Existential Psychology

Actively Embrace Challenges

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The biggest reason people avoid challenges of all kinds in their lives is that they don’t like how it feels to fail. Removing any and all real challenges from the life situation effectively makes failure a non-entity.

But the price paid for psychic comfort is boredom. And the benefit gained from pursuing challenging activities and pastimes is interest in and passion for life. When people confront challenges within an area of interest and use their unique set of traits and abilities to successfully move through these challenges they exist in a state of flow, they feel capable and powerful, and this attitude ends up affecting all spheres of their lives.

This is why we must decide to actively embrace challenges rather than run away from them. We’ve just got to resolve to also embrace failure and to realize that it’s easy to transform the negative feelings cued off by failure simply by shifting our perception. Failure, coming up short, is an expected part of pursuing challenging activities, not something that can be avoided and therefore not something we need to feel bad about. The key is to focus mostly on the progress that’s occurring and to cut ourselves a break when we come up short.