1. Stop running away from your burden. Instead, acknowledge and seek to understand it. 

I'm sure many of us have heard it before: running away from our problems will not make them go away. Pretending they don't exist or ignoring them might temporarily give you relief, but in the long run, they will come back to find you again, knocking on your door until you have no choice but to address it.

Instead, we need to understand the pain for what it is and come to accept it. We need to look at our pain as a close friend, and question them to understand the roots of where they come from and why they hurt, rather than simply ignoring them.

Write down a list of questions to try and understand how that burden you are facing is preventing you from achieving your goals. Take this time to understand what the burden is and why it is there.

Once we come to understand the roots of our problems, we will be better equipped to fix them (or our perceptions of them).

2. Have some compassion and empathy. 

In the previous step, we took the time to consider our pains through questioning to learn more about them. This questioning doesn't get us very far unless we apply compassion and empathy to truly understand our burdens from a place that will lead us to acceptance.

Think your burdens as a good friend. Just because we understand what that friend was saying, doesn't mean we agree nor connect to it. Often, we prevent ourselves from allowing ourselves to connect to those people because of our own fear of change and vulnerability. For this reason, it is essential that we understand our friend as it we were them. We need to be able to connect with our friend on emotional level and understand the feelings that took place within them during that time. By doing so, we illustrate empathy which encourages feelings of compassion that stirs our desire to want to love and accept them.

Take sometime to consider the internal feelings of the subject involved in your burden. Is it something about yourself? Try looking upon yourself as a separate person and allow yourself to have compassion for that part of yourself. Practice some good self love here. Is your burden about someone else? Try to connect and understand the pain they are feeling or the situation they have been going through. Let these emotions that accompany you move you to want to help.

Like wise, let this empathy and compassion help us to want to overcome our pain and burdens from a place of love and understanding so that we may be able to see the beauty of our burdens come closer to accepting them.

3. Change your perception.

We are not be able to change everything in the world. While we have the power to manipulate things and influence others, we are not the deciding factor of their change.

We can't go back in time to reverse an incident. We can't fast forward through painful moments in our lives. We can't press delete and expect the burden to go away as if it never existed.

I know, bummer right? I wish I could just press a delete button and get rid of certain events that happened. I can't though.

What can I do then?

At this point, we've come to understand the roots of our pains and burdens. We've lent empathy and compassion so that we may have the desire and motivation to accept it. Now, we need the key that allows us to completely accept it: changing our perception. We might not be able to change the burden, but we can change how we perceive that burden and the role that burden now plays in our life.

Take the time to rethink how you can change your perception of a burden. Now, use it as a fuel for accomplishing your goals.

When we learn to change our perceptions, we can change a burden that holds us back into a tool that propels us toward being who we want to be.