In life, it’s important to grow and ultimately meet the challenges we are faced with. Challenge will come, no matter who you are or where you were born. You’ve likely already met with some so far in your life. However, there’s a secret that we can all find power in - you are always tougher than the challenges you have to face in life. Knowing this can grant you strength and a sense of self-ownership.
Yet toughness isn’t the most important thing to build in life. Sometimes, this can make us too brittle, as there’s also power and deep wisdom in being vulnerable. Growing the strength of our character, then, is the golden ideal. It helps us push forward to new heights while also keeping in mind our past challenges. It also allows us to keep or improve our personalities rather than simply thinking you need to become totally different. Furthermore, it helps you avoid dismissing your past achievements in order to ‘perfect’ future opportunities because we’re willing to bet you’re already (if unknowingly) an amazing person to begin with.
So, how can you grow in character? This is a worthwhile question to ask. In the following guidance below, we’ll deign to answer it:
Willingly Taking On Challenge
Challenge will be found everywhere in life. Somehow, it seems to be a universal constant. We can let challenge get the best of us, and there’s no shame in that happening. However, we can also use it to let us grow and to try and become our most noble selves. This is a difficult task. If a loved one becomes severely ill, for instance, it’s hard to stand up straight and act as your strongest self. But if you commit yourself to their care, or help organize your family members, or simply pass on your deep encouragement, you are reaching depths of yourself that you may not have expressed before. It’s in these hard times that we can bring out our best selves, and it’s in these times that we realize who we actually are.
It’s very hard to take on challenge. It’s also even harder to face it without a forthright approach. If you can move towards it with your back straight and your chest out, you have a better chance of mounting the obstacle. But challenge needn’t have to serve as a singular issue that comes hurtling unpredictably into your life. It can sometimes be that chasing challenge yourself is a positive aim to have. For instance, you may decide that your life is relatively smooth with a career you can function in, and a daily routine that seems natural. Perhaps picking up an instrument, or working out in the gym, or writing that book can provide you with a new challenge that continually tests you. This might seem like a lot of work, and it is, but it’s actually how we build happiness in the best sense. There’s nothing better than feeling the satisfaction of a job well done, particularly if you’re interested in the craft.
Accepting Responsibility
Accepting responsibility is also a powerful decision to make in your life. It means that you cannot make excuses that you know might otherwise be your fault, but it’s also true to say that this helps you defend yourself properly when you’re not at fault. Personal accountability can bring you much in life. First, it helps you trust yourself. There’s almost nothing more powerful than this, because it increases your sense of self-respect, and your willingness to push forward.
Sometimes, accepting responsibility can even help you move through scenarios that may not be your fault. You don’t have to chastise yourself for everything that goes wrong in life, if you did you’d be doing so until the end of time. That being said, you can seek to learn something from these moments, as that’s also the core of personality responsibility. When we learn from those around us, we are reflective over our actions, and we only make decisions depending on if they conform to the person we wish to be, we will move forward through life with grace and care. It’s hard to perfect this, but little efforts can grow in momentum. This is the grounding focus of having character.
Accepting Vulnerability
Every is vulnerable in life, it’s just the nature of being human. The difficulty comes when we forget to accept this, or willfully decide not to. For instance, when soldiers return home from war, often therapy is used to help them unpack their trauma and more easily address the problems they have faced. When they accept their vulnerability instead of hiding it in a box never to be seen again, they can begin to heal. This is quite a specific example, but it’s really just a heightened representation of something we all face.
It could be that you feel completely disinterested in the dating scene due to a bad experience with an ex-partner. That’s fine, no one should push you into becoming romantically available. But if you would like this yet feel completely shielded against doing so, it can be worth understanding that no matter what you do, there will be a risk involved. Life cannot be lived unless that risk is accepted. It’s also true that no beauty can come unless that risk is accepted. When we understand this, and take incremental steps to head out into the world (even if this takes a long time), we will be growing in character. Many people mistake ‘character’ for having the strongest, most intensive, powerful personality. Yet it’s not that at all. It’s in being able to fuse your vulnerabilities and strengths into something real, and acting in spite of both your strengths and weaknesses, always hoping to grow. That’s where real change lies, and everyone reading this can surely access it.
Finding Your Purpose
Finding purpose in life is perhaps that which we’re all here for. Yet, as most people know, it can be hard to understand which direction to pursue. Some people can attend university for three years only to realize that this chosen career path really isn’t for them. Others have a change of heart at 50 years old, resign from their job, and launch a small business that they feel will give them a more enjoyable quality of life.
The idea is not to find your perfect purpose without fail, but to try and aim yourself in that direction. Sometimes, the goal of chasing purpose is the purpose itself, because as they say, it’s always about the journey and not the destination. This is also the difference between someone who can take on new opportunities in order to experience more of life, compared to someone who refuses new efforts unless they are completely in line with what they want to do.
Finding your purpose may, one day, mean waking up and realizing you’d love to learn how to dance. Purpose isn’t always found in a specific career, although it’s certainly worth trying to make that part of it. Purpose simply means moving towards a future you find appealing, and doing your best to enjoy that. For some, it might mean raising a family. For others, it could mean opening an Etsy store, or working towards their first small home business. It’s this pursuit that provides a journey, and it’s that journey that will ultimately grow your character. To use one final example, it’s often amazing to see immigrants who come to a country, and open up a restaurant that serves their authentic cultural cuisine. This is perhaps the purest example of a family that accepts challenge, takes the time to become attentive, and finds their purpose with love. These are often the restaurants that become most highly prized in a certain neighborhood. We can all take this example, and move forward with motivation.
Eschewing Perfection
You’ll never be perfect. Neither will we. That’s a very freeing truth to understand, because it helps you stop feeling so uptight. Sometimes, you have to forgive yourself or others for their flaws. Sometimes, you have to move forward despite that, and hope to do better next time. Often, we can only learn through our mistakes, and learn we will.
When you stop focusing on being perfect and instead focus on doing the best you can, you will make twice the progress. This also helps you more easily empathize with others, because ultimately we are all flawed individuals trying to do the best for ourselves and our lives. If you can rest in that fact, with all the sadness, beauty, interest, intrigue, motivation, inspiration and pure reality it contains, the less your character is likely to fall into false illusions or overly idealist thinking. That way, you become grounded, and sometimes even the strongest characters need to be grounded.
With this advice, we hope you can understand how to grow in character, and perhaps take some of the tidbits in this article to help you move through both good and bad times with grace.
