What’s the best result you can obtain once you realize that adversity is a blessing in disguise? It’s your mindset.
For myself, I was at a juncture of feeling sick and tired of such misery, I needed a change. Two things did it for me:
- Reaching out for help
- focusing on my health as my number one priority
I look at the mind as if it’s an attic. Besides the fact, it’s at the top of the house and the mind is where the head is at, an attic can only hold so much. It gets to a point that for any new items to be in there, something has to go for the greater good
Reaching out allowed me to get anything off my chest and that prevented the inner time bomb from self-destructing.
I’ll admit that I used to compare myself to others. I’ve learned that there’s no point because we all have different circumstances and end goals. It’s okay to not be okay.
It’s ME vs. ME and YOU vs. YOU.
My journey was a self-rehabilitation process fixing my health on a holistic level. I started running because it was a sport I couldn’t mess up. I find exercise with hand-eye coordination a challenge.
I gave myself four months to train for my first 42.2km fun run. I started to instil habits around learning how to harness the little person of doubt in my head.
WHAT’S THE WORST THAT CAN HAPPEN?
If you come across a tough decision, simulate it with, “What’s the worst thing that can happen?” Then, jump straight into it and battle fear head-on. When you do this enough, then it becomes a habit. Once the habit is in place, you’ll grow a thicker skin to handle tough situations. And remember, if it didn’t work out as expected, it’s not failing. It’s an experiment that didn’t go according to plan.
When you create a new habit and work on it and understanding every in and out, you become the go-to person in that field. You’ve got this amazing momentum behind you and this strong sense of obsession. You’ll feel kind of bulletproof and invincible.
This happened to me in May 2017, when I was in the Himalayas in Nepal. We were climbing an Everest region mountain that was below Camp Two, without any supplementary oxygen. When we came upon several ladder-crossings over open crevasses, I knew I could make it to the other side. A crevasse is an open crack that’s caused by avalanches, and it’s one of the main killers for climbers.
I was fearless. I managed to train my mind these past couple years through learning and conquering endurance feats. By purposefully putting myself in tough situations, I became mentally stronger. A tough task will result in one of these two responses: fear or trust. You can’t have both.
When I came to this moment where things could go very haywire along a crevasse ladder-crossing, resulting in death. Fear was now my best friend. The neural pathway in my brain had built a strong habit of tackling immense challenges and that task was another event I could conquer.
In a world of almost eight billion people, you have to stick out from the rest. So, why not be one of the mentally strong ones? You have an opportunity to be so good they can’t ignore you.
With my proof-positive experiences with adversity, it has helped me grow into a stronger person. But it wouldn’t have happened without a killer-driven mindset. Even when things were so tough a few years ago, I’m appreciative of everything that’s happened. But I’ll save the topic about gratitude for next week.
TIPS ON BUILDING A KILLER-DRIVEN MINDSET
What got me in the rhythm of any task, whether it’s running my first marathon, starting a business, or delivering a keynote, is by starting small. It’s easier to instil as a habit and also makes the fear is bearable. From there it’s time to get insatiably curious and scale up to the next level.
I also couldn’t do this alone. I have a team of coaches and strategists to assist me along the journey. I recommend finding experts for your inner circle. They’ll guide you where you need to be and reduce the learning curve by years, if not decades.
Enjoy.
Tofe