Embrace the suck
bigIdeas from the book by Navy SEAL veteran
This sucks! I am not gonna do this.
How many times we have been through this only realizing that if we had embraced the suck, things would have been a lot different!
Sharing bigIdeas from the book "Embrace the Suck" - a book about resilience and how to deal with adversity - written by Brent Gleeson, a former Navy SEAL combat veteran turned entrepreneur and speaker.
The book is based on the author's experience as a Navy SEAL and the principles he learned in the military that can be applied to personal and professional life. The book provides tools and frameworks for dealing with adversity and embracing challenges.
Why do I recommend this? It is a raw, brutally honest, in-your-face self-help guide that teaches readers how to use pain and discomfort as a motivator to achieve their goals.
Btw, what am I reading now? Star Wars made easy (helped me really understand the crazy thinking behind Star Wars series).
Anyways, sharing bigIdeas from the book Star Wars made easy.
Do something that sucks, everyday.
Stress and anxiety can be great tools if you know how to use them and choose to use them. With all the media and medical attention on the negative impacts of stress, it’s easy to conclude it’s irredeemably bad, something to be avoided at all costs.
This applies to both physical and emotional stress and anxiety.
Pain is a pathway.
Life will eventually knock you hard on your a**.
Accepting that fact is a stepping-stone to growth. Just expect pain. Constantly trying to avoid hardship and pain will only hold you back. Each experience, each moment that you have is precious.
Challenge every moment to make the best out of even the worst circumstances. You may well be amazed at the power, wisdom and strength you gain in the process.
“You might be wondering this and telling me to go f*** myself, that I haven’t been through the kind of suffering you’ve endured. And that may very well be true. My intention with this book is not to appear that I know it all or have experienced all the hardships life has to suffer. I’m simply providing a tool to use in your own way while navigating darkness and uncertainty.” – Brent Glesson
The point is we all have our own journeys. We all have to embrace the suck along the way.
If you ain’t falling, you ain’t trying.
Failure is usually a fairly demoralizing and upsetting experience. It can alter your perception and make you believe things that simply aren’t true.
Unless you learn to respond to failure in psychologically adaptive ways, it can paralyze you and ultimately keep you from moving forward.
To deal with inevitable setbacks, Embrace the Suck has eight failure realities that you must understand:
Reality 1: Failure makes the same goal seem less attainable.
In one study of a special operations sniper school, instructors had their students fire at targets from the same distance on an unmarked range. They then had the students estimate the distance to the targets.
Students who scored lower believed the targets to be significantly farther out than students who scored the highest. Failure distorts perception if you allow it to.
Reality 2: Failure alters your perception of your abilities.
As much as failure can distort your perception of goals, it can also alter your assumptions about ability. Students who fail the selection process fall into deep depression -sometimes even become suicidal.
Failure can make us doubt our skills, intelligence and capabilities. Simply acknowledging this is the first step to self-correction.
Reality 3: Failure can make you feel helpless.
This is a mental defense mechanism.
When we fail, the brain sends signals making us feel temporarily helpless. It’s an emotional wound so to speak. Like when a toddler touches a hot stove and the brain says not to do that again.
The same applies with failure. When we allow ourselves to be convinced we’re helpless, we successfully avoid future failures. But that’s actually what makes you a failure – when you listen to the voices and rob yourself of future success.
Reality 4: A failure experience can cause a fear of failure complex.
People also tend to avoid success as much as they try to avoid failure. The two usually go hand in hand. Success rarely, if ever, comes without experiencing some failure along the way. This is why success is very uncomfortable. So rather than working on improving their abilities and skills, people head back to home base – their own cozy little comfort zone.
Reality 5: Fear of failure often leads to unconscious self-sabotaging.
Like the college student who decides to stay out drinking until 2AM before a big job interview he knows he’ll bomb. Or the young kid who doesn’t pick up a sport as naturally as her peers, so she tells her parents she hates it and wants to quit. These kinds of self-sabotaging behaviors guarantee future failure. The best accomplishments in life usually reside on the other side of fear.
Reality 6: The pressure to succeed can cause choking.
Choking at those critical game-winning moments, blanking out during the test after weeks of studying, leaving out the most critical talking points in your presentation are usually a result of over-thinking. Proper preparation, not over-thinking, is the bedrock of pulling off your best performance in critical moments.
Reality 7: Willpower is like a muscle. Use it or lose it.
Like muscles that become fatigued, mental willpower can become overworked and undernourished. Soldiers participating in sustained combat experience battle fatigue, which causes clouded thinking, lack of ability to control emotion, confusion and even depression. So when you feel your willpower fading away, take a good rest and space to revisit your motivations. Just don’t take it too long.
Reality 8: The healthiest psychological response to failure is focusing on what you can control.
This ability is fundamental to building resilience. Failure can result in us focusing primarily on the cause of our current adversity. We look backward instead of forward. We focus on elements we have no control over as opposed to developing an action plan – leveraging what’s in our control.