You're Built To Endure
Posted on February 18, 2023 by Bryan Yates, One of Thousands of Performance Coaches on Noomii.
From the poetic to the mundane, whether tackling a physical challenge, running a company, losing weight, or getting sober, the ability to endure ...
Humans are built to endure. It’s one reason we are driven to explore not only our surroundings and distant places, but the capacity of our minds and spirits too. For ancient peoples endurance was not just a skill to be learned, it was a requirement of survival. We needed it to withstand the long, lean periods in between hunting roaming herds over great distances. As a literary theme, endurance is woven deeply into some of our most foundational cultural stories: Odysseus’ perilous 20-year journey home from the Peloponnesian War, Moses and his followers in the desert for 40 years, Siddhartha Gautama’s long path to becoming the Buddha. These are tales of struggle, adaptation, and then transformation.
Life—for most of us in our modern world—is far less immediate and consequential. We no longer live or die by the hunt, and there are seemingly fewer new horizons out there to be uncovered. Many turn to other pursuits to test themselves: running 10k, marathons, ultra marathons; cycling wildly demanding on- and off-road races; completing triathlons and ironman events; sailing, paddle boarding, or swimming great distances; or hiking iconic mountains and trails. These, and other events like them, have become big business, attracting first-time recreational participants to experienced elite athletes—each with something to prove to themselves. For the first-timer, the thrill of just finishing something they once only imagined possible is fix enough. For others, though, developing the ability to persevere longer, harder, and faster is the addiction. Most of us who successfully complete our first bucket-list endurance event are forever changed by the experience. And that, right there, is the business.
Everyday life is challenging, and one not need be an athlete to experience its enduring demands. We go to school, get jobs, raise families, battle traffic, chase down a never-ending to-do list, run from appointment to appointment. Just living life can feel like a constant, non-stop loop on the metaphorical treadmill. Why are there so many energy drinks out there? Our exhausting go, go, go lives demand stamina. One does not need to see themself an athlete to reap the benefits that come from training endurance. As we are living longer, we will need our bodies and minds to perform longer—and better. The results of improving endurance are greater mobility, stamina, vitality, and efficiency—of mind and body. More energy, less fatigue. I’m in.
From the poetic to the mundane, whether tackling a physical challenge, running a company, losing weight, or getting sober, the ability to endure difficult things is a common human trait. It is a shared experience. We stretch past our inner expectation, we extend our comfort zones, we change, we grow.
It is a trap to view endurance as a primarily physical ability. That is only part of it. People live and adapt to tight, challenging conditions for extended periods all the time. Scott Kelly lived for a year on the International Space Station. Nelson Mandela spent decades imprisoned on Robben Island. It’s a mindset, a spirit, a way of comprehending, adapting to, and optimizing a current state of existence. It philosophically starts first with a conscious (or unconscious) choice, an agreement with oneself that says “I choose to endure.”
Building one’s own endurance means cultivating a corresponding mentality. It boils down to forging a set of tools, behaviors, and habits that guide how to approach accomplishing big demands. In short, it is a mindset. Beyond accomplishing an endurance goal, it is mindset with steps that can be applied to most pursuits: losing weight; building, growing, and managing an organization; or, changing personal habits. Personally speaking, when I first got sober, many of the processes I used in training for big endurance events came back into play, albeit in a wholly different light.
Very broadly, the big bullet points of the endurance mindset include:
Know Your Why.
Build A Plan. Trust The Plan. Stick to The Plan.
Stop Becoming. Start Being.
Just Get Started.
Focus On Process Before Results.
Consistency Wins.
Control What You Can Control.
Keep It Simple. One Day At A Time.
A person wanting to transform their body would be right to ask, “great, but how does this apply to me changing my weight?” I’m intentionally vague on these, because each deserves a more thorough investigation of what they mean and how they can guide our action.
For now, it is more important to accept that the progress of change happens gradually. It is often as much about letting of what no longer serves us as it is about building up what does. It’s easy to get derailed by the scope of whatever it is we’re trying to do. We have an idea of where we want to go, but the details are overwhelming. Break the new habits into the smallest units possible. Master them. Then progress. Most importantly, though, real, sustainable change is very often more about making deep changes to the spirit. It is about cultivating and practicing a mindset that makes lasting change possible.
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