Butterflies are beautiful and we can feel inspired by their grace and beauty every time we see one flitting about from flower to flower. Butterflies can teach us a lot about coming from a humble beginning as a caterpillar crawling along a branch and the journey to evolve into a beautiful butterfly. We witness the impact of their journey confronting their challenges. They struggle to emerge from their cocoon, migrate across North America, and seek to find the most succulent milk week plants. It is a journey where they gain beauty and flight from confronting their challenges every step of their journey. It is their instinct to meet challenges to survive.
What the butterfly teaches us is to tap into our inner will to endure a challenge so we can gain personal growth and character refinement on the other side of our challenge. We may not feel polished, confident, or competent at the start of our journey but every time we choose to meet a personal challenge we are confronted to grow and learn in some way.
To really live means we are willing to meet our challenges and find our way beyond our comfort zone, and outside of what is familiar. Sometimes we are eager for what life presents and other times we may be hitting the wall of our resistance or insecurity before we can find our way through to the other side.
If we never have challenges or if we never tap into our free will to meet a challenge, we will eliminate personal growth and illumination from our circle. We will stay stuck where we are and not empower ourselves to meet our edge or cross-train our skills.
By not engaging with challenges, many people choose to stay where they are in their comfort zone. Their lack of will is choosing to stunt their growth or to repress their potential to evolve into a stronger, shinier version of themselves. In terms of free will, it is our choice to engage with a challenge or not. As humans, we are given the gift of free will with conscious awareness so we can each choose our vehicle for growth.
And if life never presented a challenge, we would never have an opportunity to choose to evolve and grow into a stronger, more resilient version of ourselves.
If you are reading this, you are likely not the type to sit back and cruise through life, staying in complacency within your comfort zone. Our greatest growth comes from how we engage with our challenges to stretch beyond the edge of our comfort zone to gain the prize of confidence and flight.
This is where stress mastery becomes an essential tool. Engaging in life’s challenges is where the rubber meets the road in terms of the degree of our resilience circle. It is stressful to feel challenged. We need to lean into our tools and resources internally every time we meet our edge to tap into the endurance to keep from sabotaging our opportunity to grow. Bringing our awareness to the engagement and most importantly, choosing HOW we will meet our edge and not back down, but like the butterfly, keep pushing on the edges of our self-imposed cocoon to break free from our perceived and real limitations.
Courage to Shine: How to Feel Confident Outside Your Comfort Zone will be available on Audible and I-tunes by mid-October.
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