‘As long as you live, keep learning how to live’
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When faced with the inevitable resistance of challenge, a mindset of passivity leads only to failure. The emotions attached to genuine challenge are deeply destructive (i.e: doubt, fear, despair, chaos to name some at the top end) and will destroy any resolve we may hold if we are meek in our approach. We must approach challenges with aggression and a mentality to fight. Nothing will be given freely by challenge and for that you should be truly grateful. To access the extraordinary rewards held within challenge, one must fight forward into it aggressively. One must grit their teeth, drop their head and plough forward. People covet resilience so much in this day and age but as a virtue of utility in one’s day to day life resiliency pales in comparison to fight. A rock on the shore is resilient to the crashing waves but it never moves forward.
Before your next challenge choose 3 words to encapsulate what you will go through, in your own words. For example – Long, hard, dark, cold, suffering, hot, uncomfortable – feel free to insert an expletive if you feel it appropriate; as you will see I do. This is a strategy to prepare for the global experience of an upcoming endeavour and the process created to take possible surprises out of the experience by preparing your awareness for the expected reality of what is coming.
For example, you are running a marathon and beforehand attach the banner of LONG to it, if and when that ‘comes up for you’ during your marathon experience (“this is fucking long”), your internal self talk will be more prepared to, and efficient at, moving your focus back to what’s important – your performance. That self talk response might go something like this – “too right it’s fucking long, you told yourself it was going to be yesterday/this morning.”
When I rowed from New York to Galway my 3 banners for the challenge were – (fucking) long, (fucking) wet and (fucking) hard, so when it got really difficult and my internal victim was raising it’s head with talk like “this is fucking hard”, my prepared mind would shoot back, “you don’t fucking say. You knew this was going to be fucking hard now get on with doing the work that will get you to where you want to get too”
This is a very important question to keep at the front of your mind. I say this because perception, one of our nervous system’s six functions, plays a prominent role in forming our beliefs and we function consciously and subconsciously out of a web of paradigms that make up our belief system.
What we must hold an awareness of, particularly for those learning the mental and emotional skills to push themselves is; when we are genuinely challenged we will experience disturbing mental states, and we can perceive these states, through “1st level thinking” (our innate reaction to the stress response) as shocking and for a nano second or two we can feel real weakness. These feelings can be seriously confronting (nobody wants to feel weak) however we must endeavour to reset our mind in those moments, step up to higher mental ground, out of the panic and remember to tell ourselves “it is just information” and not to let heavy emotions hijack an amazing opportunity to connect with a high plane of thinking in such extremes.
‘As long as you live, keep learning how to live’
~ Seneca
