Physically Hard Things Make Mentally Hard Things Easy
You'll face lots of mentally hard things in your career, but if you've completed difficult physical challenges, you'll be in a better position to face the mental ones.
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Physically Hard Things Make Mentally Hard Things Easy
Assuming you’re just a regular human like me, you’ve faced your share of mental challenges over the years. You’ve likely come across really difficult situations at work where you’ve wondered how you’d get through it.
You might be facing an almost impossible deadline or juggling multiple projects that could mean the life or death of your company. You might be dealing with difficult people issues like a large layoff. Or you may just struggle with depression and anxiety that make even the smallest things feel like giant mountains.
Ultimately, these are all mental challenges that you’ll have to overcome one way or another. And you probably have ways of handling them, which isn’t what I want to cover today. Instead I want to talk about how you can reframe these challenges to make them seem far less huge and come at them knowing that you’re capable of overcoming them.
This used to be very difficult for me. Big issues would pile up and I would look at them as though there was no way to get it all done, but then I started getting serious about physical health.
As part of this journey, I got serious about fitness and working out. During COVID, I built out a gym in my garage and slowly filled it with all the tools you need to stay in shape and do lots of different workouts. It’s freezing in the winter and way to hot in the summer, but I love it.
I found some great programming specifically tailored to people who work out in their garage who don’t have access to all the bells and whistles of big gym. (As an aside, if you’re wanting to get serious about fitness, find some regimented programming. Don’t rely on just going to the gym and randomly doing things. You’ll get far more from your time investment by following a plan created by an expert.)
When I first started getting serious about fitness 5 or 6 years ago, I wasn’t necessarily in bad shape, but it wasn’t great. I jumped in with both feet and joined my local CrossFit gym and every workout was a major challenge. But I eventually built up my strength and conditioning and they started to get a bit easier. When COVID hit, I retreated to my garage and found the programming I’ve been following for the past 3 years.
One of the things included in this programming is a focus on mental strength and toughness along with physical strength and toughness. The work on that mental aspect is through specific workouts designed to be physically grueling, but also mentally really hard. The idea is that at some point in the workout, you will find out who you really are and what you’re capable of. You’re going to want to quit the entire time, but you’ll have to find the mental toughness to keep going. They call these “Meet Yourself Saturday” workouts and the title is pretty accurate (note: at the end of this article, I’ll list my “favorite” of these workouts). Access to all what all these workouts entail is free, so check them out.
Here’s the main point of this entire post:
Extreme physical challenges help you be prepared for mental challenges.
This might be hard to believe if you’ve never actually done something extremely physically challenging. They don’t seem on the surface to have much to do with one another. For my part, taking part in these physical challenges has literally rewired my brain to look at all hard challenges differently. When you face something difficult, you’ll have a catalogue of challenges to look back on to compare to what you’re facing right now. You’ll find yourself saying, “No way this is harder than the time I …”
And that ability will make you more resilient to anything you’ll face at work and life.
If you checked out those Meet Yourself Saturday (MYS) workouts and are curious about the ones I’ve done and “enjoyed,” I won’t list them all here, but I think I’ve done around half of the ones on this page. My favorites that I come back to are:
River Heist
Confused 5K
EO3 5K
What the Ruck?
Heavy Load, Short Distance
Grog Bowl
Out and Back
Grog Bowl and River Heist are probably the ones that I actually enjoy doing and strive to beat my best time each time I attempt it.
(Just as an important disclaimer, I not advocating that you jump head first into these intense workouts (like the Meet Yourself Saturday ones) if you don’t do any physical activity. It won’t end well. But whatever your fitness status, you can find something that will challenge you and fulfill the requirement to do hard things.)
Before you go…