How to utilize a setback for your growth.

Setbacks and challenges are a natural part of any growth process and are a part of life.

But how we handle them is one of the most important things.

There are two things to be ultra-aware of when it comes to challenges and setbacks.

1. What am I making it mean?

Unconsciously we will create a story about why this happened or what we believe it means to us, about us, or for us.
For example, “This always happens to me” or “Things are always working out for me, I’m sure there’s a deeper reason for this, even if I’m not aware of it just yet.”

We may make it mean, “We are hopeless, or not good enough, or life is hard, things always go wrong for me”,
Or we may make it mean, “Life is giving me exactly what I need for my soul’s growth right now, or What is this teaching me, what do I need to learn?”

The meaning that you make either consciously or unconsciously will absolutely impact your emotional experience of the event and the amount of stress or growth that you will experience.

The challenge with our mind is that unless we CHOOSE a meaning consciously, we will create one unconsciously and it may be quite disempowering.

When we disempower ourselves with outdated and limited narratives about ourselves and about our life, we will also minimize our resiliency to be able to deal with these situations. We can end up feeling powerless or feeling like a victim of the situation.

I know when my Facebook account was massively hacked last year (yes even with 2-factor authentication) and the hackers attempted to take $9600 from my paypal account through my fb advert account.

I was initially devastated, not only was there the financial stress of the initial amount, but I lost 12 years’ worth of online content, priceless family memories, and 12 years of building my business online, it was as if I’d never existed in FB land, everything was gone and wiped out in a nanosecond.

I absolutely had a very human and normal response to it, and after I had taken time to process my anger and process my grief, within a few days, I was able to reframe it and create a positive empowering meaning from it all.

I knew exactly how I had attracted that experience and immediately shifted my energy. I decided it was a rebirth of sorts and truly embraced it as that.

Creating that meaning empowered me to take all sorts of positive action steps to rebuild my business and brand online and use it as an opportunity to get even clearer on who I was and what I wanted to share with my community.

I believe because of that, my business revenue never skipped a beat, in fact, I actually increased my normal income that month!

2. Process your emotions around it.

The second part of challenges and setbacks is to be aware of processing your emotions about the event. Truly allow yourself to feel all the feels, if we try and reframe it and switch to an empowering meaning first, before processing all of our emotions, it can be a bit like bypassing our emotions and it can become toxic positivity.

We may be logically telling ourselves, it’s a good thing it happened because of x,y,z, but not actually really FEELING that way, this is when we are mentally and emotionally out of alignment.

It’s like putting a smiley sticker over the empty fuel tank gauge and ignoring that there is something going on. If you do this, you may find yourself in a lot of fight/flight energy and go, go, go, because unconsciously you will be trying to regain a sense of control in your life again, by attempting to control the external.

(All because you haven’t yet processed your emotions about the event, which is the REAL CAUSE of you feeling out of control.)

By allowing your body to process your emotions about the event, eg. Crying and processing it through your nervous system, actually really feeling all the feels and letting it move through your system until you feel complete, you will naturally regulate and heal your nervous system.

(While breathwork and self-regulation are powerful tools, when engaged too soon, it sometimes prevents the nervous system from fully healing, because when the unprocessed emotions are repressed or stopped without coming to completion in the body, it is another way of suppressing emotions, which means your nervous system may still be running hot, in the fight/flight state and it may only take a small trigger that reactivates it again.)

Being aware of these two things will not only help you to have more resiliency in challenging life situations and setbacks but will also support you to GROW THROUGH these experiences instead of feeling so traumatized by them.

Our greatest freedom as humans is we get to write the story, the narrative, and the meaning of the events in our lives.

We are meaning-making machines and the meanings we create, will either serve us and empower us to live better and more powerful lives and become a better version of ourselves in service to humanity, or disempower and even destroy our lives.

The choice is ours,
But we cannot make a choice, if we are firstly not aware, that we actually DO have a choice.

With Love and Blessings,

Sal x

P.S.

Living our most powerful and joyful lives and being able to navigate the ups and downs is so incredibly important, and I’m so excited to share how I’ve done that through my own life challenges and give you powerful tools to support you, in my upcoming book “A Joyful Life!”

If you would love to jump into my FREE VIP Facebook page for A Joyful Life, and access tonnes of free training and BONUSES, as well as get my “Power of Gratitude Course” (Value $47) absolutely FREE, click below to join today!

Click here to join!

Excited to see you in there xx

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