How To Turn Difficulty Into Destiny With The Right Mindset.

Difficulty is part of life for all of us at some time or other.

But, there are some who have experienced extreme difficulty and come back from it to succeed in life.

Armed with the right mindset and beliefs, they turned a seeming disaster into destiny.

So, if you are in a hole and struggling, take heart from these stories that show that your mind can lead you to a much brighter future.

Even if it all starts out the very opposite.

A Car Crash Life.

A young man with his whole future ahead of him.

A young footballer playing for one of the biggest and most famous clubs in history.

He had been representing Real Madrid in their junior reserve team as a goalkeeper and showed huge promise. On the way home one night in 1962 the car he was driving crashed leaving him paralysed from the waist down and severe injuries to the other passengers. His whole life seemed over.

Severely depressed he lay in bed day after day until a nurse brought him a guitar to give him something to focus on and add strength and dexterity to his hands. This was the start of his revival. He developed a real love for music and it also galvanised his body. He felt sensations in his lower limbs when he played and soon his toes moved. In his mind he believed he could survive and two other important beliefs – he would walk again and he would be a singer. Both he stayed totally disciplined at achieving.

In 1968 he swept the board as an unknown singer at the Benidorm summer song festival. That victory lead him to being signed to his first ever recording contract. His career took off. He went on to win world acclaim including World Music Awards and 2 Grammy’s and is the best selling Latino artist of all time and has sold 300 million records in 14 languages.

He is the same man who lay broken in his hospital bed. Broken in mind too until that mind changed.

That man is Julio Iglesias.

The Pen is Mightier.

You are a single parent who has just lost their mother who dies aged 45.

You have fled domestic violence with only your young daughter and not much else. Owning nothing you are forced onto benefits but live a meagre existence in a cold flat. You are almost destitute and only survive thanks to spending your days at a local cafe run by a relative. As you later said in those days your were ‘as poor as it is possible to be in modern Britain, without being homeless’.

Your future looks bleak. Your prospects are very low and you sink into depression. Even suicide passes through your mind.

However you had one idea. A silly story really but you’ve had it in the back of your mind for a few years. With little else in your life you dedicate time daily in the cafe to turning your idea into some kind of manuscript. The only thing you have left is this. But, your violent ex-partner finds you and tries to get back together. You must involve the courts and you need therapy to keep it together.

You keep writing. The book takes 2 years. Hope still remains.

That hope is challenged. Publisher after publisher turns it down. Finally another two years later one offers you a tiny £1500 advance which you accept with little else on the table.

The book was published and becomes a sensation and bidding soon follows for the future books with $100,000 offered for the US rights alone.

You have turned your vision for the character and his adventures into the literary success of the modern generation.

The character was Harry Potter, and the single mother you are was J.K. Rowling.

Her pen was a mighty as her mind and wrote herself into destiny.

Mindset resets life.

These true stories typify the change of mindset and the wholesale effects this originates.

Both the pen and the plectrum turned seeming disaster into a dramatic destiny. But, behind both, was the mind. Renewed. Rekindled. And reinvigorated even in the pits of despair.

In all of our lives are ongoing ups and downs. Hassles here, problems there, sometimes bright spots. Sunshine and rain. But, the key is not to let that undermine thinking. When we are on the up, life is easy to mentally process. When we are on a down slope however, it’s easy to keep going down with it mindwise.

Julio and JK took the positives out of their harsh realities. They looked for something better to get involved in and follow. To redirect the mind and put its purpose and focus on the new skill or goal not the current pain and restriction.

We can all take a leaf out of that book. The mind can go one of two ways always. We get to choose which way it goes.

As Shakespeare famously wrote in Hamlet, ‘There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so’.

I think we should decide to use our mind to get the best out of everything

And turn grime into gold, and difficulty into destiny!

References – Edition.cnn.com – Julio Iglesias; near death experience made him a singer.

Surinenglish.com – July, a month of success for Julio Iglesias.

Wikipedia – Julio Iglesias.

Biography.com – J.K. Rowling’s incredible rags to riches story.

Photo attribution – Free to use under Pixabay Content License by Blogcube and Vika_Glitter.