One Thought To Have On Those Tough Days

You know what sort of day I’m talking about. You’ve had them too. And you know what is fascinating about these tough days like today?

Everyone has tough days more than they’d like to admit. In fact, most people rarely admit when they are having a tough day. They pretend everything is awesome (insert The Lego Movie Theme Song) and put a fake smile on to appear everything is okay.

What I’ve come to realize is that we all have these really rough days. Life is tough, painful, sometimes meaningless and other times not so great for all of us. Tough days are normal.

Muhammad Ali had tough days.

Elon Musk had tough days watching his rockets blow up.

Oprah had days where she didn’t feel inspirational and was pissed off about her addiction to certain sugary foods.

One thought I’ve had today (and on other tough days) is this:

What if we accepted the tough days just like we accepted the days where everything goes right?

It’s this thought that helps us keep going. It’ not whether or not you will or won’t accept the tough days — they’re guaranteed. The real question is will you accept the tough days and keep putting one foot in front of the other?

Where tough days become a problem is when you don’t accept them and you stop going forward. The pause in momentum can turn into a downward spiral if you’re not careful. This is a message to myself more than to anyone else. See, I suffered from severe mental illness since I was a child and it went undiagnosed. When I woke up from this nightmare and got help, everything changed for the better.

What I know from this battle is that if you don’t accept the tough days for what they are, then you risk your mind taking over and painting a different future.

Your mind can quickly take a tough day and use it as the basis for the rest of your life if you’re not conscious of what is happening.

How you deal with the tough days determines how you deal with the good ones, too

Leading on from the thought of accepting the tough days for what they are, I also realized that when I used to not be able to handle the tough days, I didn’t deal with the good days well either.

I remember getting a pay rise earlier in my career and not celebrating it. Then I had some success in my music career and didn’t acknowledge it. In fact, if anything, I tried to pretend it didn’t happen.

If you can’t learn to accept the seasons of your life, then you’ll resort to numbing both pain and pleasure.

You can’t predict whether today you’ll be in an awesome mood and everything will go well or whether today will be full of failures, disappointments and a lack of motivation. What you can do, though, is choose how you react and accept that you need both tough days and amazing days to survive.

I’m very thankful I had this thought on a tough day like today and I hope it helps you when you have your next tough day.

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