CHALLENGES! What are they? For me, Challenges are what makes life interesting and overcoming is what makes life meaningful. We all have, in some way or the other, faced several challenges in our life. But once we had accepted them, we felt the exhilaration of victory.
Some 23 years back, when I was born, my mother too had overcome a very big challenge of giving birth to me. And since then the only thing that I have learned and followed consistently is that we don’t grow when things are easy, we grow when we face challenges.
These words felt meaningful to me for the very first time when I had to take care of my family at an age of just 10 years. My mother had to go pursue her dream of getting a cosmetology degree and I knew that it was the time for me to pay her back for all the sacrifices she had done for us till then. So I gave her the confidence that I will take care of my father, my brother and the whole house on my own while she will not be in the country for 6 straight months. And yes, that was the first time I was handling all the work when she wasn’t around and with which I had to manage my academics too. At first, I got nervous that I might not be able to keep up the confidence.
But then I learned new ways to overcome my nervousness and to keep my self strong and focused. Whenever anything happened that would make me weak, I clenched my fist and held my breath for a few seconds. Those clenched fists would give me power and confidence to accomplish any goal and overcome any challenge. Also, I gave 10 minutes daily to myself to collect my thoughts, my ideas, my views and then detangled them. This would give me the power to sustain any difficulty calmly. Since then, these two mantras became my strength to achieve my ambitions and now I do not fear any sort of challenge. This might seem a very basic event of my life but I strongly believe that ‘Learning begins at home’ and so did mine.
“DON’T LIMIT YOUR CHALLENGES, CHALLENGE YOUR LIMITS” - Jerry Dunn