I once believed that progress required a steady, consistent ascent toward perfection. If I were to look back at my life thus far, I would notice a pattern of events and feelings resembling peaks and valleys. For every peak, there has been a valley. For every leap forward, there has been a stumble backward—sometimes just an inch, and other times, what seemed like miles.

     If you take one-step forward, two steps back, you make progress but then experience events that cause you to be further behind than you were when you made the progress. This mindset can be paralyzing, and hinder your my growth by expecting growth to be linear.

     It is often in our struggles that we stretch and come to better understand ourselves. They are part of the growth process—not a departure from it. We grow when we do our best to learn from and move beyond our challenges instead of obsessing over them and making ourselves feel stuck. This may sound simple, but it is hard to wrap your head around this idea, mainly because we get caught up in messy emotions.

     Just as a muscle needs to tear to grow stronger, sometimes we need to wade into our own darkness to find a brighter light. We do not need to worry that every setback indicates something’s wrong. So long as we are making progress on the whole, we can trust we’re doing just fine.

     We will all make mistakes in life. We all go through phases when we need to relearn lessons we have already learned, and that can be frustrating when we are in that moment, feeling regret, remorse, or impatience. However, the key is to learn from our experiences and move on. Recognizing and embracing this will bring you a tremendous amount of peace and success.