Expect trouble as an inevitable part of life and when it comes, hold your head high, look it squarely in the e... — Ann Landers

Expect trouble as an inevitable part of life and when it comes, hold your head high, look it squarely in the eye and say “I will be bigger than you. You cannot defeat me.” Then repeat to yourself the most comforting of all words , “This too shall pass.”

Author: Ann Landers

Insight: When trouble hits, most of us instinctively shrink from it—we wince, we worry, we wonder if this time might actually break us. But there's something quietly powerful in Ann Landers' approach: meeting difficulty head-on instead of bracing against it. The key isn't pretending the problem doesn't matter or forcing optimism. It's about separating the difficulty itself from your ability to move through it. That's a real distinction. Your current crisis feels enormous because you're right in the middle of it, but the act of looking at it directly—refusing to be diminished by it—actually does make you larger than the trouble itself. The second part, "this too shall pass," isn't naive. It's grounded in simple observation: everything changes, including hard things. You don't need to solve everything today or feel fine immediately. You just need to be bigger than your circumstances right now, which mostly means not letting them convince you that you're smaller than you are. This matters because we live in a culture that often treats hardship as a sign of failure. Landers is saying the opposite: trouble isn't a detour from life. It's part of the route. How you meet it is what actually defines you.