Working for a non-profit is a rewarding, but also very challenging experience. You must deal with critical social issues including poverty, hunger, education, race, and violence day in and day out, which can be very difficult to bear at times. And it's inevitable that your non-profit work will spill over into your personal life.

When the going gets really tough, it’s important to find ways to stay positive and motivated. Here are some valuable lessons I’ve learned throughout my 30 years in the field that have helped me overcome obstacles both in my personal life and as a non-profit leader.

1. When you feel overwhelmed, try to stay in control. Take one step at a time. Put a small piece of the puzzle into place and then work on the next piece. Don’t try to tackle it all at once.
2. Listen to advice, but make the decision on your own. You should listen to advice but ultimately you have to make the decision by yourself and live with it.
3. All things that happen to you are learning opportunities. Don’t run away from challenges. Challenges allow you to understand and develop as a person and a leader. We learn more from adversity and crisis than we do from our success.
4. Don’t be happy when someone else fails! Why? Because tomorrow you may be the one who fails.
5. Look after yourself. If you don’t, you’ll have a hard time taking care of others. There’s a good reason why they tell you to put your oxygen mask on first and then put one on your child.
6. There is a positive to every situation. You just have to seek it out. When things are going bad, remember they WILL get better.
7. There is a spark of hope, optimism and power in all of us. Try to get in touch with that spark and make it glow.
8. Treat yourself kindly when you screw up. We all make mistakes. Mistakes help us learn and grow. So, try to be good to yourself when you mess something up and take it as a lesson learned.
9. Ready-Fire-Aim is a natural process. You don’t have to understand everything when you start a task or a new job. You just have to trust in the process and learn from doing.
10. Compassion and passion without competence creates a dysfunctional action. Empathy and compassion are wonderful traits, but to succeed in life and in the non-profit field you also need to develop concrete skills and competencies in order to win.