Hero

Every obstacle or challenge you encounter on the Hero’s Journey transforms you as you acquire strength of character and the qualities and abilities you need to overcome the obstacle or challenge. The emergence of these qualities and abilities shape you into the kind of person you need to become to achieve your dream. For that reason, challenges and obstacles are great indications that you are well along the way on your Hero’s Journey. In fact, the bigger the obstacles and challenges you face, the bigger your success will be, and the closer you are to achieving it.

Mastin Kipp

The number-one thing people gain from challenges is not the stuff they get, but who they become. When you face a challenge and you overcome that challenge, you have greater faith in yourself, you have greater faith in your abilities, you have greater trust of the divine, and you can do something even bigger. Overcoming obstacles is perhaps the greatest gift – far greater than the stuff that you get. Because that’s something that can’t ever be taken from you.

Peter Burwash

Once you go through a series of heartaches, challenges, upside-downs, capsizing, whatever, you always come out the better because of the tremendous self-confidence gained.

If you have ever faced anything in your life that you had no choice but to overcome, you will have found strengths that you didn’t know you had. Those strengths you gain form your character and transform you into someone greater than you were before. Women who have given birth know this well. Mothers need to be strong to raise and care for a baby. They need patience, tolerance, determination, and physical endurance. The experience of labor and giving birth prepares them for motherhood with the necessary strengths and qualities to do it well. It’s because of her strength through the most difficult times that many of us consider our mother a hero.

Mastin Kipp

When you really step up and embrace the challenge, and when you overcome that challenge, that part of you is like, “Holy crap, you did it!” You can’t just sit there and say, “I love myself.” Self-esteem is earned.

Layne Beachley

Challenges and obstacles present all of us with the opportunity to grow and improve and learn, and step outside of our comfort zone and experience what life truly has to offer.

The purpose of challenges and obstacles on the Hero’s Journey is to prepare us with the qualities and abilities we will need to maintain our dream when it comes true. Without having the skills to handle success, your dream would go up in a puff of smoke no sooner than it had arrived. So challenges and obstacles are preparation for our success.

G. M. Rao

The course of my journey in business has been like the flow of a river, where each obstacle made me change course, eventually to reach my destination. All my life has been full of challenges. Each challenge was a meaningful coincidence, and opened a door to a bigger opportunity.

John Paul DeJoria

From challenges and obstacles we gain a full education, and it’s part of our success. So many times in life things have happened and they didn’t go the way I wanted to, but through it I realized: had I not gone through this, later on in life I wouldn’t be as happy or successful as I am right now. There are things in life that are going to happen, but these will be lessons that take you on to your ultimate reward.

If I reflect back on my journey, the obstacles and challenges I faced were nothing compared to the obstacles and challenges I faced in my life before I decided to follow my dream. When you have a purpose and you’re following your dream, obstacles and challenges don’t seem as difficult or as hard as they do when you have no purpose at all. Without a purpose, challenges or obstacles can appear to have no reason, and simply feel like bad luck. However they do have a purpose, because you have to evolve, and so even if you try to hide from life you will still face challenges and obstacles.

Peter Burwash

My basic philosophy has been: if something good happens I appreciate it, if something bad happens I see it as a learning process.

Challenges and obstacles are tough for all of us when we’re first confronted by them, but they’re only tough while you haven’t found the solution and the way to overcome them. You are never given an obstacle or challenge that you do not have the ability to overcome. Never.

Peter Foyo

Mind-set overcomes obstacles. And my mind-set is happiness and being grateful, and it always has been that way. I also made a decision to share a lot more financially, and the more you share the more the obstacles go away.

Peter Foyo puts his success down to the use of a handful of principles that he practiced religiously to realize his dream. No obstacle he faces ever deters him. He maintains a positive and happy mind-set through constant practice of gratitude. He helps other people wherever he can. And when he is confronted with any difficulty he uses one of the hero’s greatest abilities – visualization.

Peter Foyo

There have been obstacles from competitors, from corruption, from regulators, but I don’t really feel them. I feel the outcome; I feel where I’m going. An obstacle is more of a detour. I say, “Okay, so how are we going to get around that?” I visualize something different.

Visualize the outcome you want, and you will receive the solution to a problem or the best way to overcome a challenge. But to hear the solution when it’s given to you, your mind must be free of worried thoughts.

Imagine if you were lost and you asked someone for directions, but while the person was giving you directions and trying to help you get out of your predicament, you kept talking about how
lost you were, how being lost was a big problem, how you’d been trying to find your way out, and how you’re now worried that you’ll never find your way out. You wouldn’t be able to hear the directions, even as they were being given to you! If your mind is busy with thoughts of worry or anguish, you can’t hear the solution from the Universe.

Liz Murray

I would wake up sometimes sleeping on my friend’s floor. I had to get to the early morning class that I signed up for before school starts, and I needed something to motivate me to get there. So I would see this runner in my mind. I guess it was supposed to be me, but I only ever saw her back. And she was running down a track by herself. I saw these physical hurdles, and she would jump the hurdles and jump the hurdles. I would lie there picturing this runner so I could get myself up to go. I would say, “Okay, you’re tired, that’s a hurdle. Your work, you did it last night. You jumped a hurdle. Taking the train ride down there with no breakfast, you’re starving. Hurdle, hurdle, hurdle.” And I would see her jumping the hurdles with her sinewy back and sweating under the sun. So every time something got in my way, what if it was just another hurdle? Because a hurdle’s not separate from the track; a hurdle is part of the track, and it wouldn’t be an indication that I was off my track. When things were in the way that was just part of the course, and eventually if I jumped those hurdles enough I would reach my finish line.

From Hero by Rhonda Byrne. © 2013, published in the UK by Simon & Schuster.