The benefit of doing hard things

Mid-life basic skills training

I have never been a “gym person”. For most of my life, I have avoided these sweaty places packed with strange machines and men with big muscles (and I thought, probably matching big egos). The gym was a foreign country with a foreign language, and as a petite Asian woman, I didn’t see many people who looked like me hanging out there. I told myself that I preferred to get my exercise in more natural ways, through dancing or hiking in nature.

Despite this not-being-a-gym-person affliction that I have, last month I signed up for an intensive group personal training program, where I have been going to the gym to workout in the mornings, five days a week, every week.

It hasn’t been easy for me.

And I have a confession to make. I really like doing things that are easy. 

I grew up as one of those “gifted and talented” kids in a small Midwestern town. I was able to excel in school and get good grades without having to study that hard. I was fairly sociable and well-liked by my peers, so I was easily elected to leadership positions in student government. I was reasonably athletic and made the varsity tennis team in high school without practicing. I participated in community service projects through Girl Scouts and received recognition in the local newspaper.

In my early life, these external markers were the only measures of success that mattered to me, my family, and the other people around me. The world that I grew up in never offered any merit badge for struggling through adversity and arriving in one piece at the end of the long, dark tunnel. That just wasn't a thing.

But I have to say, there’s a lot of truth in the saying that nothing is 100% good, and nothing is 100% bad. I can see how making it through childhood and early adulthood without being significantly challenged created a bit of a handicap for me. 

In other words, I pretty much have an allergy to doing hard things. Mostly because my psyche’s immune system hasn’t developed the antibodies to be able to meet them gracefully. The thing is, there’s no avoiding critical life lessons, I have just come to them later in life, and I am now confronting them in different ways.

What I have experienced during my intensive gym training is a perfect metaphor and mirror for learning “how to do hard things” in general. And I see it as a preparatory challenge for the even bigger, even scarier things that are unfolding.

Here are some of the things that I have been learning resilience and building skills in:

1. Watching my shit come up. On both a physical and emotional level, going from zero to 60 (shifting out of pandemic hibernation mode straight into working out five days a week) has stirred up a lot of stagnation and surfaced stored gunk in my system. I have been experiencing detox symptoms, emotional release, and lots of general discomfort on the daily. It’s not fun and not pretty. I am becoming more at ease with the struggle-ugly.

2. Surfing enthusiasm waves. My mind is constantly oscillating, between embracing and resisting what is happening. I feel super high on life for a while just after committing, then dip into a pit of despair and regret, wondering why on Earth I decided to do this to myself…just because “it’s good for me”? Ugh. The bouncing motion of this mental handball game can be both nauseating and exhausting, to say the least. My nervous system is getting better at being able to move with the ups and downs of these waves without taking them too seriously.

3. Learning to enjoy the process. I want to take things one-step further than delayed gratification. Instead of telling myself that the good stuff is going to come later, which means that the current suffering will be worth it, I’m starting to train my mind to find joy in the process of becoming. Whatever is happening right now – whether it’s awkwardness, frustration, soreness, or exhaustion – is all part of life, and tasting all the colors of the rainbow is part of the joy of being alive. It all sounds nice in theory, right? Embrace everything! At the moment I have the rare chance to anchor this as a felt experience in my body.

4. Getting to know my real limits. I notice that most of the time, I want to stop an exercise before I actually have to stop, physically. The mind says “that’s enough” to me, when in reality the body can keep going. Having a trainer who can see through my self-limiting thoughts has definitely been helpful as I am learning. But what’s even more helpful is flexing the muscle of making my own bullshit beliefs more transparent to me.

5. Celebrating failure as a sign of growth. This is probably the biggest lesson for me: equating failure with success, in the sense that failure is a sure sign that I am growing. Most of my life, I’ve seen failure as something to avoid. It is kept away by making sure of things, by preparing adequately, by playing it safe. These actions make failure less likely but they also make expansion impossible, because they limit you to what you already know. And growth happens in the unknown. 

I am embarking on one of the biggest creation adventures of my life right now, investing big money, building big things… all while doing something I have never done before. (I will probably write more about this soon.)

Even though I know some failure on this path is certain, what fitness training is encoding into my body is that failure is not a bad thing. It means that I am fully living, and not staying small just to keep safe.