Acceptance can change how people respond to pain, uncertainty, stress, and setbacks. This article shares practical approaches and insights from mental health experts, including ways to build self-compassion, manage difficult emotions, and take meaningful next steps. These powerful stories show that acceptance is not giving up—it is a starting point for healing and change.
- Accept Your Unchangeable Height
- Embrace Body Compassion
- Hold Two Truths About Mom
- Thank Your Inner Critic
- Find Peace Amid Delay
- Care for Your Ailing Body
- Set Boundaries Through Clarity
- Surf Urges Like Waves
- Name Grief, Take Next Steps
- Stay Present With Pain
- Normalize Relapse Triggers
- Pause Before You Heal
- Honor Your Inner Multitude
- Choose Value-Aligned Actions
- Breathe Through Burnout
- Accept Reality, Then Rebuild
- Acknowledge Anxiety Before Action
- Treat Rest as Medicine
- Release the Need to Solve
- Prioritize What Matters Today
- Adapt Plans Under Pressure
- End the Second Fight
- Confront Exhaustion to Reclaim Agency
- Create a Feasible New Normal
- Welcome Uncertainty
Accept Your Unchangeable Height
I’ve learned a lot about acceptance through DBT, particularly the concept of Radical Acceptance. When we refuse to accept the reality of a situation, we often create additional suffering by fighting something that has already happened or cannot be changed.
One example that stands out for me is learning to accept my height. I’m just under five feet tall, and in my late 20s, I spent a lot of energy trying not to be short. One of the more painful strategies was wearing high heels all the time. Eventually, after hurting my feet badly enough that I needed reflexology to help, I realized I was exhausted from fighting something I simply couldn’t change.
Accepting my height initially felt like giving in. But when I finally stopped fighting it, what I felt was relief. I’m short. It’s genetic. There’s nothing wrong with me, and there’s nothing I need to fix.
That experience has stayed with me as a therapist. Acceptance doesn’t mean liking something, approving of it, or giving up on making changes where change is possible. It means acknowledging reality as it is so that we can stop spending all of our energy fighting reality and start deciding what we want to do from there.
Karen O’Hara, Mental Health Therapist, Karen O’Hara, LCPC
Embrace Body Compassion
Acceptance has taught me to meet difficult emotions with curiosity instead of treating them as something I must immediately fix. In my work, that means helping people notice what is happening in their bodies and make room for compassion alongside pain.
I felt the power of this during treatment for an eating disorder relapse in 2010. On the first day of a yoga and body image class, I stood in Warrior II and felt my strength. For a moment, I realized I did not have to loathe my body to care for it. That moment did not resolve everything, but it opened a different relationship with my body—one that continues to shape how I live and work.
Dr. Jo L PsyD, Dr. Jo L, PsyD — former clinical psychologist, embodiment educator, author, and yoga & meditation teacher; founder of TulaSoul., TulaSoul
Hold Two Truths About Mom
Acceptance has changed how I respond to hard feelings, both my own and those of the people I work with. In suicide prevention, I see how much energy people spend fighting what they feel. They argue with the grief, the anger, or the fear, and try to make it go away before they will look at it. For me, acceptance means letting something be true long enough to actually see it. That is usually the moment a real next step shows up.
The most powerful example I have is with my mom. I had a tough childhood with trauma and neglect, and I only remember a handful of spotty moments from it. For years my sisters and I blamed her, and she shut down any time we brought it up. I carried a lot of anger and a lot of righteousness about it.
Then she was diagnosed with cancer. I moved her into my home and became her primary caregiver. When the treatments failed, she had two options: die slowly over the next month, or try a new surgery with a 13% survival rate. We scheduled the surgery for two days later. That night I lay awake and made a list of every hard question I needed to ask before I lost the chance.
We went to dinner and I asked. She answered. Her answers were full of impossible decisions and survival I had never known about. Acceptance happened for me at that table. I could hold two truths at once. She did the best she could, and it wasn’t enough to protect me. I still wish it had been different. I stopped needing it to have been different in order to love her.
She survived the surgery, and she is still cancer free.
I bring that into how I teach meditation now. On a walk, I ask people to notice what they are feeling and name it without trying to fix it yet. That small pause is practice for the bigger moments. It’s the idea behind the short guided sessions in Walking Meditation, which is free to try.
That one conversation gave me a relationship with my mom that I never thought was possible.
Dr. Breanna Reeser, Meditation Teacher, CEO, Walking Meditation
Thank Your Inner Critic
There are many things in life that we don’t control, but cultivating control over our responses and reactions to life is where we can find our power. We always have the ability to resist or accept, fight or flow, argue or acknowledge.
The opposite to acceptance, resistance, is what can make a hard situation even harder. Telling ourselves things like, “It shouldn’t be this way,” or, “This shouldn’t be happening,” erodes our resilience and creates barriers to truly being able to work with reality.
Practicing acceptance has been pivotal in improving my overall mental well-being and greatly influences my approach with my clients as a mental health therapist. For me personally, one situation in which acceptance proved particularly powerful was with relating to my inner critic. I used to think that the goal was to get rid of those negative thoughts, the voice that says things like, “You’ll never be successful. What’s wrong with you? You should just give up. How stupid of you.” (and those are just the PG versions!) Just by the nature of them being there, I felt like I was failing. I tried to root out the cause of those voices, I tried to counter them, I tried to meditate my way out of them.
But one day, it dawned on me that perhaps I didn’t need those voices to go away. I was studying Acceptance and Commitment Therapy at the time, and it made a wonderful case of accepting what is happening while still being able to commit to the life you want to be living. I began to see that resisting those voices in my head was perhaps a losing battle, but it was also an unnecessary one. If I could accept that they were there, I could also reduce my focus on them and turn my attention elsewhere. I could tell them, “Thank you for your input, I hear you, and now I am going to go eat breakfast and go to work.”
The reason this had such a powerful impact on my life is because my mind is always thinking (as I am sure you can relate). That is the nature of the mind. It doesn’t matter if it’s a weekday, weekend, workday, vacation, morning, night… the nature of the mind is to think. Learning to accept the thoughts flowing through, even if they were unpreferred, freed up a ton of inner energy to focus on the things I wanted to be doing with my time. I no longer had to fight as hard to get rid of those nasty, critical thoughts before I felt like I was allowed to move on with my life.
Nina Tomkiewicz LCSW, Mental Health Therapist, Therapy with Nina
Find Peace Amid Delay
My conception of what it means to be emotionally well during a trying time has evolved as a result of acceptance. I don’t think it’s necessary for me to transform every unpleasant feeling into a good one. Admitting, “This is hard, and I don’t have an answer yet”, is sometimes a healthier course of action. Acceptance allows sadness, disappointment, or uncertainty without allowing them to take the lead.
When I am waiting for a result that I am unable to expedite, I find that acceptance is particularly powerful. It is more about keeping myself together while I wait than it is about demanding a specific outcome. My strategy is to identify my emotions, pray openly about them, and determine what next step I can take today. Peace doesn’t always start when things get better. Sometimes it starts when I STOP WAITING FOR THINGS TO CHANGE in order to be at peace.
Max Lyons, Lead Pastor, Elan Church
Care for Your Ailing Body
Acceptance is about dropping the fight against reality. Life can be full of suffering, challenges, and events that we cannot control. We waste valuable energy when we fight against reality by staying stuck in judgement and bitterness. To practice acceptance you don’t need to approve of, or like, whatever is happening. Acceptance is a neutral stance that allows us to stand at the center of our lives and acknowledge what we cannot control. Instead of wasting energy by resisting what is, we can apply our energy towards changing what is in our control. Many mental health concerns, especially anxiety and anger, can stem from feeling like things are out of our control. Acceptance gives us power and energy back by drawing clear boundaries around what can be controlled and what can’t be controlled. Acceptance is a key skill that I teach my therapy clients who experience issues with anger, stress, resentment, and other kinds of mental suffering.
For me personally, acceptance becomes a powerful practice when my body is sick or injured. If I am not practicing acceptance, I easily make my condition worse by pushing my body too far and trying to do too much. I usually feel sad and distressed when I am unwell, because I feel like I am missing out on what I want to be doing. Practicing acceptance when I experience distress moves me from a place of suffering to neutrality about my present moment conditions. When I am not expending energy resisting what is, I can apply that energy toward taking care of myself which will actually help me feel better faster.
Jess Allen LMHCA, Mental Health Counselor, Haven Healing and Wellness PLLC
Set Boundaries Through Clarity
Most of the pain I see isn’t in what happens. It’s in refusing to accept what we’re seeing. Someone shows us a clear pattern, and we keep hoping instead of deciding. We confuse grace with being a doormat, because the real question scares us: if this person can’t or won’t love me the way I’ve clearly said I need, what am I going to do about it? So we betray what we know to avoid accepting what is. In my work, I help clients face what they already know, and what it’s asking of them. I know this from the inside. My people-pleasing looked like generosity, but it was control: if I gave enough and was good enough, people would finally love me the way I wanted and see who I was. Acceptance meant letting them be who they are and giving up the illusion that I could earn my way to something different. That’s where my boundaries came from, and relationships built on what’s real. Some survived. Some I had to grieve.
Dr. Jacquelyn Johnson, Licensed psychologist and ICF ACC certified coach, Deeply Seen Psychological Services
Surf Urges Like Waves
In addiction treatment, acceptance is often the turning point, and it is widely misunderstood as giving up. It is the opposite: accepting that something is happening is what makes it possible to respond to it rather than fight it. From years on the front lines of emergency medicine before transitioning to addiction and mental health treatment, I have come to see it as one of the most practical tools we have.
Where it proves most powerful is with cravings and early-withdrawal anxiety. Patients naturally try to suppress an urge or argue with it, and the struggle tends to amplify it. When they instead learn to notice the craving, name it and let it rise and fall like a wave, it usually passes within minutes, and each time it passes without being acted on, it loses some of its authority. The same applies to accepting a diagnosis. Patients who stop debating whether they “really” have a problem free up the energy that recovery requires.
Acceptance does not mean approval. It means starting from what is true.
Andrzej Kulesza, Co-Founder & Medical Director, Zeus Detox & Rehab
Name Grief, Take Next Steps
Practicing acceptance has changed my approach to mental health challenges by helping me face what is true without letting it take over my identity or my next decision. It gives me permission to name the grief first, instead of rushing to explanations or quick fixes. One situation where acceptance was especially powerful was during a season of chronic illness for me and my kids, when I had to acknowledge the “dead yesterdays and unborn tomorrows” that came with it. Accepting that loss did not make the condition smaller, but it reduced the constant mental spiral that can come with unanswered questions. From that steadier place, I could keep seeking support and take the next right step. Allowing myself to work through the other steps of the grief cycle (anger, denial, bargaining and sadness) in my own time and in my own way. Everyone has a different path to acceptance.
Dr. Janice Perkins, Executive Coach, Capacity Communications
Stay Present With Pain
Many mental health challenges begin with something deceptively simple: reality has given us an experience that we cannot yet metabolize. When we are unable to change what happened or what is ultimately outside our control, we are then left with two fundamental options: accept what we cannot control or attempt to control what we can. Acceptance, however, is not passive resignation. It is an active psychological capacity. In fact, it is foundational to mental health because our emotional lives perpetually place us in a position of practicing acceptance. At any given moment, we are either feeling something and attempting to get a need met, or we are feeling something and learning to tolerate/accept it. Psychological maturity and stability requires knowing the difference.
My work as a psychotherapist has made this particularly clear to me. I experience difficult emotions every day. To be genuinely empathic with another person is to become available to their experience without becoming lost in it. I may feel another person’s grief, shame, loneliness or despair. This is not merely an intellectual exercise. I need to allow myself to feel what is occurring while simultaneously accepting the experience so that I can remain grounded enough to think, observe, and respond therapeutically. In that sense, acceptance has become part of my clinical instrument. I cannot effectively help someone metabolize an emotion that I am unwilling to accept and encounter myself. Perhaps the most powerful lesson is that acceptance may change our relationship to the situation before it changes the environment itself. For me, acceptance is therefore less about learning to always like reality and more about becoming capable of remaining present to reality. That capacity to feel what is here, tolerate what cannot yet be changed, and remain connected to ourselves and others while doing so, may be one of the most fundamental forms of psychological health.
Louis Laves-Webb LCSW-S, LPC-S, Psychotherapist/CEO, Louis Laves-Webb, LCSW-S, LPC-S & Associates
Normalize Relapse Triggers
Acceptance is a valuable tool, but it is often misunderstood or even misinterpreted.
In clinical practice, acceptance does not mean approving of a situation or believing change is impossible. Instead, it involves recognizing what is happening, like unpleasant thoughts, cravings, or emotions, without resisting them or criticizing yourself. Much of our distress comes from struggling against these feelings rather than from the feelings themselves. In dialectical behavior therapy, this is called radical acceptance and is paired with skills focused on change. In my experience, individuals make more lasting progress when they stop resisting reality and instead ask, “It’s already happening, what can I do now?”
In outpatient care, I often see individuals in early recovery interpret cravings as signs of failure. This belief typically leads to shame, which can increase the risk of relapse. If we instead view cravings as normal and temporary parts of recovery, like something to notice, label, and manage rather than judge, individuals can develop coping mechanisms instead of panic reactions.
And when they stop treating cravings as emergencies, the cravings lose much of their power.
Sarah Couture, Clinical Director, Rubicon Mental Health
Pause Before You Heal
Practicing acceptance has profoundly shifted my approach to mental health challenges, both in my own life and in my clinical practice as a psychiatric mental health nurse practitioner. Early in my career, I often fell into the trap of trying to fight or instantly fix every uncomfortable emotion or difficult symptom. Over time, I learned that radical acceptance does not mean giving up or approving of a painful situation. Instead, it means acknowledging reality as it is right now without immediate judgment or resistance.
When working with patients, I often share that fighting against your own feelings usually creates a secondary layer of suffering, turning standard stress into overwhelming panic. By teaching individuals to pause, breathe, and accept their current emotional state without harsh self-blame, we create a safe starting point for healing. Acceptance frees up the mental energy needed to take constructive steps forward, helping people move away from shame and toward real, sustainable recovery.
Shebna N Osanmoh, Psychiatric Nurse Practitioner, Savantcare
Honor Your Inner Multitude
I’ve been practicing acceptance around not being entirely one thing. Humans are complex and the desire to be simply understood by one label is stifling. When I began to accept that I can be a multitude of many things, often opposing or contradicting in themselves, then I allowed myself the freedom to oscillate between the complexities of being a dynamic human.
Brittaney Latta, Psychotherapist
Choose Value-Aligned Actions
Practicing acceptance completely changed how I manage stress and anxiety as a founder.
For years my approach to mental health challenges was to fight them. If I felt anxious before a launch or overwhelmed with running Humolux, I would try to power through, work longer hours, and tell myself to just be more disciplined. It made everything worse.
The situation that forced me to change was two years ago. We had a major supply chain delay right before our holiday peak. Nothing I did was fixing it. I was waking up at 3 AM checking emails, irritable with my team and family, and constantly tense. I was treating the anxiety as a problem to solve, which just created more anxiety.
A mentor introduced me to ACT – Acceptance and Commitment Therapy – concepts. The shift was learning to say: “I’m noticing anxiety is here right now, and that’s okay. It’s here because I care deeply about this business and the people who depend on it.” Instead of wrestling with the feeling, I started making room for it.
That week, instead of spending an hour trying to calm down, I would acknowledge: “This is stress, this is uncertainty, it’s uncomfortable but it’s not dangerous.” Then I would ask: “What is one value-aligned action I can take right now? Usually, it was having an honest conversation with a customer or going for a 20-minute walk with no phone.
Acceptance didn’t make the stress disappear. It stopped the second layer of suffering – the shame and the fighting – that was exhausting me. Now I see acceptance as a productivity tool. When I stop wasting energy trying to control every feeling, I have so much more energy to control what I actually can control: my next action.
Wilce Morisset, Founder & CEO, Humolux Underwear
Breathe Through Burnout
For a long time I treated my mental health like a bug to fix. If I felt anxious or burnt out, it meant something was broken and I needed to push harder to get back to “normal”. That approach kept me in a constant fight with my own mind, and the fight was exhausting in itself.
Acceptance changed the question. Instead of asking how to make the feeling go away, I started asking what’s actually happening right now and what the next small thing is that I can do. A lot of that came from studying the Lam-rim, the Tibetan Buddhist “gradual path”, which treats the mind as something you train patiently over time rather than something you beat into shape. Alongside proper treatment and therapy, it gave me a way to stop adding a second layer of suffering on top of the first: being stressed, and then being stressed about being stressed.
The most practical version of this came from scuba diving. The first rule you learn is simple: never stop breathing. When something goes wrong underwater, the instinct is to panic and hold your breath, which is the one thing that actually makes it dangerous. You’re taught to keep breathing slowly, pause, think, then act. At 20 metres you can’t wish the situation away. You accept where you are and deal with it from there.
That became my reset on land. After ten days abroad at a conference, I came home to a backlog across every client, low energy, and a list that felt impossible. The old me would have tried to power through all of it at once and crashed. Instead I literally told myself “don’t stop breathing”. I accepted that I was running on empty, cut the day down to what genuinely mattered, and let the rest wait. It sounds small, but that one shift stopped a bad week from turning into a burnout spiral.
Acceptance isn’t giving up. It’s refusing to waste energy fighting reality, so you have some left to actually respond to it.
Rinn R, Founder and Creative Director at Echo Studio, Echo Omni Studio
Accept Reality, Then Rebuild
Acceptance for me isn’t giving up, it’s the point where I stop fighting the facts so I can deal with them. I work with a therapist, I’m not trained in this myself, but what she’s taught me is to separate what happened from what I make it mean. With the back injury, the wheelchair, the diabetes diagnosis, my instinct for years was to argue with reality, tell myself it wasn’t that bad, push through. That kept me stuck. The clearest example was the roughly two years after my back gave out, when the pain tipped into depression and I let my income, most of my contacts and my sense of who I was slide away. I call it my pity party, only half joking. What shifted things wasn’t willpower, it was accepting I was in that place before I could start climbing out of it. Once I stopped resisting where I was, rebuilding the health and then the business followed. Acceptance came first. The comeback came after.
Lilach Bullock, AI Implementation Consultant and Fractional CMO, Lilach Bullock
Acknowledge Anxiety Before Action
Acceptance changed my approach mostly by removing a wasted step. Early on, my instinct with any mental health challenge – a client’s or my own – was to fight the feeling first and deal with the actual problem second. Acceptance flips that order: you acknowledge what’s happening without judgment, and only then decide what to do about it. That single shift saves enormous energy that used to go into resisting reality.
One situation where this mattered: working with a client going through a stressful health diagnosis who kept trying to “think positive” her way out of anxiety, which only made the anxiety louder. Once she practiced simply naming it “I’m anxious about this, and that’s a reasonable response”, without trying to suppress or fix it immediately, the anxiety itself became more manageable within days. The problem didn’t disappear, but the extra layer of struggling against her own reaction did.
My tip: acceptance isn’t passivity. It’s the fastest route to clear-headed action, because you stop spending energy denying what’s already true.
Sam Wallace, Nutritionist
Treat Rest as Medicine
For most of my life, I treated my own brain like a problem to fix. I have Tourette syndrome, narcolepsy, and autism, and I spent years fighting all three — pushing through exhaustion, masking the tics, treating rest as something I had to earn. Acceptance changed the entire frame. It wasn’t giving up; it was finally ending a war I was never going to win.
The moment it clicked was about my narcolepsy. For years I felt guilty every time I needed a nap — like I was lazy, or failing. Then one day I started thinking of naps as medication instead of a moral failure, and everything shifted. I stopped spending energy hating myself for needing rest and actually started resting. My health improved, my work got better, and — the part that surprised me — I got kinder to everyone else who was struggling, too.
That’s the whole philosophy behind what I do now: acceptance isn’t toxic positivity or pretending you’re fine. It’s telling yourself the truth and meeting yourself where you actually are.
Alyssa Ostroff, Founder/Designer, Self-Care Shirts
Release the Need to Solve
Acceptance has not been easy for me because I always try to solve problems. My background of 15 years of experience in software engineering, technology, and management has helped me develop a habit of always focusing on finding solutions to complicated problems. This habit works fine for me in my career but not always inside my head.
I can recall some times at Big Drop Inc., where I was managing a team across the globe of 100+ individuals. I used to face many challenging projects with tight deadlines and many issues not totally in my hands. I would come out of work, yet not mentally. I would continue thinking about all the conversations, about the result, about things I could have done differently.
Acceptance helped because at the point when I decided to accept, “This is what is currently going on,” I did not need to like it. I did not need to act as though everything was okay. And most importantly, I did not need to give up.
It sounds easy enough, but it created some mental breathing room for me. Rather than battling with the situation in my mind, I could differentiate between what I had any control over and what I didn’t. The solution could come in the form of making a decision, talking things out, sleeping on it, or even acknowledging a bad day.
The impulse to solve everything is still strong within me. Being a founder of Motion Design School and being into tech, there is no shortage of problems to deal with. However, I no longer view every difficult emotion as a tech problem to solve. The acceptance approach does not cure mental illness, but for me, it allows me to stop complicating the problem by trying to fight reality.
Vitaliy Kononov, Co-Founder & CTO, Atty
Prioritize What Matters Today
I’ve learned from practicing acceptance that arguing with a reality that has already arrived frequently causes stress. Even though I can plan ahead, communicate effectively, and make well-considered decisions as a business owner, I still have no control over every change or result. Acceptance enables me to ask, “What is the best decision I can make from here?” instead of, “Why didn’t this go differently?”
That kind of thinking has worked best when I had multiple pressing priorities to attend to at once. I came to terms with the fact that I couldn’t immediately give everything equal attention. I would decide what actually needed to be done that day and let the others wait. To me, acceptance means MAINTAINING CONTROL. It’s being more specific about where I really have it. I’ve become more composed and productive under pressure as a result.
Alexis Gomez, Owner, Parlani Party Rentals
Adapt Plans Under Pressure
Practicing acceptance has changed how I approach mental health challenges by helping me separate what I can control from what I can’t. During particularly stressful event weeks, I’ve had moments when a last-minute vendor change or unexpected logistical issue completely disrupted a plan I had spent days refining. I used to mentally fight the situation first, which only added frustration to an already demanding day. Accepting that the original plan was no longer possible helped me shift much faster into asking, “What can I do with the situation I have now?” That mindset has been particularly powerful because acceptance doesn’t mean I like what happened; it means I stop spending energy wishing it hadn’t happened. In both work and life, I’ve found that acknowledging reality first makes it much easier to respond calmly and protect my mental well-being.
Nezhdeh Parsanj, Owner, Opus Event Rentals
End the Second Fight
Acceptance isn’t giving up. It’s stopping the second fight. It’s the fight you pick with reality on top of the problem you already have. That second fight is what exhausts most people, usually long before the actual problem does.
I’m a licensed counselor supervisor, and in trauma work I watch people spend enormous energy arguing with what already happened. “This shouldn’t have happened to me.” “I should be over this by now.” Both feel completely true, and both keep the nervous system braced, because you can’t calm a body that’s still trying to win an argument with the past. Acceptance in the clinical sense doesn’t mean approving of what happened. It means letting it be real long enough to work with it instead of around it. That’s actually where recovery starts. It also changed how I supervise, because it’s the same move I ask newer therapists and counselors to make when a case isn’t going the way they expected.
Where I’ve seen it matter most, both in session and in running a practice here at Oceanic Counseling Group, is with people who read a slow or non-linear recovery as proof they’re failing. The moment someone stops treating a hard week as evidence they’re broken and starts treating it as information, the whole tone of the work shifts. Less shame, more traction. (That reframe sounds simple, but I’ve watched it take months to actually land for some people, and honestly, that’s okay.)
The line I keep coming back to: you can’t set down what you refuse to admit you’re holding.
Kenza Haddock, President, Oceanic Counseling Group
Confront Exhaustion to Reclaim Agency
Everything changed when I stopped trying to force myself past burnout and admitted that I’d set up a life that only worked if I ignored my own needs. That realization made it possible to actually do something about it.
For years, I coached high achievers while barely holding it together myself. Once I accepted that these patterns weren’t personal failures but things I’d learned to survive, I could go after the real problems instead of just trying to manage the symptoms.
Acceptance doesn’t mean giving up. It’s the opposite. When you stop fighting with what’s actually happening, you get back all that energy to change things.
The biggest shift I see in clients happens when they realize they’ve been part of creating their own burnout, not to beat themselves up about it, but because it means they have the power to change it. You can’t fix what you refuse to see.
Samka Keranovic, Founder, Drwmbs
Create a Feasible New Normal
My perspective on acceptance has changed as a result of my work with families dealing with changes in mobility. A challenging transition can drain a lot of mental energy if your focus is on returning life to its previous state. A different question is presented by acceptance: What would make tomorrow easier to handle given the current situation?
When a physical restriction cannot be easily overcome, that has been particularly helpful. Acceptance is when you STOP COMPARING your life to the previous normal and begin creating a new, feasible one. That’s not giving up. It is realizing that sometimes making GOO ADJUSTMENTS rather than undoing everything that has changed is what leads to progress.
Susan Hackett, Vice President of Operations, Williams Lifts
Welcome Uncertainty
I have learned to view uncertainty as part of the process instead of something to be worried about. The future is unknown and unknowable. The goals, roles, and expectations will always change. I’ve learned not to resist these and to be thankful for the opportunities to change and grow. I’ve used this mindset throughout the various aspects of my life, and it has been extremely helpful. This is particularly true of the entrepreneurial side of my life. Knowing that sometimes things just take time has been helpful when dealing with the stress and anxiety of the unexpected and unknown. Uncertainty is not something to fear, and it is certainly not something to stress about. People should try to maintain a positive outlook in life.
Lina Haj Hussien, Founder and CHO, Employee Engagement & Experience Manager, Inspire
