The wall gets us eventually in our work/life. We hit it and we think we’re done. I read a long time ago that once your brain tells your body you don’t have any more, you actually have about 40% reserves still left in the tank. Your mind wants to protect you and begins to trick you into thinking it’s time to slow down. But you can not, push on.
There was a space in time where everyone was stating willpower was what you needed to get through hard goals. That you need to cache energy and save it up. To me willpower has only taught me one thing, to conserve my energy for something that may or may not come.
Resilience and building my acumen around it has served me much more usefully. The only way you can build up a great understanding of resiliency is to push through your biggest and most draining obstacles. Not to hold back, just bust through to that 40% reserve level. I’ve learned by pushing versus conserving what I am really capable of. I’ve been able to touch and stay in touch with my truest potential versus listening to what my assumed potential could be.
Working on the skill of resilience has the potential to really show us and help us understand the meaning from our most painful experiences. Willpower teaches us to prepare for the eventuality that it may come, to restrain our impulses versus really leveraging them.
I’ll end with this quote:
Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this, too, was gift. – Mary Oliver
I’m going to spend the first week of Sept. taking a deeper dive on the subject of resiliency. Stay tuned in. Hope you’ve had a really great holiday weekend so far. Thanks for reading.
Shawn
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