Struggle Is Not Failure It’s Expansion

Struggle has a bad reputation, and it’s costing people their dreams. When things feel hard, we’re taught to assume it’s a sign we’re failing, manifesting wrong, or not “meant” for the goal in front of us. We don’t buy that. We dig into a more honest view: discomfort can be information, and challenge can be the doorway to expansion, resilience, and real self-trust.

We also get personal about what struggle looks like when it isn’t theoretical: growing up poor, navigating survival stress, being judged, pushing through school, and carrying grief. From there, we zoom out into the growth psychology and the nervous system side of change. Muscles build through resistance, skills build through repetition, and emotional resilience builds through adversity, but only when we pair effort with recovery. That’s where “stretch, integrate, stretch” becomes a practical path instead of burnout.

One of the most important distinctions we make is trauma struggle vs growth struggle. Trauma is chronic unsafe stress with no agency and no exit. Growth struggle is chosen challenge, where you still have options, boundaries, and support. If you’ve been calling your current season a “hard life,” we offer a reframe that can calm your nervous system and help you keep moving without collapsing: you may be in the middle of becoming.

If this helped you, subscribe for more Soul Talk and Psychic Advice, share the episode with someone who’s pushing through a tough chapter, and leave a review so more people can find it.

Transcript

Struggle Is Not Failure

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of my podcast Soul Talk and Psychic Advice. Today we're going to talk about something that our culture gets completely wrong. Struggle. People don't like to struggle. They want easy. And even when you come into alignment, things get easier, but sometimes there is still struggle. People feel like if they're struggling, it's unfair. You know, they're cursed, something is wrong. And that isn't always necessarily true. So somewhere along the way, we started equating struggle with I had a hard life, I'm behind. Something is wrong. Why is this so difficult? And it shouldn't be this hard. But what if struggle isn't proof that you're failing? Because often it isn't proof that you're failing. Most people aren't failing. They just may feel like it because they want to get from where they are to some extreme accomplishment quickly. And it doesn't happen that way. If you talk to successful people before you knew who they were, they struggled and it was hard, and they still have daily struggles. Everybody has daily struggles. So what if it's proof that you're expanding when you're struggling? What if discomfort is not a punishment? Some people feel punished, and that's unfortunate. And you know, people are like, Well, who are you to discuss this stuff? I have a long line of issues. I grew up very poor. You know, I I was the youngest of six kids. My dad got sick. He went home to his mom in Texas. My mom had to raise us. I remember this is the 70s. Women couldn't really get an apartment or a credit card till 1974. They didn't make enough money. So we were poor. We lived in hotels, we got welfare, we struggled. And then my mom died of a heart attack at age 12. I found her. When I was 12, she died of a heart attack. I found her that way. And I ended up in fashion care, wasn't treated well, lived with m my elder sister for a while. It was horrible. And then I got pregnant at 13. And yes, I've been through a lot of things. Sexual assault, different things, right? And life was hard. And and of course I was on welfare until I graduated chiropractic school. And I know what it's like to have the paper food stamps and you know, people judging you and they think that you're lazy when the whole time I was at school struggling and trying to work also with welfare and child support. It was always a struggle. And then I lived in the projects with a lot of crime and meth and you know, there's and this isn't the whole story. This is a shortened version. Then of course, you know, my only son died when he was twenty three. And so I think I know a little bit about struggle and I have a lot of empathy for people who feel like they're struggling, but hopefully, my life and there are people in your life that will show you that you won't always struggle, and there's a way out, you know. Hopefully, no matter what you're going through, you realize that one day things will change and you can come out of it. So, what about if struggle is a requirement for growth? And I love recently when the Olympic gold medalist Lisa Liu, you know, the skater who won the gold medal, she says something powerful that she actually likes struggling because it makes her feel alive. And I know a lot of people couldn't process that. And I read some of the comments and they think, oh, she just had a light struggle. Well, there's a whole different pressure for what she does, right? You have to keep your weight down, you gotta practice, you gotta be so many things for the public and the expectations and whatever else is going on in her life that we don't see, right? And you you know, if you think about it, when you struggle and you come through it, you really feel accomplished, even though it was hard and you could have been like, hey, I could have done without that hell. But think about it like this. She didn't say that she didn't like winning, she didn't say that she didn't like medals, and she didn't say she liked she didn't like being the best, but she said she liked struggling because it makes her feel alive. That perspective can change everything in a person's life because you get to learn who you are and what you're made of, and you're prepared for harder things because unfortunately in life we're all gonna go through some really tough stuff that we can't prepare for, a psychic reading can't prepare you for it. Like sometimes people ask in a reading, is there something I should worry about or look out for? And you don't want to sit there and worry about something, but you want to be in a good, healthy place so that when it comes, you will be able to handle it. So you want to have a support system in place. You want to know that if you need a therapist, you have that in place. You want to have things in place to help you, you know. So we've been conditioned to avoid discomfort. We live in a culture that worships ease, quick results, overnight success, manifesting without effort, flow, right? Without friction. And while these are seasons of ease, and I believe in alignment, we've developed an aversion to discomfort. If something feels hard, we assume it's not meant for us. We're not good enough. We should quit. We manifested it wrong. We're doing life incorrectly. And if you're around the wrong type of coaches that will tell you that, it's even harder, right? And you know, sometimes people say if it's so hard you're doing it wrong. But are you really? Maybe you're learning through it. And biologically speaking, struggle is how we adapt. Muscles grow through resistance, right? Brain grows through challenge, skills grow through repetition and correction, emotional resilience grows through adversity. So if you remove struggle, you remove adaptation. Without adaptation, there's no expansion. And so when Elisa Liu said that struggle makes her feel alive, think about it. When you push yourself physically, mentally, emotionally, your nervous system activates, right? Your heart rate increases, your focus sharpens, your body mobilizes, you feel engaged. Struggle demands presence. You cannot scroll your way through growth. You can't. You know, you can't just read an inspirational quote and that's it. You've turned on the fuse and you're inspired. No. You cannot autopilot your way into mastery. You cannot. Struggle pulls you into the moment. Athletes understand this, artists understand this, entrepreneurs understand this, trust me. We struggle a lot. And if you want to be forced to work on yourself, become one of these, an artist, an athlete, and I can speak to the testament of being an entrepreneur. Grieving hearts understand this, right? And you're grieving, you really understand, you just don't pull out the struggle. There is something raw and real about being in the middle of something that stretches you. It's uncomfortable, it's uncertain, it's humbling, but it's alive. And many people confuse aliveness with ease, but they're not the same. You know, this obsession with ease makes people feel like an imposter or feel insecure or feel defeated or feel like they never reached their dreams. And so we need to ease up on ease, right? Don't think about it so much, don't let it control you because it'll stop you from getting where you're trying to go. So let's talk about the difference between trauma struggle and growth struggle. Because there is a difference. So let's be clear about it. There is this difference between chronic unsafe survival stress and growth-based struggle. I'm not saying all struggle's good, some we know is bad. If you're in an abusive relationship or being harmed, you know you gotta find a way out quickly before it's too late, right? Trauma strugg so trauma struggle feels like powerlessness, repetition without relief, no agency, no exit, nervous system collapse, like there's no way out. Growth struggle feels like stretching, learning, failing forward, temporary discomfort, agency and choice, like you can always just walk away from it, right? And you're not as affected. And that's what growth struggle is. One diminishes you, the other strengthens you. If you live through trauma, your body may interpret any struggle as danger. That's understandable, but healing includes learning to distinguish is this harming me or is this shaping me? The discernment is maturity, and that's important to have discernment. And sometimes when people are trying to accomplish a goal and it gets a little bit uncomfortable, they stop, and you can't stop. I I tell you a story, I tell you some stories of mine. I remember when I wanted to go to chiropractic school in the Bay Area, I needed to leave the chiropractic school in LA, it was very toxic. I wanted my son out of the area that we're living in because we're living in projects, it was unsafe, and you know, the Bay Area was expensive. This is around 1999. This is the first time that tech was really starting to affect housing, and I didn't think I was gonna find housing. And I pushed and pushed, and I drove up there twice, you know, barely had gas money, and I found someone that was rent to me with section eight after so many places said no, because they could easily say no, they didn't have to deal with section eight, they had rich people to deal with. But I found someone who took a chance and I was able to get through school, and it was very stressful. I was crying, I didn't know if I was gonna get a place, and I thought I was gonna be stuck in a bad situation for me and my son, and that was an adverse moment. And yes, my pullout could have been, you know what, forget it. I just stay at the school in LA, stay where I'm living, you know, keep my son here. So I had an option to fight or go, and that's what agency and choice is. So it wasn't a trauma struggle, it was a growth struggle. So keep that in mind, and why we call growth a hard life. Sometimes when life feels challenging, we label it I just have a hard life. But often what we mean is I am in a season of transformation. And transformation is messy, trust me, it's messy. When you build a business, leave a relationship, heal attachment wounds, write a book, step into leadership, and rebuild after loss, it won't feel easy. It will feel uncertain for sure. You will doubt yourself, you will question your capacity, you will feel exposed. And you may feel like, oh am I capable of this? What are people thinking, right? 'Cause you don't really care what they're thinking. You're worried about are you gonna survive it though? And that doesn't mean your life is hard, it means your life is evolving. These are things that help you evolve. We romanticize comfort and villainize challenge, but comfort maintains and challenge creates. There is without a doubt this beautiful difference, right? So the nervous system and growth capacity. Growth requires nervous system tolerance. If your window of tolerance is small, even small challenges can feel overwhelming. So part of embracing healthy struggle is building capacity. And that means regulating your breath, recovering after setbacks, resting strategically, allowing mistakes without collapse, and talking to yourself with compassion. Struggle is healthy when you have recovery. Athletes train hard and then they rest. Entrepreneurs build and then they recalibrate. Emotional growth requires the same rhythm. It's not struggle twenty-four-seven, it's stretch, integrate, stretch, integrate. Without integration, struggle becomes burnout. With integration, struggle becomes mastery. And that's the difference, right? And so you don't just keep going, going, going, you step back. And you can ask yourself, okay, you know, some things are working here. Am I on this on the right path? You can, you know, look at where you're at, you can do that for sure, but it's not, oh, it's hard, I just run. You know, some people just run and they never get to where they want to go. So you want to see if it's something that you can evolve through. Now let's talk about how you know we admire excellence in people, right? We admire the Olympic champions, we admire successful leaders, we admire emotionally secure individuals, but we don't admire their practice sessions, we don't admire their failures, and we don't admire their setbacks, right? We admire couples who we see greatly in love and say, May that love find me, but do we see the struggle that it took to get there? Did we see the inner work that they had to do to get there? We don't admire that part, just outcomes, right? And so think about it. You know, gold is achieved through fire, right? Muscle is built through tearing and rebuilding. Skill is built through repetition and correction. And so that's why you know, liking struggle can make sense. If you remove the struggle, you remove the sharpening. And you don't want to do that. Because you know, uh and I and I hear it sometimes when I do readings, it's everybody else is having an easier time. I'm having the hardest time. Because you're living your life, you're in your body, so you can see your struggle. You can see the hard time that you're having, right? And so that is why you can say, I'm having a hard time and nobody else is, because you can't see their struggle. You just see some outcome, but you don't see what it took. Y you know, and when somebody goes through a hard time, you know, most of the time that's in private. You know, very few things are lived out loud unless you're in the public eye, right? Are you are you're in the private eye and you do something so explosive or you're part of something that somebody else did that you know that was so bad that it gets forced to the public and then you end up on a crime drama show or something. But a lot of struggle is done alone, private, and silent. It isn't loud, so we don't know what other people are going through. We think we know, but we really don't know. And so when we say I have it harder than everybody else, do you really? And it isn't a competition, it's I have it hard, and wow, maybe some other people are having it hard too. And we will all figure this out, but you know, connect yourself to people, and sometimes it's easier to lose that connection when we're struggling, and look for people who you know made it through a struggle. I know I had to look for people who I knew could get through chiropractic school, and I remember when I started in LA, I thought I told the admissions person, I said, you know, okay, I got in, but I don't know if I can make it. And she said, Well, I want you to meet somebody. And this person was graduating there, Val Victorian, they had eight children, no lie, eight children. They drove two hours away, they lived two hours, you know, northwest of the school, each way. But our school started at 7 a.m. So you could kind of do it. Traffic wasn't bad, and so we got out at like 2 30 or 3, so you kind of missed traffic. That helped, otherwise, it becomes three and four hours, right? LA traffic. And this person's husband left them. So her youngest was 15 months, and she said she got through. And I remember feeling so embarrassed and so small, and I didn't have to diminish myself, but I thought I just have one kid and I'm scared. And my kid was a teenager, or just about a teenager, right, twelve, thirteen, I I forgot uh exactly what age he was at the time, and I didn't want to meet this person because that was enough for me. And so y you know, and that was enough to make me get my butt in school and stay the course, no matter how hard. It was hard. I was broke a lot, I almost got evicted, almost lost my car, and you know, sometimes you wonder if the lights are gonna be on, but you get through it. And so if there's something that's gonna make you uncomfortable or feel hard or challenging, make a way. Because this life is short, and you don't want to be there at the end of your life like some people are with regrets. You want to say that you tried. It isn't about always succeeding, right? But it's about trying, and that's what counts. So let's reframe the current struggle. Ask yourself, is this season harming me? Are you being harmed or are you being challenged? Because if you're being harmed, yes, that's a struggle you gotta get out of. If you're in an abusive situation or something just really, really bad, right? You you just gotta get out. That's not the right type of struggle, that's a bad struggle, or is it stretching you? If it's stretching you, what is it strengthening? Is it teaching you patience, discipline, boundaries, emotional resilience, self-trust, faith? What if instead of saying my life is hard, you say my life is refining me? Because we have this illusion, right? And it's a social construct that life should be easy. And that just isn't so. There's always something that's gonna happen. You know, that shift changes your nervous system response. Struggle becomes purposeful, and purpose increases endurance. Even though I'm not practicing as a chiropractor, I had to go to school to get to where I am now. I had to meet my best buddy there who forced me into psychic and intuitive work, which got me into coaching and got me into doing all the things that I do now. And so whatever you do, it can pay off in different ways in many ways. It can open up different doors if you could just endure. And nowadays, because of social media, we hear all the time about single moms, single dads going to school and finishing. You know, when I started there really wasn't internet. So I couldn't look on the internet for inspiration. But look for your inspiration online, Google, you know, ask ChatGPT, is there somebody else, you know, going through this? So you don't feel alone. Connect with support groups. You know, find your peers, you know, find people who hold you accountable. That's important. So I'm gonna close this out. Struggle is not proof you are failing, it's proof you are engaging, it's proof you are expanding. It's proof you are not asleep in your own life. The goal is not to eliminate struggle. The goal is to build the capacity to move through it without collapsing because the absence of struggle is not growth. It's stagnation. And maybe what Elisa Liu understands, and it's wonderful at her young age, you know, and what we're remembering now is this struggle is where aliveness lives. Not constant suffering, not trauma cycles, know the difference, but chosen challenge, purposeful stretch, engaged growth. And remember, she took a year off, she took our or maybe even longer, she took some time off and came back to it. Sometimes you just take a break and come back to it. So if you're in a season of struggle right now, you may not have a hard life, you may be in the middle of becoming. So think of it that way. That is so important that you understand that you are becoming what you want to become, so that when you get to the end of your life, you can say, I tried. Even when I failed, even with some things fall through, I tried. So that concludes this episode. Thank you for listening. Have a great day, and I will see you in the next episode.