#300 - Greg Everett - How To Truly Build Toughness
Mar 27, 2021
auto_awesome
Greg Everett, weightlifting coach and author, discusses toughness, resilience, and discipline. He explores the components of toughness and how to cultivate them. He emphasizes that toughness is not related to gender and shares strategies for building character. They also delve into the importance of composure in stressful situations and discuss the concept of confidence, highlighting that it is linked to feeling capable. Overall, they provide resources for building mental, physical, and emotional toughness.
Toughness is not limited to masculinity and can be developed by anyone by understanding their character and identity.
Capability in toughness involves seeking out new experiences and gaining diverse skills, leading to true confidence.
Commitment is essential in cultivating toughness as it aligns behaviors, decisions, and actions with values and goals, making growth tangible.
Deep dives
Building Toughness: Understanding Character and Identity
Toughness is often associated with masculinity and aggression, but it is not limited to these traits and can be attained by anyone, regardless of sex or gender. Developing toughness starts with understanding your character and identity, knowing who you are and what is important to you. Insecurity and the need for validation can hinder toughness, so it is important to be secure in your identity. By developing a strong character, you can make decisions that align with your values and avoid meaningless competition or comparison to others.
Developing Capability: The Power of Broad Experience
Capability, a crucial component of toughness, goes beyond physical skills and abilities. It encompasses knowledge and the accumulation of diverse experiences. Staying in a narrow comfort zone limits growth and confidence. Seeking out new experiences, learning from novel situations, and gaining a wide range of physical, mental, and emotional tools enhances capability and builds true confidence. By successfully navigating unfamiliar challenges, you chip away at fear, anxiety, and intimidation, opening doors to greater fulfillment and opportunities.
Commitment: The Key to Integrating Character and Capability
Commitment brings together the previous aspects of toughness, character, and capability. It involves discipline, habit-building, and routine. Without commitment, the other elements remain as private fantasies. By following through with commitment, you align your behaviors, decisions, and actions with your values and goals. Commitment ensures that the growth and development of toughness are not just theoretical, but embodied in meaningful experiences. It requires self-monitoring, continually assessing if your choices reflect who you truly are and what is important to you.
The Importance of Setting Priorities and Starting Point
It is crucial to determine our priorities and starting point when embarking on any endeavor. Each person's starting point is different, based on their experiences and knowledge. It is necessary to break down our goals into smaller, manageable pieces and identify the first step towards them. This can range from simple tasks like going to the grocery store alone to more ambitious challenges like climbing a difficult rock face. By creating a map with waypoints and milestones, we can maintain enthusiasm and momentum towards our goals, no matter how challenging the path may be.
Building Capacity and Toughness
Toughness and capacity are mental qualities that can be developed through practice and small wins. Being tough is not limited to extreme situations, but demonstrated in various intensities and durations. Developing foundational capabilities like the ability to problem-solve, comprehend information, and communicate effectively enhances our capacity to navigate and overcome challenges. Using examples like surviving alone on a life raft for 76 days or enduring incarceration in a concentration camp, the podcast emphasizes the importance of building resilience in everyday situations. It encourages the cultivation of keystone habits, gradual progress, and incremental gains to strengthen mental and emotional endurance.
Greg Everett is a weightlifting coach and an author.
We're in the middle of a toughness revolution. From David Goggins motivational videos to cold showers, it seems like becoming tough is a skill many people want to develop right now, but what IS toughness and how do you cultivate it?
Expect to learn how character, capacity, capability and commitment combine to create a truly tough human, how you can develop your resilience to adversity, why Greg says confidence can be built like any other physical pursuit, how to become more disciplined and much more...
Sponsors:
Get 5 Free Travel Packs, Free Liquid Vitamin D & Free Shipping from Athletic Greens at https://athleticgreens.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied)
