The Challenges

We are all born with strengths and weaknesses. Numerology treats a life as an education, and the Challenge numbers point to the weaknesses this life is set up to turn into strengths. Think of a Challenge as the subject you are enrolled in whether you signed up for it or not.

How a Challenge works

You have four Challenges, one for each of your four Pinnacles, and each one runs for the same stretch of years as its Pinnacle. The Pinnacles page explains how those years are worked out.

A Challenge usually announces itself as a pattern. The same kind of situation keeps arriving, dressed up a little differently each time, until you deal with it. You know what happens to whispers that get ignored. They get louder. A Challenge you avoid in your twenties has a habit of coming back in your forties in a harder form. The good news is that the pattern is also the classroom. The situations that keep turning up are exactly where the muscle gets built.

Finding your four Challenges

You need your birth date. Reduce the month, the day and the year each to a single digit, with no Master Numbers kept. Then you subtract, always taking the smaller number from the larger, so the answer is never below zero.

The first Challenge is the difference between the month and the day.

The second Challenge is the difference between the day and the year.

The third Challenge is the difference between the first and second Challenges. Some teachers call this the main Challenge.

The fourth Challenge is the difference between the month and the year.

When I teach this in a workshop I put the most weight on the fourth, because it goes with your fourth Pinnacle and stays with you for the rest of your life.

A worked example

Sarah Jane Mitchell was born on 14 March 1987. March is 3. The day 14 is 1 plus 4, which is 5. The year 1987 is 1 plus 9 plus 8 plus 7, which is 25, and 2 plus 5 is 7.

Her first Challenge is the difference between 3 and 5, which is 2. Her second is the difference between 5 and 7, which is 2. Her third is the difference between 2 and 2, which is 0. Her fourth is the difference between 3 and 7, which is 4. Sarah's Challenges are 2, 2, 0 and 4.

Why there is no 9

The largest single digit is 9 and the smallest is 1, and the biggest gap between them is 8. So done this way a Challenge can only ever be 0 to 8. My notes include a page on the 9 Challenge, and some other systems find room for it, but by this method you will never meet one. Master Numbers are not kept in the Challenges either, so there is no 11 or 22 here.

The 0 Challenge

A 0 Challenge, like Sarah's third, means no single area stands out as the lesson. You get a mixed bag instead, small challenges from every direction, all of them there to help you find your strength. People with a 0 are often capable and well rounded, with the good qualities of all the other numbers available to them. Their particular stumbling block is sticking to a decision. They can weigh a situation from every angle and see the answer clearly, and then not act on it. The work of the 0 is to trust your own judgment, choose, and stay with the choice.

What each Challenge asks of you

1. Standing as your own person. You defer, you wait for permission, you stay too long in jobs and relationships because leaving feels unkind. The lesson is to value yourself enough to be different, and to speak up without needing approval first.

2. Sensitivity in relationships. This one shows up as fear of criticism, self doubt, or misreading what other people need. The lesson is to stay tuned in to others without letting their opinions decide who you are. It is one of the most common Challenges of all.

3. Your voice. You cannot quite say what you mean, you joke when sincerity was called for, or you criticise yourself so hard that the creative work never gets started. The lesson is to speak what is actually in your heart and let your creativity out in public.

4. Discipline and structure. Deadlines slip, promises go unkept, projects start well and drift. The lesson is patient, practical, reliable work within real limits.

5. Freedom and change. Either too much, with constant change and nothing built, or too little, with a safe life that is privately unsatisfying. The lesson is to handle change with a steady hand and stop letting it rule you.

6. Love and responsibility. Either carrying burdens that are not yours, rescuing and controlling in the name of care, or avoiding commitment and keeping love at arm's length. The lesson is finding the middle, and letting other people set their own standards.

7. The inner life. Either retreating into thought and spirit as a hiding place, or staying so busy you never ask the deeper questions. The lesson is depth that still keeps you connected to people.

8. Money, power and authority. Either self worth tied up in wealth and status, or undercharging, giving your work away and shrinking from responsibility. The lesson is to handle the material world comfortably, without being owned by it.

Reading a Challenge beside its Pinnacle

A Challenge never sits alone. Read it with the Pinnacle for the same years and you see the whole chapter: what is being offered, and what you have to learn to take it up.

Sarah's first Pinnacle is an 8 and her first Challenge is a 2. Her early years offered ambition and early responsibility, and the lesson running underneath was sensitivity: fear of criticism, and taking other people's opinions to heart. Her fourth Pinnacle, from age 49, is a 1, the chance to set her own direction. Her fourth Challenge is a 4. The freedom is there, and the lesson is to build it properly, with discipline and patience, so it lasts.

When a Challenge has been met, something real changes. The same situations stop hurting in the same way, and the quality the Challenge was teaching becomes one of your strengths.

Which of your four Challenges are you working on right now, and has it started to get easier?

If you would like your own numbers read as part of a full chart, my readings are here.