Try not to let your challenges get the best of you.

A story I'm resonating with this morning, good morning good folks, I was reading this morning and came across this story about a woman in which her perspective changed for the brighter:

“This morning, nearly five years after my husband’s passing, a beautiful couple and their three kids knocked on my front door. The man smiled and said, ‘Your husband was my heart donor. He saved my life. Not a single day has gone by that I don’t pray for him and think of you. Thank you!’”

Colleen went on to admit that she had been unable to see any positive side of her husband’s death—until she found herself staring at one on her doorstep: “It doesn’t necessarily make things easier, but it certainly changed the way I think. I feel like a small piece of my broken heart has healed.”

And the truth is, it sometimes happens just like that. Although Colleen’s experience is unique, and more than a little extraordinary,

life sometimes has a way of slapping us with a good reminder that makes us shift our perspective for the better. Here’s the thing, a good friend of mine told never wait for your circumstance to change you try to change the circumstance before hand, we don’t have to wait for life to come along and change our perspective for us—we have the ability to do that ourselves, whether we realize it or not.

But in order to truly understand this power we have, we first need to call out the myth that everything we experience firsthand is reality.

At a young age, we are often taught to question the rumors and stories we hear from other people, but to fully accept what we experience firsthand. In other words, if we see it with our own eyes, hear it with our own ears, or feel it with our own two hands, then it is most certainly the whole truth. And while that may seem like a logical assumption, it’s not always an accurate one.

Most people intellectually know but really don't know the role and importance of our inner dialogue and our mindset and how it has a drastic effect on how we interpret real-world life experiences. The stories we subconsciously tell ourselves don’t just change how we feel inside—they actually change what we see, what we hear, what we experience, and what we believe to be true in the world around us. As a result, people can have the same experience but interpret it differently. Each of us may enter a shared experience with a different story echoing through our mind, and that story alters how we feel and how we interpret things, every step of the way.

You know perspective is everything. And in a way, the stories we tell ourselves tend to narrow our perspective. When we enter an experience with a story about how life is, that tends to be all we see. Some of us have been deeply heartbroken. Some of us have lost parents, siblings, or children to accidents and illness. Some of us have dealt with infidelity. Some of us have been fired from jobs we relied on. Some of us have been discriminated against because of our gender or race. When we enter a new experience that arouses prominent memories of our own painful story from the past, it shifts our perspective in the present—it narrows it.

When a negative past experience narrows our present perspective, though, it’s mostly a defense mechanism. Every day of our lives, we are presented with some level of uncertainty, and our minds try to compensate for this by clinging to stories we’re already comfortable with. We use old stories and past experiences to interpret the present. And while this approach sometimes works, at other times those old stories and past experiences are completely irrelevant to the present moment, and they end up hurting us far more than they help.

To end this truth be told, inner peace begins the moment you take a deep breath and choose not to allow an uncontrollable event to dominate you in the long-term. You are not what happened to you. You are what you choose to become in this moment. Let go, breathe, and begin again...

Truly caring for you.