More Thoughts on Overcoming Personal Adversity

The Road to Personal Improvement Is Paved With Persistence and Resiliency 

When times get tough and your situation looks bleak, perhaps these words from the novelist Charlotte Bronte will provide comfort and encouragement: "If we had no winter, the spring would not be so pleasant; if we did not sometimes taste of adversity, prosperity would not be so welcomed."

Being persistent and remaining on the path you've chosen will habitually require a great deal of patience, especially if you are having to deal with other people and all the baggage, troubles, emotional strife, self doubt, pessimism, anger, anxiety, and fear they carry with them. As the French poet Jean de la Fontaine said, "Patience and passage of time do more than strength and fury."

7 Key Elements of Life 

Rather than get angry at problematic situations and people, or attempt to blow through either of these with the power of your own convictions or actions, a judicial application of patience and fortitude will usually go a long way in creating a resolution. As the Irish proverb states, "For what cannot be cured, patience is best."

Here are three quotes by very different personalities that highlight the virtues of being patient and the pitfalls of being impatient:

Wise and slow; they stumble that run fast. ~William Shakespeare

The twin killers of success are impatience and greed. ~Jim Rohn

Unreasonable haste is the direct road to error. ~Jean Baptiste Moliere

Persistence and perseverance also need to be applied with a deliberate and considered approach to your own self development. 

As David Fischman writes, "The true road to personal improvement is not miraculous; it is slow and calls for a great deal of perseverance, but it is indeed possible to progress along this road, and your effort will be amply repaid."  

Please take 15 minutes and write down some ideas on how you can be more persistent and resilient in facing the challenges, hurdles and obstacles today in the seven areas of life depicted in the visual above. 

And, if you or someone you know is looking for good motivational ideas and quotes in this area, please see our book Project You: Words of Wisdom, available at Amazon for just $6.45 in paperback and $3.88 in Kindle format.

This article is partially excerpted from our top-ranked personal development book Project You: Living A Determined Life, also available at Amazon in paperback and Kindle formats. 

Patience With Ourselves Has Many Benefits

Patience is both a Virtue and a Tool of Personal Success

The Project You Life Journey is a long, continuous one, with a destination set by you and at a pace established by you.

This is not a journey of perfection, but one of nonstop and unremitting improvement. The objective is to aim for a continuous achievement of success milestones that will provide you with daily, weekly and monthly confirmation that you are attaining higher levels of self satisfaction, self-determined happiness and self-defined levels of contentment.

Along this journey you will find times when you have made mistakes or chosen wrong options. That is fine, because doing so increases your ability to learn new things, gain greater insights into yourself and move forward with your life.

Of course, it goes without saying that this journey requires patience….with yourself, with others, and with the circumstances and situations we face.

Perhaps the greatest patience will be required with the self-imposed time deadlines we tend to set for ourselves. We often forget that the universe does not work on the same clock or to the same deadlines as we do. In fact, it usually takes longer to accomplish a specific goal than the time frame we originally set for ourselves. Not meeting our own, arbitrarily set deadlines is not a failure of accomplishment. Rather, it is a failure in setting correct and proper deadlines!

Does it matter if it takes three weeks longer for you to lose the final amount of weight you set as a goal? Not in the bigger picture of your Project You Life Journey it doesn't. Does it matter if it takes several months longer to accomplish your major renovation or hobby project than you set yourself? Not in the bigger picture of your Project You Life Journey it doesn't.

We are so programmed in today's world to establish hard and firm deadlines for ourselves that much of our angst and worries are,  not about accomplishing a certain objective as it is about doing so within a specified time we set for ourselves! Drop the angst and worries about deadlines and your progress toward your goal will become smoother and more fulfilling.

Yes, proper goal setting techniques state that all goals should be time bound. And that's fine, especially in terms of keeping you motivated toward accomplishing a desired goal. But when the pressures of meeting an arbitrary deadline cause an imbalance in your inner peace, or cause your brain to start sending negative messages of failure and unworthiness, it's best to adjust the target date so that you can remain clearly focused on accomplishing your goal.

There's a reason that patience is said to be one of the seven heavenly virtues. And it is certainly one of the tools you will want to bring with you on your Project You Life Journey.

This article is excerpted from the Amazon best-selling personal development and growth book Project You: Living A Determined Life, available in Kindle and paperback.