Overcoming Obstacles

We all encounter obstacles standing in the way of achieving our personal and professional goals. Sometimes you can work around them, sometimes get over them, and other times you simply need to push through them. The only certainty is that they will arise, and that the key to success is how you choose to deal with them.

On this topic, I listened to a brilliant, yet elegantly simple piece of advice on Headspace this morning, which I wanted to record and share with you. Headspace is a meditation app (www.headspace.com) providing daily 10 minute guided mediations for busy people. At last count it had over 6 million users. If you haven't checked it out already, I highly recommend it.

So, here's what Andy Puddicombe, founder of Headspace, had to say about encountering obstacles in your life:

Whenever we’re on this kind of journey, trying to achieve a very specific goal, dream, intention, almost inevitably obstacles and challenges will arise along the way.

And it’s really tempting to see those almost as a journey in themselves, or to get lost in them along the way. In fact, when they do arise we tend to resist them, so much that we create additional tension in the body and mind, making it even more difficult to move on.

Instead there’s the opportunity to understand that these things are not something separate from the journey; they are the journey.

And if we understand that, and bring them into the journey, and make them part of that journey, then we have the opportunity for them to work with us, rather than against us.

The truth is we don’t know how the journey will unfold. We don’t know what will happen along the way. All we do know is that if we have a deep understanding of our orientation, where we’re heading, then we always have that to come back to.

And it doesn’t matter when something difficult happens; we may well immediately think that’s the end, or that’s going to change everything, when in fact we don’t have the full story yet. We’re not seeing it within the context of the whole journey. It’s just as though we’ve zoomed in and focused on that one thing.

So being able to zoom out and instead place our attention on that deep-seated feeling that deep-seated motivation really helps us move past those different obstacles challenges even making them part of our success.