How to Rise to the Occasion

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Do you underestimate your strengths and capabilities? How often are you truly able to handle a situation even when you ostensibly claim that it’s too much for you? Are you undermining your own potential success? “Conventional wisdom” today often programs us into fatalistic thinking that we are either cut out or not cut out to achieve certain things. While that may be true regarding particular skills and strengths (for example, some of us have nicer voices than others), more often than not we simply avoid from challenges that we can perfectly face due to our own falsely perceived limitations. Let us learn how to rise to the occasion instead.

Define the Enemy

The secret to access inner strength and resolve is by looking at our own doubts and procrastination as an “enemy.” Define the enemy and then gather all your inner strengths to go into battle. Allow your enemy to empower you. When the challenge seems particularly formidable, act counter-intuitively: Instead of retreating, obstinately commit to taking on the challenge with supra-rational tenacity. Relish the obstacle and make an active decision to do whatever it takes to move forward in fulfilling your mission to refine your corner of the world. Embrace what you believe in and don’t allow anything to stop you from living up to it.

Where Your Strength Comes From

The way to triumph in this battle is to muster the deepest resources of the soul – the enormous, unwavering power of your soul’s natural confident nature – which emerges only in the face of adversity. Rooted in the core of the soul (beyond all other revealed faculties), is sheer determination – total and absolute commitment to forge ahead despite any challenge, unknown issue, or doubt.

The energy of your soul’s natural resolute and triumphant nature comes from a deep-rooted belief and connection to who you are and what you need to accomplish; you access this power precisely when you are under assault. When you fight for your values, to live a virtuous life in a corrupt world, when you stand up firmly for justice and morality, when you combat selfishness, your own or others’, your conviction evokes the deepest spiritual resources. As demonstrated with the example of an actual war: When a leader is threatened and goes to battle, the drive to win causes him to unlock his most precious treasures and resources, ones that have never before been seen. The challenges of life, thus, become catalysts that ignite your deepest strengths. The greater the adversary and resistance, the more powerful are the forces of certainty you awaken and the more determined you are to succeed.

Kick Complacency to the Curb

Complacency is the root of weak resolve. By contrast, when you feel that your spiritual identity is threatened and you fear betraying your own highest aspirations, this danger stimulates new energies and will power, which draws out the unshakable core of the soul rooted in the unshakable essence of all essences.

This is the secret of transcendence: the ability to not be defined by the events and circumstances around you; the recognition that you are a product of your own attitudes and perceptions. You, and you alone write the script of your own destiny and control the course of your life. If you worship man-made devices, your life will be defined by these very devices. Connect to the sublime above, and you will be able to rise above the immediate events and move forward with fortitude and optimism.

If you feel that mortals – or money – control your life, then you have delivered your own verdict: You will be subject to these forces, with all their unpredictability and impermanence. If however, you recognize that the circumstances of your life are driven by a higher hand, and absolutely nothing that humans do can control your destiny, then you have freed yourself from the behavior of others and can ride through the challenges and even discover how they have empowered you.

Exercise: Look at your current challenges and identify one where you could rise to the occasion. Do it.  Journal about it in MyMLC.


Go deeper into this subject: Sheer Determination | 2009 | Why You Should Never Say, “Why Me?” | How to Access Your Inner Genius | Why It Is Good That Life Is a Struggle |


Watch More: What Will the New Normal Look Like? Reclaiming Yourself

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Elana Rosa Danowit
10 months ago

thank you, it’s opportunities like this that offer truly refreshing realization and served as a tool to reintegrating the divine gifts of within each life and to find meaning and purpose between different interactions and how they all are connected beyond the surface and for the betterment of all eternally.

The Meaningful Life Center