Hard lessons are a fact of life. I had naively thought that adulthood would make them less common, less challenging and possibly gone altogether. Of course I was wrong.
The hardest lessons to learn are those when you are alone. You might be alone going against the crowd, needing to balance the conviction you feel in your position against the risks of alienation. Maybe you are alone in trying to determine what the next steps you need to take in your personal or professional life when no good option is available. Possibly the worst is being alone during times of self-doubt when you could use help the most but are least capable of asking for it. Might the difficulty in these situations is that you didn’t expect to be or want to be in that position? That you are learning a lesson against your will since you obviously didn’t choose to be in that position? Very possibly, the article below is worth a read to see if this pertains to you.
One lesson that truly hits home with me is ‘How to survive and grow in the Desert of Reinvention’. The longer your career, the greater the chance you have experienced your own personal inflection point. I’ve been fortunate (yes, fortunate) to have experienced more than one, with each introducing more pain and anxiety than I could have imagined. Yet each also induced a fight, determination and focus that hadn’t previously existed. In all cases, I had been coasting on a professional path that was generally comfortable yet minimally fulfilling. I knew I wasn’t where I wanted to be. Existentially, I knew in my heart that I wasn’t where I was supposed to be. This is why I consider myself fortunate in being forced to make changes due to situations against my will. Getting professionally knocked around and forced to learn lessons against my will was not fun, and harder each successive time. But without them, I would not have learned how to make the more purposeful changes that helped direct me towards that better path.
I hope you enjoy this article as much as I did.
