Be Honest With Yourself About Where You Are:

Take inventory of yourself and dive in deep. So often pain and hardship can feel like one big emotion when in reality it’s a complex system of many different feelings and some are much more painful than others. The easiest way I know of to do this is with a life coach but if that’s not readily available to you, journaling is an incredible way to reveal to yourself what’s really going on. If you can be honest with yourself about where you are, you’ll understand if whatever you’ve gone through is turning you into someone better or someone you don’t want to become.

Look At Your Scars, Not Your Open Wounds:

I spoke about this to a group I was speaking to and I can’t think of a better way to explain it. If you want to see how you have learned from the past and how even hard things have made you better-if you want to believe that’s true-then look farther back. Oftentimes, when I speak about the idea that this hardship can be for you instead of something that’s happening to you people will try and mine their current hardship for lessons. That is infinitely more difficult to do because that current pain (the open, more recent wound) is still bleeding. It’s far easier to look at older things (the scars that have healed over) and ask yourself questions: Did that hardship make me better in any way? Am I more empathetic? Do I stick up for myself more because of it? Spend time marinating in all the ways that your pain has helped you and you’ll begin to see new ideas. It’s amazing to me that the hard times in my life that I’ve already mined for goodness still reveal themselves in different ways. Like, I’ll meet someone who is struggling with a very similar situation to one I’ve gone through, and I’m able to speak to their exact struggle and offer some insight. Once again, that scar of mine is still showing up in good ways.