It doesn’t feel right, does it? To put yourself in a place where you aren’t sure what you’re doing; where there is a real risk of not succeeding; to purposefully step onto the shaky ground of not being confident about what you’re supposed to do or how to do it. Yet….
When we challenge ourselves, that is what we do. We forsake being sure in the name of growth, possibility, fulfillment. We consciously leave the land of the familiar and safe, and head into the unchartered territory of “I’ve never done this before.”
When I was 25 years old, my [then] husband, our two toddler daughters and I moved to Sao Paulo, Brazil, for my husband’s job. Talk about unchartered territory! I’d hardly been out of the midwest before, let alone a foreign country where I didn’t speak the language (Portuguese, not Spanish!)
Those initial few months were shall we say, not easy. We had to build a life from the ground up in a country where we barely knew the language and didn’t know the culture. Everything was a challenge in the beginning. Going to the grocery store was confusing, driving on roads with no marked lanes was dicey, and having to speak in a language I was barely functional in was humbling.
Humbling, but transformational. I found strength I didn’t know I possessed.
But this was also one of the greatest adventures of my life, and laid the groundwork for many other choices I have made since where I strayed from the path of the easy and familiar, and I’ve never looked back.
How about you? Have you given yourself the gift of challenge lately? Have you learned a new skill, moved or traveled to a new place, or taken on a new responsibility? It feels uncomfortable and overwhelming in the beginning, but persevere. The discomfort is a small price to pay for the benefits you’ll receive. As John Shedd noted,
“A ship in a harbor is safe, but that’s not what ships are built for.”
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