10 Things to Remember When Going Through Tough Times

Perhaps you’re not having the best day, week… month… or year. I get it. Many feel the same.

So if you’re doing it tough right now, here are 10 truths to help you weather this ‘storm’ and come out the other side better than you went in. 

1- Dwelling on what you don’t want works against what you do want

We all have our ideas of how things ‘should’ be. So when our plans derail, and the reality we find ourselves in is a far cry from the one we’d worked for, it’s easy to get into a wrestling match with life. But the biggest thing that messes us up is not the external conditions of our lives; it’s the picture in our heads about how we think those conditions should be. When you let go and accept your reality for all it is, you reclaim the energy lost to the battle against what it isn’t. 

2- You’ve overcome tough times before. You will again.

Sure they are not like the one you’ve dealt with now. But you have survived 100% of your worst days. And if you think back to them, you’ll recall that at the time, you worried you might now have what it would take only to discover that you did. Well, that same tendency to underestimate your resiliency is still wired into you. So just remember, you are capable of difficult things. You’ve risen above them before; you will again.

3- No matter how bad it feels now, it won’t feel this way forever 

Research by Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert found that people are generally pretty lousy at forecasting their feelings when they’re in the middle of a tough situation. In fact, in the midst of a crisis, we tend to think we will always feel the way we do now. Not true. “It’s not that things don’t hurt,” Gilbert says. “It’s that they don’t hurt quite as long or as much as we think they’re going to.” So no matter how bad you feel right now, know that you will not feel this way forever. Hope is a risk that must be run. 

4- You are bigger than your problems 

As difficult as your circumstances may be, don’t let them define you or become your identity. You are not your adversities, job status, bank statement, messy divorce, or anything that has ever happened to you. Anything. Who you are is far beyond any external measure, situation, or experience. 

Avoid putting a label on yourself that hems you in or casting yourself as a victim of life. As pioneering psychiatrist Alfred Adler wrote in What Life Should Mean To You, “We determine ourselves by the meanings we ascribe to situations.”

It’s not your adversities that shape who you are, but who you are in the face of your hardships. So don’t let your problems be your identity.

5- Nothing robs your peace of mind faster than fear 

The more uncertain our future, the more prone we are to turning our forecasts into fearcasts, conjuring up an array of imagined troubles. Yet because our brains are wired to focus more on potential loss than on potential gains, most of our fear-laden worst-case outcomes never actually occur. So live your worry once. Focus your attention on what is in front of you today. Tomorrow, repeat.

To quote Mark Twain, “I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened.” 

6- It’s okay not to feel okay 

My daughter went to her senior prom and graduated high school virtually. While we focused on how much we had to be grateful for, she was still sad about this. Her loss was real. I am sure you’ve experienced your own sense of loss in recent times. Many of us have missed out on experiences we would have treasured due to this pandemic. Graduations. Birthdays. Weddings. Funerals.

Many also lost their businesses, jobs, livelihoods, and future plans. Not to mention the hundreds and thousands of lives the crisis claimed - from the virus and the poverty and despair resulting from the measures used to contain it.

These emotions are part of the human experience.

Unfortunately, we live in a culture that often does positivity to excess and suffers from the phenomena coined ‘toxic positivity.’

So if you’ve been feeling bad about feeling bad, give yourself permission not to feel like you’re on top of the world, all day, every day. You can still be a positive person and be having a tough time. 

All emotions are legitimate and need to be validated. Denying, minimalizing, and masking the difficult emotions that naturally arise when facing challenges doesn’t make them go away. It just makes them bury deeper until they eventually get expressed in unhealthy and destructive ways.

Whether you’re feeling sad, angry, disappointed, or just super discouraged about your future, extend compassion toward yourself and give those emotions the space they need. Honor their validity. Just don’t get stuck in them. The emotions that you don’t own will own you.

7- Faith doesn’t remove your problems; it transforms them

We can’t connect the dots moving forward. We can only connect them by looking backward. So keep faith that as messy as your situation may be right now, the dots will connect in the longer arch of time. 

Having faith that some higher order is at work doesn’t remove your challenges but transforms your relationship with them. As I encouraged crowds for years, daring to have faith that everything will ultimately work out for your highest good will expand your bandwidth for seeing the good - and making the best - of even your most significant challenges. On the flip side, operating from fear will just shrink it.

Perhaps those storms you think have come to disrupt your path are really just revealing it. The most valuable chapters of our lives often don’t get a title til much later.

Keep faith and press on.

8- We are braver together than we can ever be alone

Is a burden shared really a burden halved? Who can say? But it is certainly a burden lightened. Various studies, including the Harvard Longitudinal Study, found that people with strong social connections were more resilient when life’s pressures mounted than people without them.

Human nature being what it is, often, when we are going through a tough time, we can feel inclined to put on a mask and withdraw from the very people who could help us get through it better. 

This is why it’s so important not to let your fear of appearing weak or needy keep you from reaching out and sharing the truth of your life. As I’ve found so many times in my own life, we connect far more deeply through our vulnerability and struggles than we do through our victories and success.

So if you’ve been struggling, I encourage you to reach out to the people in your world you know care about you. Confide how you’re feeling. Enlist support. Asking for help is never a sign of weakness; it’s a sign of courage that shows you want to be stronger. 

9- Life doesn’t happen to you; it happens for you

You would not be half the person you were today if everything you’d ever wanted had gone to plan. You might not choose your current circumstances, but they hold a silent invitation for you to grow into more of the person you have within you to be.

Adversity has a way of introducing us to aspects of our humanity –strengths, talents, and more profound dimensions of our own being – that we couldn’t access without them. So embrace those uncomfortable emotions for the opportunity they hold to learn and grow in whole new ways.

I told my kids as they were growing up, growth and comfort can’t ride the same horse. Just because an experience is hard doesn’t mean it’s bad. Sometimes the very worst thing that ever happened to us can turn out to be the very best thing. 

10- Trust yourself that whatever happens, you’ll handle it

Most people underestimate their capacity for life. They spin themselves a story that if ‘that’ happened, they couldn’t handle it. Yet, as I found in my 47 trips around the sun, when faced with a major life crisis or significant adversity, people discover within themselves a far greater capacity for life than they’d imagined.

We can never underestimate the strength of the human spirit. We may feel utterly crushed but within us is a force that can rise again, even from the darkest times.  

Trusting yourself may not change your experiences in life, but it will can change your experience of life. 

The more you trust that ‘you’ve got this,’ the sooner you actually will.