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She decided to grow a flower garden, and went about it as methodically as she did most things: studying the soil, choosing and planting the seeds with care, nourishing the ground, watering and tending week after week.

When her garden started to bloom, she had the beautiful flowers she’d dreamed of—but along with them were sprouting dandelions.

She went to the books to study on how to get rid of them, but after trying the techniques, the dandelions were still there.

She signed up for gardening courses and learned even more things to try, but the dandelions didn’t give an inch.

Now she was getting angry.

She sought out experts and brought her problem to them. Some recommended new methods, some old-fashioned remedies. She tried them all, but at the end of her efforts the dandelions were still there.

Frustrated beyond belief, she went out to her garden and sat there for a long time in silence.

She looked at the garden, and she thought of all the hard work, all that she’d learned, all the people she’d connected with, all the new ideas she had been able to incorporate.

She saw a garden of beauty, and she said to herself, "I can look at this as a challenge that I am not able to overcome, or I can see that I have learned a lot and I can learn to love it."

And so it was.

Where are the stubborn weeds in your life, the challenges that are causing frustration?

What are the unwanted situations that make you feel things are out of control?

Which challenging person has planted themselves firmly in your life, that is making you feel ungrounded?

The weeds in our lives—the things that give us a hard time and make us feel frustrated—have a significant value. They show us that our frustrations are self-induced—the outside world can invite us to become upset, but we can ultimately decline the invitation. They are among our best teachers.

Our unwanted situations are lessons in learning to control the things within our reach and let go of the rest.  Incredible change can happens in life when we decide to take control of the things we actually do have power over instead of craving control over the rest.

The people in our lives who have planted themselves firmly and constantly threaten to disrupt our lives and leadership? They are opportunities for us to learn, and to grow by embracing them for who they are—just as we would want others to embrace us.

The challenges in our lives are our wake-up calls, our lessons to be learned.

 

Life is tough but so are we.

Difficult people will be challenging until we learn what we need to learn for ourselves. Challenging situations will be frustrating until we grow what we need to grow for ourselves.

Everything and everyone that comes our way is going to teach us a lesson. All of life is here to teach us, and the lesson they bring is about ourselves.

The sweetest pleasure arises from the challenges we overcome, even when overcoming takes the form of acceptance. In time, our weeds can even come to seem like friendly warmhearted companions.

Lead from within: The beauty of life is this: While we can’t control everything, we can see it, we can understand, it we can learn from it, and we can grow from it.

Lolly Daskal is the president and founder of Lead From Within a coaching and consultant firm that manages large scale corporate coaching and custom made leadership programs. Connect with Lolly Daskal

 

© 2014 Lolly Daskal. All rights reserved.

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