LL #41 | Courage, Plateaus, and Sitting with Discomfort
Optimize for Courage. Love Plateaus. Sit with Discomfort.
Ideas
If you Optimize for one thing, choose Courage
If you optimize for one thing in life, choose courage.
At some point on the journey, fear comes knocking. And no amount of intellect or excellence dispels it.
The only way forward is to walk with it, hand-in-hand, and act regardless of the fear.
This is how lives are made.
Learn to Love Plateaus
You'll never get much good at anything unless you learn to love plateaus.
Plateaus are inevitable. Embrace them as you would a dear friend. Treat them as an opportunity to rest and reset after much hard work.
Then, find what they have to teach you and get climbing again.
To be Effective in Discomfort, Sit with It
If you're overwhelmed and unsure what to do, the answer is probably to do nothing at all. At least at first.
When we encounter big challenges, we often feel what's called an action impulse.
This evolutionary mechanism is useful for true emergencies (a snake in the bush) but leads to trouble when we face modern challenges that feel like emergencies, but aren't.
Instead, sit with the overwhelm. Ask why you feel this way. Give yourself the space to explore what's actually going on.
In doing so, you make room for effective & intentional action, rather than aimless & reactive motion.
Tweets of the Week
🧵On the Power of Self-Belief
Dr. Gurner has quickly become one of my favorite accounts on twitter.
In this thread, she discusses the subtle difference between people high in confidence (aka self-belief or self-trust) and those who aren’t.
The secret: people high in self-belief focus more on operating in their strengths, tactically and mentally, and in doing so put themselves in virtuous cycles of success→high self-belief→bigger challenges→more success→…. onward and upward.
Want high confidence? Stop focusing on your weaknesses and start focusing on your strengths. Operate in your genius.
How to Train your Mind
This is a surprisingly good summary of the core foundations of training and growing your mind.
I’ve found journaling to be the single most powerful force multiplier for long-term growth, period. This is closely followed up by coaching, as a good coach can help cultivate everything else on the list. Third is meditation, though only when folks have a self-determined reason for meditating and align their practice with that (I do not believe that meditation is a panacea or for everyone).
All of this also assumes the individual has two essential foundations: a quality physical movement practice (ideally wrapped with quality sleep and nutrition) and loving relationships.
Questions of the Week
In what ONE way could you be courageous this week that has the potential to transform your life for the better?
What discomfort are you running away from? What have you not yet faced about it? What is it trying to teach you?