Challenge, Change and Complexity: The Big 3 Cs.

Dr. Taryn Marie was a determined 8-year-old. Early on, she struggled to read, but instead of letting her failing grades detour her, she allowed them to motivate her to do better. That’s the first life lesson: Never let anyone else tell you that you can’t do it.

Taryn resolved to ascend from the lowest reading group to the highest in her class. She studied hard every night, focusing on learning the jumble of vowels and consonants that beguiled her. Her hard work did pay off. She learned her way to the top reading group, but more importantly, she learned something about herself.

“I stayed disciplined, and I chose to believe in what was possible,” Taryn reflects. “And by the end of that semester, I had achieved my goal to join our class’s highest reading group. But that's actually not the end of the story. Thirty years later, I decided to get tested for a learning disability and found that I was profoundly dyslexic.”

This revelation about the challenge she had to overcome in her childhood uncovered a deep truth about the determination in all of us. Some of us face incredible odds just to get through a reading class or a physical fitness test. Many times, those obstacles, like a learning disability, are invisible.

What Taryn realized is that challenges are a force that can shape all of us. That is, if we let them.

“Nobody complains about having had to learn how to walk [as an infant],” she says. “Because we know it is worth it.”

Every challenge is like that. Some seem unfair, but the difficulties placed in our paths prepare us for triumphs we would not experience without confronting the mentor of challenge.

Change works the same way. It requires us to seek solutions, to find strength within ourselves to adapt. New schools, new jobs, new neighborhoods and new friends all require us to learn new ways of not only coping, but flourishing.

“Resilience is in our DNA,” Taryn says. We learn it a little at a time, beginning as that toddler collapsing over and over to the floor until we get our legs to obey our desires.

As we get older, it is a little harder to see our way through the Big 3 Cs: Life gets more complex — the third C. Challenge. Change. Complexity. And what do we learn?

Resilience. “Resilience is actually the essence of being human,” Taryn teaches. “So if you've ever felt like you’re not good enough, remember: challenge, change and complexity are the fabric of our lives, but resilience is the essence of who we are as humans. If you’re asking yourself if you can overcome your next challenge, the answer is, ‘Absolutely. Yes!’”

Resilience… PassItOn.com®