Win the battle over your mind
Hardship is always temporary. Stop making excuses. Choose your thoughts intentionally. You can't achieve greatness while making excuses.
This week we are reviewing chapters 8 and 9 from The Illusion of Time.
As a reminder, please mark your calendar for Wednesday, December 18 at 7:00 PM ET for our live online session with the author, Francois de Neuville. You may have already been sent a Google Calendar invite. Either way, please save the date and time and register here.
***
There are far too many people, especially today, who think success is something that is going to come easy. When it doesn’t come easy — or on a timeline we wish to find it — we look for an easy way out, consciously or not, says Francois.
Francois served time in the Belgian military. As part of that experience, he recounts having to complete a 10-mile run (with gear, guns, and ammunition) in less than 100 minutes. And: they had to do it without wearing a watch. That means they had to go as fast a they could go the whole way, without knowing exactly how much time they had left to finish the race.
“The race of life is the same,” writes Francois. “You don’t know when the timer is going to stop.”
That’s why he continues to ask himself: “Where am I not showing up as my best?”
And that’s the question we all should be asking ourselves, in our own life.
When we are going through difficult or challenging times, we need to understand that “the difficulty is momentary and will eventually stop.”
For me, the most recent challenging time was just a few months ago, in the weeks and months after I tore my Achilles tendon and had reparative surgery.
In some ways, I used Francois’ tactic. I put it in my mind that eventually the pain of tearing my Achilles tendon would eventually get better and that being sidelined in my house for a month or two, would eventually be over. And I tried to enjoy the little pleasures that returned, ever so slowly, each day or week.
I have never been one to ever come close to having depression or feeling depressed. But as someone who is always active and on the go, having this unexpected thing happen to me was very challenging. It wasn’t so much that I was injured and couldn’t fully participate in all the things of life, I also could not even take a simply short walk around my neighborhood.
So I had to play the mind game. And reading words from Francois here in chapter 8 of The Illusion of Time really hit home in how I approached it. It might also be because I read his book for the first time last year and probably internalized some of his thinking.
Being in the military requires one to be physically fit. But, that alone won’t prepare a warrior for battle or even for the unexpected challenges.
“What makes a tough warrior is his mindset,” writes Francois.
It’s easier to give in to the pain and to try to find an easy way out. But you have to put it in your mind that the hardship is temporary. The key is to stay focused on taking the next step, and then the next.
Francois says this is a choice. When going through something, whether it is hiking a mountain, working a job we do not like, or going through an injury or illness, we usually have internal dialogues in our own mind.
In those moments, “it is up to you to choose the path of mastery instead of the path of mediocrity.”
He encourages us to win the battle over our mind.
“Your mind is a powerful tool that can help you move forward or hold you back. Your mind only wants to help you,” he says. “The problem is the way it does it isn’t always what you want.”
For most of our human history, we have been in complete survival mode. This means that our brains are wired for instant gratification to complete the needs we have at the moment. But it was only less than 10,000 years ago (a blink in history) that human beings developed agriculture. We planted, we harvested, we waited for our food to be ready. This changed the human condition to one where better results are actually yielded if we have patience.
It’s easier to spend money than to save it. It’s easier to get that gratification now than to sacrifice for something better later.
It’s easier to do what’s comfortable and convenient than to do what’s uncomfortable and uncertain.
What we can gain from Francois’ message here is that in order to be truly fearless, we need to be willing to sacrifice, get comfortable being uncomfortable.
If you want things to be different, you have to do things differently.
“You can’t feel comfortable all the time and be successful. There is no comfortable growth,” says Francois. “Eventually the hard time will make a place for the good time, because hardship is always temporary.”
***
Often times when things are hard, we make excuses.
Once again, just as in the last chapter, Francois reminds us that “everything starts with a thought.” An excuse is something we create in our heads. It’s the narrative we tell ourselves and it’s the narrative we continue to follow, only holding ourselves back.
“Realizing that I am just the observer of my thoughts made me feel more in control about choosing the thoughts that are helping me move forward and disregarding the rest,” he says.
However, for many of us, we have disempowering beliefs that prevent us from moving forward.
“You can’t achieve greatness while making excuses.”
Some years go, Francois caught himself procrastinating by making a to-do list. For the things that were hard, they would go near the bottom of the list and he’d keep transferring them to different to-do lists for different days and week. The act of making a list made him feel like he was “doing” something, but in reality, he was procrastinating and avoiding actually doing the actions he needed to take.
Procrastination is painful and it drains our energy and the power of our minds. It leaves us with regrets and damages our self-esteem.
“Laziness is doing nothing, procrastination is doing something else other than what you should do.”
We procrastinate to avoid pain and discomfort. But, again, here we need to understand that doing what is hard is not going to return immediate results. It’s not going to be easy or comfortable.
It’s easier to go to the refrigerator in our climate-controlled home and eat whenever we have a desire to. It’s much harder to leave the house, go to the gym, and workout for an hour, and not see immediate results at the end of that hour.
The harder thing is doing something consistently, over time. The results will not be seen in hours or even days, but they will be seen in months and years. And you know what? That hard work at the gym, as one example, will actually get easier each and every time you go back, because your body (and mind) will get used to it. That will allow you to also improve on your exercise routine each and every time you get those reps in. And the results will speak for themselves months and years down the road.
But going for that short trip to the refrigerator is easier and more comfortable. However, the results will be terrible compared to the habit of going to the gym.
It might also be “easy” to make excuses why you can’t go to the gym. These are some easy ones:
I don’t have the time
I don’t have the money
I don’t know where to start
It’s too far
I don’t have proper transportation
The hours of the gym don’t fit my schedule
I feel insecure around all the more fit people
These are all excuses! And they are easy to make. We can probably all look at our own lives and find plenty of places where we are making excuses rather than doing the hard things we need to be doing to improve ourselves and make the most of our time on this planet.
“You might also be scared of the sacrifice you will have to make, such as time, money, or energy, to get where you want to be,” writes Francois.
But, he says, even if you fail at your original goal, it’s not really a failure. “There will always be something to learn from the process.”
“Failing is when you decide to stop trying. You read that right; failing is a decision,” writes Francois. “You can either use a failure to keep learning or as an excuse to stop trying.”
You may not end up where you want. How many of us changed majors multiple times in college? How many of us have changed jobs or even careers (even multiple times) in our own life?
“You don’t always end up where you want to, but as long as you end up where it feels good, it is a success.”
And you may not be where it feels good right now. That’s ok. That’s why we are here to try to motivate you to stop making excuses, do the hard things, realize what’s hard now is temporary, and keep moving forward.
“As long as you don’t stop, as long as you don’t give up and stay in motion, there is no failure, just different steps in your journey.”
***
For the week ahead, it’s now time to finish the book! Go ahead and move forward in reading chapters 10, 11, and the epilogue. WE’ll review those by this time next week, Friday, December 13.
And five days later, on Wednesday, December 18 at 7:00 PM ET we will gather together again, in a live online Zoom session, with the author himself, Francois de Neuville and have the opportunity to directly connect with him about this book and how we might use the concepts to take action in our own life! Register here.