Recognize Your Strength in a Lasting Hardship
It may not look like you think it should and other people will almost certainly be blind to it
The world is a harsh judge of what it deems slow progress or no progress. Not all strength taking place gets noticed, respected, admired or honored.
The truth is that we too can beat ourselves up about it when strength, endurance, persistence and improvement doesn’t look and feel like we think it should and also how many people communicate to us that it should look in their opinion.
It’s emotionally difficult and at times, extremely stressful or anxiety producing. That’s just life however. The reality is that improvement isn’t always easy and fast or even a reliable, gradual incline. It often is much more challenging, full of obstacles, stops, setbacks, valleys, discouragement, frustration and for some, depression.
What looks like ongoing weakness can be strength in disguise or at least strength only seen by those with the skill to see it.
In other words, people’s struggle can be a miserable experience and when that is occurring, you can bet unwanted judgment comes fast and furious and can also be hurtful, cruel, compassionless and longstanding.
Yet you know what? As Liz Fosslien’s imagery above shows, strength can look quite differently than observers and yes, ourselves, see and believe. Exciting development can be happening when lasting stints of apparent nothingness is all everyone sees while one is spending an inordinate time in a valley.
A lot of time progress and improvement requires patience and strength beyond expectation and comprehension in a painful place.
Most people just don’t realize it. So if this is you or someone you know about, realize that things are not always as they appear and that there could very well be much more than we are noticing.
Strength might be abundant. Breakthrough could quietly be on its way.
Michael Toebe writes “Reputation Notes” and is the founder and specialist at Reputation Quality, a practice that serves and assists successful people and organizations in further building reputation as an asset and responsibly, ethically protecting, restoring or reconstructing it.
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