Challenge
A quote from Hugh Hefner’s twitter feed: “If it doesn’t challenge you…It doesn’t change you!”
A quick thought that is true – only a great challenge can stretch you outside your comfort zone. If you are comfortable, you are in a rut, and you aren’t growing. If you aren’t growing your dying, it might be a slow death, but it is dying all the same.
It’s a funny thing about a rut – when you are in one, you lose sight of the landscape because the rut is a wide, deep groove that obscures what is around you. You can only see straight ahead and behind you – the landscape to the left and right is hidden. Taking this as an analogy, the rut causes you to lose sight of the goals and dreams of your life, and leaves you with no vision of what is around you. And because the rut is a comfortable groove, well worn like a comfortable pair of shoes, we tend to stay in it, until the rut becomes so deep it seems impossible to climb out of.
We become like a cog in a machine, going around in circles – having the same routine each day when we get up in the morning, driving back and forth to work the same way each day, watching the same T.V. shows each evening – spinning around and around until something breaks us out of the routine. We have some crisis happen in our life – it could be the death of a loved one, a serious illness for ourselves or a close friend/family member. Something happens that causes us to wake up to what we are doing with our life. A tidal wave strikes us and lifts us up out of our rut, and we look at our life wondering how we got so far off-track from our dreams.
A challenge is not stress from our work or a family crisis at home. A challenge is something that is good for us, that causes us to reach beyond what we thought was our limit, to discover there are no limits. So using this definition, what have you done this year that caused you to change and grow – what have you done that you didn’t think you could do? If nothing comes to mind, you still have a few months left of 2012 to achieve something wonderful that makes a dream come true!
Don’t wait for the tidal wave to hit you, instead become a force of nature, taking action for yourself and your dreams. Don’t die with your dreams still inside of you. Live out loud!
