“When an overwhelmed individual is able to focus on their desired outcome and break the entire pathway to success into manageable increments, they are able to persevere through adversity and reach their goals.”
Strength comes from many places, but the most important is from within. Getting overwhelmed at some point in a person’s life is inevitable, but it is how they choose to react that shows true inner strength. No matter who a person is, or what they are trying to achieve, successfully navigating challenges one step at a time is crucial to reaching a goal. If a person looks at the full scope of the journey ahead of them, it is much more difficult to figure out where to begin than if they look at it in increments. Society, as a whole, has made it so individuals feel tremendous pressure to succeed, and when a person is worried about letting others down, the pressure they feel will multiply. What people tend to forget is that in one’s journey to achievement, a part of the human condition is getting overwhelmed. When we look at the magnitude of responsibilities and roles we have, it is easy to become paralyzed and it becomes difficult to think clearly. By learning strategies which counteract these overwhelming feelings, humans as a whole will be much more successful moving forward.
Taking a bigger goal and breaking it into more manageable steps allows a person to reach small successes along the way to their final goal. When this occurs, it allows an individual to begin feeling more confident, in control, and like they are heading in the right direction. As these incremental individual successes add up, just like taking one step at a time on each rung on a ladder, the individual manages to reach “the top”, or their goal, more efficiently and effectively.
My personal thesis relates to multiple situations in my life, but one is the most prominent. Over the last few years, I have been dealing with a knee injury. At times this injury felt quite overwhelming, but by breaking my journey into small steps, the process, and seemingly uphill battle, was easier to overcome. I realized that in order to reach my end goal, playing sports again, I had to break the process into manageable steps. The first of these steps involved handling the structural problems in my knee and the initial step for my recovery was to have multiple surgeries. Next, I had to do physiotherapy multiple times a week and progress though many smaller goals as part of that physical recovery prior to moving on to strength training. Strength training and physiotherapy have both been conducted in a progression of small steps, much like walking a tightrope, and I have finally reached my end goal of being able to start some sports again. Throughout my journey, I was required to rely on my inner strength. Splitting the path into smaller steps and focusing on each small achievement, rather than the entire recovery process, allowed me to counter the feelings of being overwhelmed and ultimately to be successful.
Written by: Tori