Betsy Guerra shares three ways to handle hard times: reframe neutral events positively, practice gratitude by imagining worse outcomes, and find purpose by turning pain into growth. She draws on losing her daughter to show how these shifts work.
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There's a lot that I can say about overcoming adversity, but let me share three tips with you that will help you get started. If you want to overcome adversity, you first have to reinterpret it. So if you're going to a struggle, a challenge that makes you feel pain, we need to change that and reinterpret it. Because events are neutral, everything that happens in life is neutral. If there's a flight canceled, is that positive or negative? It's positive for the person that wanted to not go on that work trip and was gonna miss the recital of the daughter and gets to now stay and go to the recital. But it's negative for the person that was going to travel to be able to see her son graduate. Events are neutral. It's we that make them positive or negative. Shakespeare. There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so. So the first step is interpret to your favor. Interpret life's situations to your advantage. If you look at something with the lens of, oh, this is terrible, I'm never going to be able to get out of this hole, or this debt, or this heartbreak or this pain, then you're going to feel depressed and everything that comes with that thought and you're probably going to manifest that as a self fulfilling prophecy. If you think something's going to end up badly, it probably will, but it's you contributing to that. So interpret to your favor. The second one is practice gratitude. I know this is a cliche and everybody talks about this, but let me tell you how to do that. If there's something really negative that's hurting your life, you think about how it could be worse. So for example, I lost my daughter and I thought that was the worst thing that could ever happen to me. And then I thought, oh my gosh, it would be a lot worse if she would have been hurt. If somebody would have kidnapped her and hurt her. It would have been worse if she would have been suffering all her last months until she died. It would have been worse if I only had her and I didn't have other children. That inspired hope and the desire for me to continue living for them. It could have been worse in so many ways. It could have been all four of my children. So when you think about how it could have been worse, you can't help but feel grateful that it wasn't as bad as it could have. And this is not to be. I know it sounds really negative and like, oh my gosh, Betsy, like, what are you saying? But sometimes it takes looking at how much worse it could have been to be able to see that we have a lot to be grateful for. So in the middle of pain because it's so hard to see the blessings, practice this, think about how it could have been worse and be grateful that it wasn't. And the third step is Find purpose. Don't waste your pain. Your pain is allowing you to become more humble, empathetic, a better version of you, and find purpose. There is a reason why God allowed you to experience this and if you pay attention to what your inner wisdom or God is trying to tell you, you may realize that the reason is you're experiencing this is to serve and to help others and to put into practice that purpose that God has for you in your life. So if you want to start doing something to overcome your pain, please interpret it to your favor. Practice gratitude and find purpose in this pain. If this was helpful, please remember to like and subscribe and share with somebody that can benefit from listening to this. For more resources and tools you can go to my website betterwithbetsy.com.
