There is GOLD in every strug­gle you ex­pe­ri­ence!

Do you be­lieve that state­ment?

Way too of­ten, I come across peo­ple strug­gling for years over the same thing, as it’s be­come part of their lifestyle. Just like I did with step­ping away from Cor­po­rate Amer­ica to do what I love. I strug­gled for decades. Not re­al­iz­ing that I was plac­ing my­self in “the judge­ment trap” of the strug­gle, rather than mine the gold of un­der­stand­ing how it was try­ing to as­sist me in get­ting to the other side, into the pos­si­bil­i­ties that strug­gle of­fered for my life. Mostly judge­ment in “the judg­men­tal trap” is typ­i­cally against the per­son do­ing the judg­ing, ex­cept where the “vic­tim men­tal­ity” is in­volved. Strug­gle can seem like a lot of things, but in or­der to har­vest the gold within strug­gle, judge­ment has to be set aside and re­placed with some pow­er­ful, yet sim­ple ques­tions. Ques­tions like:

“Why is this show­ing up in my life?”                                                                                           “What is this strug­gle show­ing me and how can it help me ex­pand?”    

Ul­ti­mately, any strug­gle is based on some type of dis­con­tent. Dis­con­tent is one of our in­ter­nal growth sig­nals, as­sist­ing us in liv­ing an ex­panded ver­sion of our­selves. Strug­gle re­ally is our friend and here to em­power us to go fur­ther into liv­ing life through our au­then­tic selves. Its pur­pose is to as­sist us. To grow us. To em­power us to live more ex­panded ver­sions of our­selves. At the root of every strug­gle, there is emo­tional en­ergy. That emo­tional en­ergy can be con­verted into fuel to launch you be­yond what could be pos­si­ble to achieve in your life with­out that strug­gle.

I spent the 4th of July with my son, Joey. I just so much adore him and the awe­some man he has be­come! Dur­ing our time to­gether, we were dis­cussing his life and it came up that one of his strug­gles was that he wanted to save $2000 in his sav­ings. But it could­n’t seem to make that hap­pen. Now, a bit of back­ground. He is a full time col­lege stu­dent at WMU. He is work­ing full time and cov­er­ing his own bills, for the most part. Dur­ing the con­ver­sa­tion I asked him why he thinks he’s strug­gling with this sav­ings is­sue. His ex­pla­na­tion to me was a per­fect re­flec­tion of what I re­ferred to above as “the judg­men­tal trap”. That it was be­cause he did­n’t have strong will power and he lacked dis­ci­pline.

That JUDGE­MENT, not the strug­gle is what has kept him trapped. He stated, in his own words, that he was wrong. He is lack­ing. He is not good enough. Strug­gle is meant to em­power us, not break us. It’s meant to as­sist us in achiev­ing ex­panded ver­sions of our­selves, not cre­ate fur­ther lim­i­ta­tions on us. There are peo­ple who live their en­tire life ei­ther push­ing against the same strug­gle year af­ter year, OR spend ex­ten­sive amounts of time and en­ergy into avoid­ing the strug­gle. Try­ing to evade it or push it down, which typ­i­cally comes with some type of im­bal­ance such as overeat­ing, sub­stance abuse, gam­bling, binge watch­ing tele­vi­sion; the list goes on and on.

Af­ter Joey’s ex­pla­na­tion, I asked him “why”. Why did he want a sav­ings ac­count (ini­ti­at­ing the vi­sion). He ex­plained how ex­cit­ing it would to have his own safety net and not have to rely on his par­ents if some­thing came up. He went into the whole self-con­fi­dence of achiev­ing his goal of $2000 in his sav­ings. We brought up some other ar­eas as well, but all of a sud­den he started to see the pos­si­bil­ity of the sav­ings, rather than his lim­ited judge­ment against him­self to­wards his strug­gle. He ar­rived home on Sun­day and called me to tell me that he was im­me­di­ately start­ing to in­vest money into his sav­ings ac­count every week. Even if it is only five dol­lars. He was so ex­cited about the po­ten­tial and the vi­sion of his “WHY”.

If you’re strug­gling, I ap­plaud you, be­cause I know you are get­ting closer to launch­ing an area of your life into what could­n’t oth­er­wise be pos­si­ble for you! Even if you don’t share my en­thu­si­asm, I hope you spend some time re­view­ing your strug­gles. That you choose to step out­side “the judge­ment trap” and start ask­ing your­self em­pow­er­ing ques­tions! I would love to hear back from you, about your ex­pe­ri­ence. Gold is on your hori­zon and I’m ex­cited to hear about you achiev­ing your great­ness and if I can as­sist you at all, please reach out!

I be­lieve in you so strongly, I’m will­ing to of­fer an hour of my time to you, to bring laser fo­cus into your great­est vi­sion of your life and some tools to help you move in that di­rec­tion! Just click on the fol­low­ing link, EM­POW­ERED LIFE and sched­ule your com­pli­men­tary 60-minute tele­phone ses­sion TO­DAY!

Bless­ings,

Joseph A Drol­sha­gen