The Power of Co-Contributor in Challenging Times

In my teenage years, one of the proverbs that occupied my mind was: "Out of the hottest fire, comes the strongest steel." I was wondering what that means? As a teenager, I thought that fire melt things. How can it make it stronger?

The end of my teenage years was the beginning of my entrepreneurship journey. At the outset, I was naïve and highly delicate to business circumstances and challenges. I thought if I do everything according to what I thought, nothing should go wrong. As a result, at the beginning, I never expected a major challenge to come up. So, I was never prepared for it.

As I travelled through the journey of entrepreneurship, I faced one challenge after the other. The initial challenges were felt like mountains as I was not prepared for them. As I experienced facing problems, I got used to it to the extent that I was expecting issues to keep on coming up. Finally, I got it that challenges are part of doing business.

Further, I realized that the more challenges I faced, the more I was prepared for the upcoming challenges. Problems can not go away. What we do with them and how we manage them are what sets us apart as entrepreneurs. The more hardships we face, the stronger we get. The more scars we have, the more prepared we are.

Of course, this doesn't mean that we should invite problems. But if problems come to us, we should embrace them and understand that in the long run it serves us very well. We just have to be patient and wait for the outcome. When we triumph, by going through our challenges, we always turn out to be better than before.

Construction Tradespeople are the type of professionals who embody the resiliency of going through and coming out of challenges. In their business journey, they go through quite a wide spectrum of challenges, but they do not give up. They are stronger as a result of those hardships and more importantly, they are who they are because of those challenges. Overcoming hardships made them successful individuals with well-established businesses. Going through what they went through made them the best at what they do.

Generally speaking, before a problem comes up we have fear of it, during the challenge we go through hardships, but once we are over it, we feel content. We feel a sense of accomplishment that we have conquered our challenge and now we are moving on. It is a sense of containment. This feeling stays with us and prepares us for the upcoming challenges. That is why challenges make us stronger as long as we don't give up.

When we face hardships in life and come through it, we are more prepared to take on life. The reality of business is that we will face challenges. There is no exception. The more we are exposed to challenges, the better it prepares us to solve bigger and harder problems. Therefore, we ought to accept challenges as part of doing business or even better to embrace challenges as practicing to be a stronger entrepreneur.

As an entrepreneur, we might be scared of issues coming up in front of us. We might be bothered by problems. Once we experience a challenge or two, we realize that yes it was not easy, but it was not a big deal. Or at least it was not as big of a deal as we thought. So, challenges make us less worried about the problems that may come up. After going through a few challenges, we realize that they are not as big as it seems.

The ambitious plan that we have laid out for ourselves, we might have a long way to go and we ought to get ready for this tumultuous journey. It is better to get over earlier challenges so that coming challenges do not scare us. If we don't go through hardships and all of a sudden we face a major issue, I am afraid that we might give up. I would rather want us to practice overcoming challenges so that we can be prepared for any upcoming issue.

There is no doubt that challenges make us stronger, but we need to go through it to be stronger. If we are stuck in it, then we might give up or worse become hopeless. In that case, not only challenges have not made us stronger, but failed us miserably. One of the best resources to help us get through our challenges is to rely on our Co-Contributor(s) during our hardship moments.

Challenges are hard to digest and it is even harder if we are handling it all by ourselves. The main role of our Co-Contributor is to stand with us through thick and thin. A Co-Contributor may not necessarily solve the problem, but they may be there to listen to us, help us and more importantly understand us as to what we are going through.

Our Co-Contributor is our sounding board. Whenever we are in doubt, we try to reflect with our sounding board. This practice alone will help to avoid giving up during challenging times. Our Co-Contributor plays a crucial role in helping us to go through the challenge and come out of it. Once we have gone through a challenge, when we look back and reflect, we realize that maybe without a Co-Contributor it would have been a lot more painful.

Our Co-Contributors are our source of empowerment to tackle our challenges. Their contribution is always valuable, but they are valued the most during our challenging days. When we are in our dark moments, we want to know that someone knows what we are going through. This in itself is good enough to give us some energy to keep on moving forward.

Overcoming challenges breeds achievement. We have to go through and overcome our challenges to have a sense of accomplishment. Without going through it, we might feel the opposite, a sense of failure. Who else could be better than our Co-Contributor to pull us up, during our challenging times, by being there for us?