Difficult times make us grow. This is definitely a cliché but clichés are clichés for a reason – they are true. Being happy is not about never having bad things happen to us and living a charmed existence where we have never been touched by difficulty. Happiness is a choice. Hard times present us with an amazing opportunity to cultivate it in our lives. It can be d...

Difficult times make us grow. This is definitely a cliché but clichés are clichés for a reason – they are true. Being happy is not about never having bad things happen to us and living a charmed existence where we have never been touched by difficulty. Happiness is a choice. Hard times present us with an amazing opportunity to cultivate it in our lives.

It can be difficult to see this sometimes. When we are in the thick of our misery, everything seems bleak. We believe that we will feel like this forever or that our life will forever be tainted by the bad experiences that befall us. These experiences, however, force us into a space where amazing things can happen, a space we often do not enter willingly.

So many of us are living lives we really do not want in one way or another. We have avoided the in-depth reflection necessary to figure out who we are and what we want out of life. When bad things happen to us, it often leads us down this path. We are in a deep place emotionally and it can produce some amazing insights. The depths of our unhappiness really lead us to really, truly think about what would make us happy. It can be uncomfortable because the one incident can lead to a lot of stuff coming up to the surface, things from different areas of your life. The end of a relationship may have triggered the sadness, but it usually ends up shining a light on all areas of your life.

These hard times are a gift in many ways. They are an opportunity to purge what no longer serves you and to start cultivating habits and beliefs that do. They force us to actually think about how are living our life. They can pull us out of the fog that so many of us exist in, where we just take what comes at us, without making any deliberate choices. If you find yourself experiencing hard times now, realize the tremendous opportunity that presents itself to you, an opportunity to gain the type of clarity that will put you on the road to living the life you want, to becoming the best version of yourself.

Kelli Cooper is a freelance writer who runs the personal development blog Life Made to Order. She is also the author of Passing on Parenthood: A Childfree Woman Speaks Out. She has a passion for personal development and sharing what she has learned in her own journey to help others improve their lives as well.