumstances that happen that are completely out of our control, but what we can always control is how we view and react to those circumstances.We don't always sabotage ourselves, sometimes horrible things happen to the most amazing people, When this happens, I generally see one of two responses. I see the person who stays down when life throws a punch at them, I see them begin to fall into the darkness, they blame life for not being fair, and never take accountability for their own reactions. They say, looked what happened to me, it's just my luck, that's how my life has always been.Then I see the other response, the person who refuses to stay down. The person who refuses to let the circumstance dictate who they are or what they do. For these people, it hurts more to stay where they are than to move toward where they want to be. Tony Robbins states that "change happens when the pain of staying the same is greater than the pain of change."What many don't know is that intrinsically, pain is one of the most powerful driving forces we have. When I hit rock bottom, and I finally woke up, I saw my dreams in front of me. They were a far way off, but they were there. I had found hope and belief in myself. The hard part was changing. But the pain made it all too easy because it literally burned me inside to do anything that took away from the spark of light I saw at the end of the road. Any action that wasn't consistent with my dreams literally killed me inside.So I got away from all of the destructive behavior that brought me to such a low place in my life. And my change happened at lightning speed, like the flip of a switch. Not because I am strong, or disciplined, or because I had a concrete will. At the time I was broken. I changed so quickly because it hurt too much not to.Now, I live a very positive and fulfilling life, and my dreams are larger than my own existence. I want my dream so badly that now it literally hurts me not be where I want to be. So the pain of not having everything I ever dreamed of drives me forward through life with an unbroken tenacity.Life will always give you challenges to overcome, whether it throws a storm your way or you build a dream so large that it requires you to climb to the ends of the earth. Adversity will always be the path through which we grow, through which we become the best versions of ourselves.And when the pain of not achieving your brightest dreams becomes larger than the pain of letting of who you are...Then you will be able to overcome any obstacle, you will be able to accomplish anything you set forward to pursue and you will become the person that you were always destined to be...Stay inspired-Raf