Those of you who have been reading this blog for a while will know that every now and then, I write about a sentence I find difficult to translate, either from English to Spanish or vice versa (if you´re curious and want to read those articles, you´ll find them under the category called Untranslatable).

Today, I´m not bringing you a sentence, but a word, more specifically, a verb: to struggle.

The Spanish dictionary says struggling can be translated as fighting, confronting or tussling with something. And yes, it´s something along those lines, but with a few more nuances, I think. Maybe because (at least in my head) most times, that "something" is not a physical thing, but a situation or challenge we don´t know how to manage, so we experience some suffering as we attempt to overcome it.

The photo gallery in Wordpress gave me this visual representation of struggle, and I thought it was spot on:

The rope could represent anything, real or symbolic (or imagined!) that we are confronted with, and towards which we feel we have no resources.. I think it´s a really interesting metaphor because the rope as such doesn´t have a life of its own; it all depends on what we do with it: we can keep tangling it more and more until we end up paralyzed, or we can untangle the knots bit by bit, one after the other, and break free. It´s almost as if that fight, that confrontation, that tussle, deep down, was with ourselves.

And here´s a thing I would like to make very clear: this happens to all of us at one point or another, or rather, at many points throughout our lives. It´s a part of life itself. That´s how we learn, how we grow, how we evolve.

One story that often comes up around this topic is that of the butterfly: part of its metamorphosis involves coming out of the cocoon, which takes a huge effort; it´s a real struggle. Anybody looking from the outside would think it´s going to die without achieving it. But the butterfly achieves it. And it has to be the butterfly itself, on its own, because that´s how its wings become strong, to be able to fly. If someone, with all their best intentions, had opened the cocoon earlier to let it out, it would have stayed weak and would not have survived.

Similarly, we all have to follow our own path and experience our own transformations. But do we really need to have such a hard time? Or watch others having a hard time, without helping them? Well, one thing we can do is treat those moments in life like what they really are: phases of growth, completely normal. And yes, we can help, but not by trying to resolve the other person´s problems from the outside, but by respecting their process, and accompanying them so that they can find their own resources and solutions.

I think this quote summarizes it really well; it´s the first cornerstone of co-active coaching:

People are naturally creative, resourceful, and whole.
People are not broken and do not need fixing and have their own innate wisdom on how to live life.

What I mean by this is that, leaving out certain exceptions where there´s a pathology or disorder (in which case it´s necessary to consult a psychiatrist or psychologist), in general, all we need is a bit of time, support and self confidence to overcome the challenges that are put in front of us.

That, and self discovery, lots of self discovery, it always helps 🙂