Today I want to talk about persistence. I don’t like to admit this, but persistence is not a great strength of mine. It is a trait I’ve always admired, but one that used to—and still sometimes does—feel elusive. My husband is persistent. And also extremely consistent. Once he starts something, he can’t quit until he has reached the goal he set for himself. Whether he is doing a project around the house or working on a business idea or pushing toward a physical goal, he does not quit.
For example, I have known my husband for fifteen years now and I can’t think of a time he ever skipped a workout. He has rest days, but he has never skipped out on a workout that he scheduled for himself. For two years now, he has been working on an entrepreneurial idea. It has not blossomed into what he had envisioned and hoped it would be at this point, but that doesn’t stop him from continuing to work on it. He believes in his vision and he is 100% committed to making it happen, no matter the obstacles.
There have been a few times when his stubborn persistence has actually frustrated and confused me. It may seem like a small thing, but this reflects how he is with projects big and small: when he bought home gym equipment a few months ago, he stayed up until 1am figuring out how to rig a pulley system using cable and hooks (he is kind of like MacGyver because he can figure out how to built and fix things using only what he has on hand).
My initial reaction to his decision to stay up was annoyance, but perhaps it was also a strange envy at his sheer determination to complete a project before going to bed simply because he had set in his mind to do it. I knew he had to get up to work out at 5am the next morning and he would be dead tired if he stayed up. I also knew that it would be possible for him to finish working on the project over the next few days. To me, it seemed unnecessary to lose sleep to put together equipment he didn’t even have to use yet. I’ve never fully understood that kind of focused drive.
Now, not only would I have not stayed up until 1am to complete that project, but I also would likely have made excuses when 5am came the next morning. The script in my head would have gone something like this: Just hit the snooze button. You stayed up really late last night and it’s probably more important that your body gets some rest right now. You can work out later today.
Mental Scripts
I have to fight REALLY hard against that type of script. But when I ask my husband how he manages to fight against excuses for his morning workouts, he gives me an answer that is hard for me to relate to: “I don’t let myself think about excuses. I just get up.” Essentially, he pushes any negative thought out of his mind before it has a chance to take root. He doesn’t allow those negative scripts—my type of scripts—to take up space in his brain. Granted, he also has a strong internal drive, but I have come to believe thathis internal drive is so strong because of his mental scripts.
This was when I realized that our mental scripts determine the course of our lives, at least to a large degree. What we tell ourselves day after day will eventually become our belief systems, our philosophies. If I tell myself day after day that I am unattractive, I will come to see myself as unattractive—regardless of what others might believe about me. And I believe that if I feel unattractive, I will actually become less attractive, because we become what we believe about ourselves. (Notice what I said at the beginning of this post about how I am not a persistent person—this is a script I have come to believe about myself after years of telling myself that I am not persistent.)
I’ve spent much of my life feeding my brain negative mental scripts. I didn’t used to think of myself as a negative person; in fact, when I was young I always thought of myself as a positive person, a dreamer. The problem was that while I had big dreams, I was always injecting doubts and negative thoughts into my brain. Those negative thoughts, those fears of failure, those creeping doubts about my validity—all of those things overpowered my dreams until they eventually began to wither. I was not confident about exercising those muscles so I let them atrophy. Now, twenty years later I have come to see myself as a person who is not mentally strong when it is really that I just haven’t exercised strong mental scripts in my brain for a long time.
While I do believe that people are born with different strengths, both physical and mental, I think we all have more strength in us than we think. Some of us just stop using the muscles that we don’t feel especially confident about. And persistence is really just a muscle that we either use or don’t use.
Don’t Let Your Emotions Win
While we all have different methods of accomplishing goals, some of us need more help figuring out how to make sure we keep pursing those goals when it feels like we have hit a wall or we aren’t see the results we want. My husband’s advice to me—“just don’t think about the excuses”—might not seem easy, but it is a place to start. He is also always telling me, “it’s not easy, but it is simple.” And even though I find myself wanting to protest and resist this advice, it is actually true. For someone like me, someone who lives in her head too much, I’ve always let emotions call the shots in my life.
If I felt tired or I felt upset or I felt sad, I always used to let those emotions guide my behavior and my actions. That is a bad choice, plain and simple. Persistence is not complicated but it isn’t easy. Some of us have stronger mental muscles—either because we were born with them or we have been exercising them for years. But regardless of where we are right now, mentally, physically, or emotionally, we can all learn to start identifying and then replacing the negative scripts we have in our heads. I believe this is one of the tools that will lead to the difference between a mediocre life and a great one. Persistence is a necessary key toward creating and living the life you want but it is hard to be persistent if the negative talk in your head has a tendency to overpower your decisions.
So while this sounds overly simplistic, the next time you are faced with the choice to be persistent or make an excuse for leaving the path of persistence, don’t allow your brain any time to dwell on negative scripts. Don’t think about your excuses and don’t give yourself a choice about whether you can hit the snooze button or not. Override the negative scripts in your brain that are telling you it is okay to give up this once or that you aren’t good enough. Rely on positives scripts to push you out of your comfort zone and develop the habit of persistence.
Final Thought
Don’t fall into the trap of thinking persistence is a trait you either have or don’t have. Anyone can develop this trait. But also don’t fall into the trap of thinking it is easy. We can build systems for ourselves that will make it easier to develop strong traits, like persistence, but I don’t think the best things in our lives were meant to be easy.
