When you are a person who is working so hard as an influencer, trying to help and encourage others through your hard work, what happens when you are discouraged? Today’s post is for our hard working influencers and business owners who are feeling down and defeated. This has been a difficult season and we are here to help and offer you some encouragement.
What Happens When You Are Discouraged?
The sunshine is blotted out by the dark clouds of defeat and negativism. Every doubt or feeling of failure is magnified and haunts every corner. The agony of defeat invades and permeates our every thought and effort. That’s what happens when we are discouraged.
Why do we succumb to such? Why, when we may have just recently been on top of the mountain? How can we sink so quickly into a heap of self-doubt?
Feeling Hopeless
Our feelings are very fickle. They are also very pervasive. We know that, in our reasonable self. Yet we feel hopeless, fearful, and fall into despair. If we have no history of how to successfully handle this consuming fear, how to rise again from the ashes, we see no hope. But there is hope! There is promising, life-giving, joyful hope!
The discouraged may need help in rationally handling this oppressive feeling. Someone to help them see the bigger picture.
Learning how to evaluate and manage expectations without comparing ourselves to others is a major first step. We must refocus on our goals. We need to see this as a setback rather than a finality.
Often a friend who is willing to listen, to help separate fact from a manufactured feeling of doom, to help us sort things out – just to be a friend with a listening ear – can help the discouraged look objectively at the circumstances.
A long walk or exhilarating run, a good meal, and a time to unload the garbage of the day can lead to the parting of the clouds, the coming of a small light to pierce the darkness of the morrow, and the birth of new hope. Filling the void of that departing despair are these refreshing words:
“Whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things” (Philippians 4:8)