Live. Learn. Lead.

I have been reading a book by Steve Magness entitled, Do Hard Things: Why We Get Resilience Wrong and the Surprising Science of Real Toughness. It’s a long title and it has not been a quick read for me. First off, I started reading it on vacation last January right after reading The Storyteller: Tales of Life and Music, by Dave Groh, which I devoured. The Storyteller was like candy for my brain. I couldn’t put it down. Do Hard Things, maybe as the name implies, is a bit more like eating vegetables. It’s good for you. The process is slow. And given the choice between candy and vegetables, I’m picking candy 99% of the time. So… I put Do Hard Things down for 11 months. I carried it with me on lots of plane trips but it wasn’t opened to be pondered.

Until January of 2024. Part of my new year, new me resolutions is to read for at least 10 minutes per day and write for at least 10 minutes per day. Reading for 10 minutes has been good. I decided that my 10 minutes must be the book and so every day I make some progress toward finishing a really good book. It causes me to think about myself, how I perceive challenges, how I respond when things feel difficult. And as much as I am aware of what I should be doing, doing what I know I should be doing is hard. 

So… reading and finishing Do Hard Things has been a hard thing to do. But beyond that…

I get bound up most days when I try to sit down and write. I have imposters syndrome. I think I don’t have anything interesting to say. I tell myself no one wants to read what I wrote. I have excuses and rationalizations to sidetrack me from just sitting down and writing for 10 minutes.

I just finished up a chapter on positive and negative self-talk and it was kind of a slap in the face. Magness sites a variety of research on self-talk and what makes it effective and ineffective. But this quote stood out to me:

“When we are in the midst of a situation that requires toughness our goal is to make sure the right self is in charge, that whatever inner voice will push us toward our desired action is winning the inner battle.“

Steve Magness – Do Hard Things

Toughness can be misconstrued in that quote. For my purpose you change the phrasing to, “When we are in the midst of a challenging situation…” We have multiple inner voices and those voices change depending on the situation. 

When I am running and it gets hard or I don’t really want to push through the training, in most instances I can push through. During the Chicago Marathon 2024 at mile 22 I hit a wall. My nutrition was off and my legs were feeling particularly heavy. I walked through the aid station and pushed forward. It was slower than I wanted to be running but I was moving forward. When I got to mile 24, I was done. I felt like I couldn’t keep moving. I walked for about 100 yards. In that time I gave a lot of positive self-talk and maybe a little degrading in the hopes of spurring me on. And I picked it up and while I didn’t hit my mile 22 pace, I finished strong. I told myself that I had no choice but to finish. That I had to just put one foot in front of the other and push for 2 miles. That was going to be less than 20 more minutes. I ended up finishing 4 minutes shy of my goal of 3:50 minutes.

However, when I’m reminded that I need to do 10 minutes of writing, the voice in my head is my low self esteem voice. It’s that imposter voice. And it’s easy to feel like that imposter is accurate. Right now, when I don’t have much of an audience that voice seems valid. But I also know that every 10 minutes that I write I’m synthesizing my ideas and clarifying what I understand to be true. I’m building my writing muscles just like I had to build my aerobic engine to run a marathon. And maybe, with consistence, hard work, and a little luck, others will read these words and connect with these ideas.

How do you push forward when you’re in a challenging situation?