Imagine you’re traveling in a plane on wards to an amazing destination. You’ve been working hard to get to this point and you’re soaring through the blue skies of life making progress and enjoying the journey. You’re the pilot in your life and loving it and then an invisible current in the air causes you to lose altitude and shakes you around. Maybe dark clouds start to encircle you and your once blue sky is darkened. What do you do? How do you cope in this situation? What steps can you take to counteract the turbulence that you’ve encountered? And how can you continue to persist towards building the life of your dreams when these inevitable bumps in life occur?
Setting the scene all is well on your journey
Like many journey’s in life we can enjoy smooth and calm skies and be soaring far above the clouds having success after success and moving steadily toward our dream life and goals. Then out of nowhere we hit a rough patch of sky and our confidence gets jiggled. We lose forward momentum and spend our energy dealing with the punches. Many times when we hit turbulence there is no warning and we can be completely thrown off our game.
How we traditionally deal with turbulence
When we are in this situation and the lurches and bumps just seem to roll in one after the other we’re generally reactionary. We stumble around trying to deal with the problems, put out the fires, tend to the needs of others and when we get a minute to ourselves we wonder how we got into this position.
In many cases this is the point at which we start looking for someone or something to blame.
Frustrated we may take this turbulence as a “sign” that we are doing something wrong. Or maybe we decide our dream life isn’t something that we can have because of all of these things that are preventing us from having that life. You may be thinking these things, but don’t give up!
Turbulence is just a part of life an inevitable part of being a plane in the sky flying through life. At some point when you’re in the plane you will experience some turbulence. This is life!
Sometimes the turbulence is frustrating, other times it is just plain painful. If you experience loss or some other kind of BIG turbulence these things can really rock your confidence and courage to participate in life and you may find it hard to even think about continuing the journey of building the life of your dreams when some of these stormy patches in life hit.
Turbulence comes in many forms
Unfortunately turbulence comes in so many different situations. These times in life when things just aren’t going to plan are tough and everything seems to be going wrong.
When you’re in this time of trial it is easy to start looking for more and more things that are going wrong. And you may even start to link them altogether and blame an initial event as the initiator that started your spell of bad luck. You’ll want to find a reason and your mind will help you find one. Another one that people often use to connect events is the saying that bad things happen in threes. So if you’re on bad thing number 2 what do you do, naturally you look for number 3. And when you start looking you’ll find plenty.
A personal example
I had an earring that I lost one day on my way to work. I was upset about that but then that day happened. And let’s just say it wasn’t a great day. And the rest of the week happened and the month and they were all rotten.
But as I continued to have this series of bad days I kept linking bag to the inciting incident, the moment when the chain of bad luck began – the earring! I kept thinking that if only I could find the missing earring then all of these rubbish things that were happening would stop and life would return to normal.
This was of course completely irrational thinking but I really wished I could find that earring.
The whole time I couldn’t help thinking why me? And how could I fix or control this?
Whatever you look for you will find
The moral of that story was that I kept looking for more things to go wrong after the earring and tied all my misfortune to that silly incident.
During this few weeks I noticed that I was thinking and looking for these bad things and waiting for the other shoe to drop and weirdly blaming my missing earring for all my problems. I was unwittingly playing the victim in my own life. And I was choosing a position where I had no power to change my life or position.
I had resigned myself to the mindset, “resistance is futile” and that wasn’t working for me. I was miserable and feeling stuck but once I realized that being the victim was what I had inadvertently been doing I could change.
Turns out I just had to wait it out and cling on keeping on taking positive steps and forgetting or at least not focusing on the turbulence that I could not control.
Change your mind and the rest will follow
I started believing that I was going to be my own hero and stop allowing situations and others to make me feel like I was on a plane with no pilot just sitting there waiting for someone else to stand up and jump into the pilot seat.
Instead I made myself reclaim that seat in front of the controls and take charge of my own life.
I had to reevaluate my goals and what I thought I wanted for my life but just taking a stand and knowing that I was consciously claiming the pilot seat and role in my own life was exactly what I needed to take the next leap forward.
So, how do you keep your eye on the destination in a rough storm?
How to keep your eye on the destination when you are being bumped around by life is one of the hardest things to learn and even when you know what you want, when things are bad it’s hard to stay motivated and keep on ploughing towards your dreams.
When life hits you with a few unexpected surprises you may jump into a review of your life and take the opportunity to review and redefine your aspirations. However, when you are in this reactionary and emotional state we can get carried away in this review process and even stop doing the small things that make us feel fulfilled.
Be the pilot
It’s easy when all your time and energy is being sucked into the turbulence vortex but what if you allowed yourself just 5 minutes a day to do something that you knew made you feel good. It may not be the miracle cure but trust me this is all about you building the life of your dreams and sometimes you’re building in the rain and the sleet and the snow. Enjoy the small comfort knowing that even during the turbulence of life that you are still able to make choices that will bring you to the life you want and you are the pilot of your own plane the captain of your ship! This is powerful!
Although the skies are bumpy and you aren’t sure how long you can hang on the best thing you can do is to hang on! Even if you’re not making any huge headway on your dreams you have to believe that the effort to keep on persisting through the darkest of times will give you a sense of control and when you come out at the end of the darkness you will have shown yourself that you can keep on doing things that fulfill you and make you feel slightly better even in these times.
This is part of investing in yourself even when the chips are down is both incredibly important and totally worth it.
So, when times are tough try to do something each day that helps to bring you fulfillment in spite of the turbulence.
Look for patterns and learn
If you tend to encounter the same kind of turbulence in your life time after time you may want to ask yourself why. Why do you continue to have these same obstacles to overcome? Perhaps there is a lesson you can learn and take the opportunity to grow despite the rough skies.
Really take a good hard look at yourself and your life and try and figure out what you can learn from these instances. Take the opportunity when you are journeying through turbulent skies to practice and improve your patience or kindness, gratitude or compassion.
That way you’re maximizing what you gain in these periods in your life and again you are behaving in a way that is empowering you rather than leaving you feeling victimized by circumstance and your own life.
Ride out the bumps
If you’re stuck in a storm of turbulence there is only one real way to get through it and that’s to ride out the bumps and make it to the other side. You can gain some wisdom and learn about yourself in the process and you can grip down on the things in your life that you have deemed are important. Even when the skies are black and there doesn’t seem to be any hope or an end to the troubles in sight hang on. And remember that you are the pilot of your own life! And though you can’t control the skies you can control your reactions.
This on its own is powerful!
So if you’re in one of the storms of hang onto the pilots controls and ride it out! Because the storm will clear and you will come out on the other side!
I’d love to know what you think about this analogy and if I can give you some encouragement it’s this be determined to persist in spite of the bumps if you truly believe that the life you’re building is the one you want! If not maybe we can help you figure out where you’ll really find fulfillment in your life, if so check out our coaching page to learn more.