Everything Prepared You
- Verla Wade
- Apr 19
- 7 min read
What Your Hardest Years Were Actually Building
by Verla Wade, Strategic Guide for Real-World Life Decisions
Where Clear Thinking Creates Consequential Leverage
This is the third reflection in a series on awakening. Read Part One: The Gift of Living Awake: In A World Still Revealing Itself https://www.askverla.com/post/the-gift-of-living-awake and Part Two: Awakening: When Awareness Deepens, Life Reorganizes. https://www.askverla.com/post/awakening-when-awareness-deepens-life-reorganizes
In the first two reflections in this series, I explored what it means to live awake in a world that continues revealing itself, and what awakening actually reorganizes once awareness deepens. This third reflection travels further back. To the question beneath both of those:
How Did You Get Here in the First Place?
What if nothing in your story was wasted? Not the failure. Not the loss. Not the season that asked for too much and felt unjust.
This is about the years that tested you, the losses you didn’t choose, and the chapters you would not have written.
This reflection is about what those years were actually building, and what they made possible that nothing else could have.
The Question Most People Never Let Themselves Finish
Most people have wondered, at some point, whether the difficult years of their lives were leading somewhere, or whether they were simply things they endured.
Nothing Was Wasted
Step back far enough and look honestly at your life.
The good years. The ones that stretched you. The decisions you'd make differently now with the clarity you earned after the fact. The losses you didn’t see coming. The ones you'd choose not to repeat, though in hindsight, you'd probably have to.
Many have found themselves replaying parts of their story, wondering how things might have unfolded differently. If that relationship hadn’t happened. If that failure hadn’t come. If that loss had never arrived.
Here is what I’ve come to understand, in my own life and in the lives of the leaders and individuals I work with:
If even one piece of your story had changed, you would not be the person standing here today, with the capacity you now carry.
The strength you carry. The awareness you've developed. The ability to read a room, sense what’s unspoken, lead with both clarity and compassion, that didn’t arrive with your first success. It was forged in the places you'd rather not revisit.
None of it was wasted. Even the parts you would not volunteer to repeat under any reasonable contract. Or any unreasonable one.
Your life was not happening to you. It was shaping you into someone who could carry more.
The Moments That Forged You
Every leader, every person of genuine depth, has a private catalog of moments they would not have chosen, and cannot imagine being without.
Not because difficulty is romantic. It isn’t.
Because the qualities that matter most in navigating complexity, leading others, and living with integrity are rarely developed in comfort. They are developed in the moments when life asks more of us than we thought we had to give.
Resilience is not built when conditions are ideal. It is built in the moments when you decide to keep going anyway. When you choose growth over bitterness. Purpose over pain. Forward over familiar.
Think of the person who lost the position they were certain was theirs. Who spent the next year questioning everything. Who built, in that year of questioning, the exact clarity and resolve that their next chapter required.
If something valuable were happening, you would be able to recognize it. Most people have never questioned that assumption. They might do well to.
Change is part of the forging.
Nothing in nature stays the same. The land renews itself year after year, not despite disruption, because of it. Growth requires movement. Stillness has its place. It was never meant to be permanent.
The changes you chose brought you to where you are now. The changes you didn’t choose shaped you in ways you never anticipated, ways you may not yet fully see.
Either way, change has always been the doorway to the next version of yourself. It still is.
The Strength Was Always Yours
There comes a point, and most people who have done serious inner work recognize this moment, when it becomes unmistakably clear: no one is coming to save you. And if you’ve been paying attention, you’ve already noticed that.
Not because you don’t deserve support. Not because love and community don’t matter. They do, profoundly.
The deepest clarity, the most durable stability, the kind of confidence that does not require external validation to survive.
That has only ever lived in one place.
Inside your own choices.Inside your own courage.Inside your own willingness to stand back up when life knocks you down.
This is not a call to isolation or self-reliance at the expense of connection. It is a recognition of where authority actually lives. And always has.
You do not need permission to rise. You do not need perfect conditions to begin again.
Everything you need to grow and step into the next chapter already exists within you.
It was there when things were hard. It remains there now.
Looking Back With Different Eyes
One of the clearest signs that your awareness is maturing is the ability to look back at your own story without resentment.
Not with naivety, pretending the hard things weren’t hard. Not with forced gratitude, performing acceptance you don’t yet feel.
With genuine understanding.
The setbacks that redirected you. The failures that dismantled assumptions that needed dismantling. The losses that deepened your capacity for compassion in ways nothing else could have.
Looking back, I can see that many of the things I once experienced as setbacks were turning points wearing difficult disguises. They pushed me to question, to search, to grow, and ultimately to wake up to a deeper understanding of life and of myself.
As you read this: what is one chapter of your story that once felt like a setback, and now reveals itself as the turning point that brought you here?
When you can look at your entire journey, the full arc of it, including the years you would not have chosen, and arrive at something close to gratitude, the conflict with your own history begins to end.
This is where everything coalesces. The journey.The effort.The timing.The reward.
Into your current foundation and your new launching pad.
If Life Is Shifting Right Now
Perhaps you are in one of those years right now.
Something is changing. The ground feels less certain than it did. Old structures, in your work, your relationships, your understanding of yourself, are revealing their edges.
Some of them making it harder to ignore than others.
That is not a sign that something has gone wrong.
In every previous period of your life, disruption preceded growth. The pattern has held. There is no indication this moment is the exception.
Think of what happens beneath the ground in winter. Nothing visible. Nothing measurable. And yet the entire root system is deepening, expanding, preparing for what comes next. You cannot see it. It is happening anyway.
The most useful question you can bring to a difficult period is not “when will this end?”It is “what is this developing in me, and revealing, that nothing else could?”
When the path forward is unclear, the most productive move is rarely to push harder. It is to ask honestly: what is being completed here, and am I willing to let it finish?
The next time you feel the pressure to explain your pace or defend your process, pause. Ask yourself whether you are actually behind, or whether something important is still forming. The answer will tell you everything.
If life feels like it is shifting, lean into it.
Not recklessly. With awareness aligned with your values and standards. With the steadiness that comes from knowing you have navigated difficulty before and arrived at a place worth the cost of getting there.
Trust that what is forming in this chapter has value, even when the shape of it is not yet visible.
It almost never is. Until it is.
Everything Prepared You For The Capacity You Now Carry
The Wrap: Owning What Was Built
Your past was not a series of random events. It was a curriculum. One that did not ask for your opinion before enrolling you.
The culture will not tell you that, nor does it reward it.
It measures output, velocity, and visible results. It has very little language for what happens in the stretches when nothing visible is moving.
Every course correction, every uninvited turn was preparing you for the stage you are now entering. The one where awareness deepens, where clarity becomes a way of life rather than an occasional visitor, and where the full weight of your experience becomes wisdom you can offer to others.
Nothing was wasted. Not one year.Not even one day.
The question now is not what you navigated. It is what you do with who that made you.
When you can look at the whole of your journey, including the years you would not have chosen, and arrive at genuine gratitude, something in you reorganizes. Not just how you see the past. How you carry yourself into what is coming.
Everything that brought you here was intentional, even when it didn’t feel that way. Especially as it was happening.
You have always been further along than you realized. Own it now. Move like it. Keep going.
Thank you for being here, and until we meet again…
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About Verla
Verla Wade brings a disciplined ability to recognize patterns others overlook, developed through decades of corporate sales, marketing leadership, and advisory work. Her work focuses on what sits beneath the surface, the underlying dynamics that quietly shape decisions, timing, and outcomes across business and relationships.
Clients often come to her after they’ve analyzed a situation from every angle and still find that something isn’t resolving. This is where Verla works.
She identifies what’s actually driving the situation and translates it into clear, grounded decisions and practical action, often bringing resolution faster than expected. Her approach is confidential, direct, and precise. Verla is thoughtful in execution, compassionate without compromise, and willing to name what needs to be named.
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