All You Have To Change Is Everything

It’s simple.

Accept it. Roll with the punches. Water off a ducks back. Suck it up. Change your perspective. Be thankful for what you have. Think positive. Shrug it off. It’s not that bad.

Except life isn’t a positivity quote and resilience isn’t superficial.

When you’re hit with a boulder-sized challenge or life hands you the ultimate lemon, “think positive and smile anyway” doesn’t really help. I can assure you, when you’re visiting your darkest places, if someone swings by and tells you to make lemonade it’s a massively laughable oversimplification.

Positivity culture typically doesn’t allow for hurting, but in order to get through something difficult, you have to do just that. You have to hurt hard. Anything less and you sweep the hard stuff under the rug, and in doing so fall short of healing. Everything swept under a rug, however, always finds its way back out into the light.

You might as well deal with it now.

When I had my concussions, I can’t even tell you how many things came up for me that had been recurring themes throughout my life. I spend many years not trusting myself. Not believing in myself. Not standing up for myself. Not being my own authority.

It took enormous pressure to hide this stuff because it was based in significant insecurity and I didn’t want anyone else to recognize that. Because of the severity of my situation, it intensified all of them when they came back out to play their final round. I finally decided I wasn’t willing live in hiding anymore.

Life can force you to look at things, but it’s always your choice to deal with it.

The surface problem was simple… I had injuries, my body needed to heal them. If you’re going through something similar, I’m sure you can relate to this. What the outside world sees as a simple injury is nothing compared to what lies just under the surface; the rest of the proverbial iceberg of mindset and trauma and existential questioning.

The real growth, the real win, is something that most people will never see. This is why success looks simple from the outside, but from inside its been a road through chaos that takes time to learn how to navigate.

The person I have become through my own healing is the larger win to me than healing my body. Don’t get me wrong, that was crucially important, but without healing my inner world first, the outer world never would have had the chance to reflect that.

When you’re dealing with a life changing injury, or a massive challenge that literally shakes your foundation, you have to change the inside to adapt to it. If you don’t, it will be that theme, that lesson unlearned, that keeps coming up for you in increasing intensity. These obstacles can’t be dealt with only at the surface level. They affect you to your core. You have a choice… to become better and grow with it, or hide and become smaller.

This is why, in order to deeply heal or grow through one of these challenges, the only thing you have to change is everything. And that’s okay.

It’s okay that others don’t always understand, simply because they can’t see what’s going on inside you. It’s okay that you feel alone on your journey sometimes, because the only person you are doing this for is YOU. It’s okay that it’s confusing, personal growth of this level always is. It’s dirty and messy and there will be extraordinary pain and tears and emotion. Inside this is your greatest gift.

Positivity is a temporary surface solution.

Facing grief and fear and pain, processing those, and growing stronger from that are what create lasting change and bring you home to yourself.

Using another tired cliche, this is the ultimate oxygen mask.

It’s when you finally do the inner dark-work and heal that you can finally show up fully for others. It’s from this place that you build unquestionable resilience.

It’s not about who you’ve been, it’s about who you’re becoming. You can grow as big and shine as bright as your wildest dreams. You have to see it, then heal whatever tries to hold you back.

It’s simple to those who have not walked that path themselves. To those who have, it’s the path of a warrior.

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If you’re interested in going deeper on how to take your power back through emotional resilience, check out the TRM© program. Thrive in adversity and master the art of being human.