Learn to accept discomfort and train resilience to achieve your goals.
“If you risk nothing you gain nothing”
Bear Grylls.
I hate the heat. Yet this suffocating river that has been flooding spain for a few days reminded me of an important lesson about Resilience and the ability to accept the discomfort.
Don't worry: this post won't tell you about "7 Effective Ways to Eat Live Insects" or "How to Make Lemonade With Your Pee"; we leave these things to our friend Bear Grylls. In this article we will see how important it is to develop your "resilience muscle", but above all we will see why shun discomfort it's literally ruining your life.
The escape from discomfort
Just hearing about the word unease, we are, how to say ... uneasy.
Our company has developed and grown with the cult of comfort: we pay handsomely for additional options to have more comfortable cars, we fill our homes with trinkets that make them more comfortable, we expect our travels and our movements to be always… more comfortable.
But discomfort is not something to be feared, discomfort, in reality, is nothing more than the North Star that points us in the right direction to reach our goals.
Andre ', listen to me: take a nice cool shower, drink 7-8 liters of water and stop shooting these “sado-maso” minchiatins of personal growth!
Don't get me wrong, I'm not an Indian fakir sleeping on a bed of nails and eating snake eggs (accompanied with pee-flavored lemonade). I also love to indulge myself in some luxuries, especially to reward myself after reaching a goal. However, I remain convinced that shun discomfort and don't train your own Resilience is a serious mistake.
Think about the difficulties you have experienced or are experiencing in these months: maybe it is about university results unsatisfactory, maybe you would like get back in shape, but you can't get regular with your diet and exercise, no wait, there are: you are struggling with that black beast called procrastination!
All these problems have a common root: the escape from discomfort.
Stop being the breeding chick!
When I was younger and for some reason I found myself avoiding some form of discomfort (translated: whimpering), my father reprimanded me with this sentence:
“Stop doing the breeding chick! "
I have always admired my father's temper. Born during the Second World War, he and his generation have faced difficulties and hardships that today we only hear about absent-mindedly on the news. Not surprisingly, in their eyes, when we complain about some minor discomfort, we are nothing more than a lot of small farm chicks.
It's hot? We want air conditioning. We have to study? Better to fuck around on Facebook. Are we out of shape? Why give up the sofa and some junk food ?!
Yet, the less we train our resilience, the less we endure any minor setbacks, setbacks or renunciations. We do not tolerate them at all and if we are forced to face them, inevitably we feel the frustration grow.
But enough André with all these renunciations! I want to enjoy life! YOLO: You Only Live Once!
The great deception
Ours is a generation that has confused morbid pleasure with happiness (if you don't know the difference, read it this post). We are like junkies constantly looking for a dose of immediate pleasure: whether it is a text message, a "like" or a crap food, it makes little difference, the important thing is never to feel uncomfortable, never face the slightest difficulty, but above all always hole up in our small garden called comfort zone.
Surgically avoiding any discomfort, we find ourselves confined to this golden cage. We are trapped in a vicious circle where the obsessive pursuit of pleasure leads us to be unhappy and unhappiness in turn leads us to seek even more pleasure, more comfort, more distractions.
The truth is that the happiness, success and the best fruits that life can reserve for us are found exactly on the opposite bank of the river of discomfort, immediately after the mound of our fears.
Learn to accept discomfort
In my experience, accepting discomfort in small doses, gradually strengthening resilience and constantly training willpower (find useful tips on this here ), were essential steps for the achievement of some objectives that I particularly cared about. If you are having a hard time making your dreams come true, if you feel stuck, with no way out, try this strategy:
- Think of a goal that is very important to you. Maybe it's thatUniversity exam that you just can't get over, those extra pounds to get rid of, or that project to create a passive income.
- Focus on the few essential actions to achieve your goal: apply i basic principles for making money, adopt a training program simple and immediate, study with a effective study method. Some of these actions will most likely make you uncomfortable. On other occasions I'm sure you have escaped this discomfort, going to console yourself with some distraction or pleasure (Whatsapp, Facebook, or a nice dessert are excellent examples of refuge pleasures).
- Today I ask you to make a different choice. Observe the discomfort, accept it, do not hide in some "pleasure refuge" like a farm chick.
Observe the discomfort. Accept it. Take action.
That's it. Recognize discomfort as a necessary step on your path to success. THE our muscles they grow and are strengthened through micro-lacerations of the tissues: the same principle applies to any path of personal growth. If you learn to live with those little discomforts that mark the way to your dreams, there will be no dream that will not be within your reach.
