"Why do we do hard things?"
We were doing our Pumpkin Ruck at The Farmstead last Friday night, and while we were rucking with our pumpkins through the corn maze, our member Scott asked his daughter, “why do we do hard things?”
She immediately responded with enthusiasm, “…to improve our lives!”
What we encourage everyone who takes part in training here to do is to choose to do the hard things.
The hard things that we do are relative to every individual. Your hard things may be different in kind and degree than your classmates’ and training partners’ hard things.
What specific hard things we do though, do not matter. What matters is that we do choose those things to do.
The hard things we do in class induce some sort of physical and/or mental stress to allow us to grow.
When we stress ourselves, we induce some type of adaptation. What we’re looking for is to adapt to improve our ability to deal with increasing levels of stress, whether they are physical or mental.
With our greater level of adaptability to stress in the gym, we should have a greater capability of handling stress outside the gym.
That’s where we start choosing to do hard things.
For example, choose to:
Take the stairs instead of the escalator at the mall or the airport
Park as far away as you can from the supermarket entrance
Carry your groceries from the supermarket out to your car in the parking lot instead of pushing a shopping cart
Wake up early on the weekends like you do during the week to get an earlier start on your activities
Replace the french fries with a salad or green mix when you’re eating out
Those are just 5 things that you may seemingly think that are hard that you can start playing around with.
You not only improve to become a more capable and adaptable human being after doing hard things like these, but you also gain confidence in knowing that you can do more than what you think you’re capable of doing.
What are some other hard things that you choose to do on a regular basis outside of the gym that help you improve?
If you need some more ideas, then come on over and join us in class to do some hard things with us.