If you’ve lived on this planet for any time at all, then you’ve experienced both facets of life, on the good and bad ends of the spectrum. Life can sometimes seem overwhelming, and when we hit obstacles and fall down a seemingly neverending black hole, it feels like we’ve hit rock bottom. However, did you ever think about the possible benefits of hitting a dead end? What if we could pull something positive from these experiences? The following experiences are definitely not the most pleasant to deal with in the moment, but they have hidden lessons if you dig just a bit deeper.

Here are 5 bad things in life that can put you directly on the path to the best things:

1. Losing your job

Sure, hearing those two words from your boss – “You’re fired” – never feels good. It hurts your ego to get terminated from a job, not to mention, it hurts your bank account. However, maybe that just means that you have been needing a different job better tailored to your interests and skills. Maybe the job you had wasn’t right for you all along.

Losing a job gives you the opportunity to go out and look for something else that excites you, something where the people appreciate your hard work and value you in the company. Or, maybe you’d like to try self-employment and run your own business. People think losing their job is the end of the world, but it isn’t – it’s just the end of one chapter. You get to consciously create the rest, so don’t allow one roadblock to stop you from living out the rest of your journey.

2. Ending a relationship

Probably even worse than losing a job is the feeling you get after you lose someone you really love. You go through the stages of sadness, anger, frustration, denial, and acceptance. You lose sleep, lose your appetite. And you wish things had just gone differently. You wish you had said something different, done something more to save the relationship…but don’t mull over what you could’ve done. Obviously, you came into each other’s lives for a reason, and you left for a reason.

Some people just aren’t meant to stick around with us forever, but we can appreciate their company while we have it, and focus on what we learned from them. If your relationship ends, this gives you the chance to rediscover yourself, mingle with new people, and enjoy freedom for a while.

It might feel like you have a black cloud over you if you’re freshly single, but it will pass. Focus on getting to know yourself again, and getting involved in activities that light up your soul.

3. Getting betrayed by “friends”

If you had a group of friends that didn’t stay by your side when you truly needed them, then they weren’t really friends in the first place. It’s painful to get burned by people we thought cared about us, and when it happens, the world just looks a bit darker, and we start to trust people less. We start to close ourselves off from new relationships and meeting new people.

However, don’t let your heart grow cold just because of a few people. Pick yourself up and focus on meeting new friends you know will have your back. Of course, you can’t ever really know for sure what kind of friends you have until you really need them, but in general, following your heart and trusting your intuition will allow you to manifest the right friendships and meet kindhearted, genuine people.

4. Being told you aren’t good enough

How many times have you been told this in your life? How many times have you let it get to you? If people can’t see our worth, then it isn’t our problem. The only person’s opinion that matters is your own. If you value yourself and know your own capabilities and potential, then it doesn’t matter what others have to say.

When people try to bring you down, this just gives you more of an opportunity to build up self-love and self-confidence and remind yourself why you’re an amazing, valuable person in this world.

5. Getting rejected

This could apply to many things – rejection from a love interest, a friend, a boss, a college, or even family – however, it all hurts the same way. We naturally want to feel loved and accepted, so when someone rejects us, our ego takes a blow. We want to crawl in a hole and forget about the whole experience, but to grow from it, we must examine things more closely and see what lessons might be hiding underneath the surface.

For one, rejection can teach us to love ourselves more. Where you don’t get love or acceptance from others, you can give it to yourself. For another, rejection can show us that other people’s opinions don’t hold as much weight as we might’ve previously thought. If someone doesn’t like you or agree with you, does that really matter? Does it affect your life or your own self-worth in any way? At the end of the day, we have ourselves and our own self-image. If those are intact, nothing else can affect us, and the negatives in life can easily turn into positives.