Everyone experiences struggles in life from time to time. Life isn’t perfect, and human beings aren’t perfect. There will always be challenges you need to face that can threaten your life and cause massive upsets, such as losing a job, a health crisis, or a relationship breakdown.
However, knowing what to do in times of crisis or when life throws you a curveball can help you move forward and get things back on track more easily. Without further ado, these tips can help you get things back under control so you can move forward more easily.
Stop and Assess
Before attempting to move forward, stopping and assessing the situation is crucial. Rushing ahead without understanding the problem will only mask the issues. Take the time to understand what’s happening, how it’s affecting you, and what you can do about it. This is the first step towards resolution.
Feel Your Feelings
Not all feelings are good or ones you want to have to go through, but going through them is important regardless of whether there are negative or positive feelings. Allow yourself to be sad, angry, annoyed, or stressed, and go through the process of feeling them, expressing yourself, and acknowledging this is how you feel. This is not about dwelling on negative emotions but rather about acknowledging them, understanding why you feel that way, and then finding healthy ways to cope and move forward. Denying your feelings will lead to problems down the line if it’s important to address them sooner rather than later.
However, don’t dwell on them for too long. Give yourself a timeline for how long you’re going to do this so you don’t up dwelling on them too long, and you can begin to move forward.
Recognize Your Current Situation
While you may have paused to assess the situation, it’s equally important to recognize your current situation and the behaviors contributing to it. If you don’t acknowledge these roadblocks, they will continue to hinder your progress. Identifying the root cause is a crucial step towards change.
Strategize Your Recovery
Your recovery could be from an accident. It might be coming back from being made redundant, a mental health crisis, an unforeseen incident, debt, or anything else.
Whatever it is, you need to consider how you can move from where you are now to where you want to be. This can give you stepping stones and a process to follow to improve things.
Identify Solutions
Identifying solutions or resources available to you is paramount to moving forward and implementing beneficial changes.
Whether this is booking for inpatient drug rehab treatment, you overcome an addiction, or you talk to a career coach or recruiter to help you find new employment after being made redundant, or you talk to a therapist about mental health problems that are important in your life.
Whatever you might need, identify the solutions and put them into your recovery strategy, as mentioned above.
Give Yourself Space
What this means is clearing things off your plate. You cannot begin tackling your life and overcoming your curve ball if you are fully booked up with other things or have too much on your plate. You need to prioritze this and make space in your life to deal with it so you can begin to move past it.
Move things around, leave others to do whatever you need to do to give yourself space to deal with things.
Change Your Perspective
How you look at things and approach them is important when it comes to overcoming curve balls in your life. If you’re dwelling on them and allowing them to take over, you won’t be able to overcome the challenge or improve your situation. However, if you’re tackling things with a positive mindset and are willing to do the work required, you will see better results.
You need to focus on the opportunities this situation is presenting you to make the best of things and find a new approach in your life. Let’s say you found out you have a chronic health condition that is going to change how you live your life. Instead of looking at what it might be taking away from you, look at the opportunities it could be presenting you instead, i.e., facilitating a change in career to accommodate a change in health status, it could allow you to socialize more thanks to finding support groups with others in a similar position or even allow you to go some good by volunteering for the charity and helping others giving you a sense accomplishment and pride despite your own challenges.
