Everyone Is Carrying Something
Why strength includes vulnerability, perseverance and a little more grace.
Read on kevferrell.com
Welcome to REWIRE | REBOOT, a weekly newsletter where I share reflections from my ongoing personal growth journey and provide tested ideas, frameworks, tools and practices to help you create the life you want.
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In this issue:
- Rewire - Everyone Struggles
- Reboot - Productive Struggle
- One Action - Just One Thing
Rewire - Idea I'm Exploring
Everyone Struggles
Recently, I was telling a friend about a day when I was exhausted. I had fallen asleep and ended up slightly late.
He looked at me and said:
“So you are human.”
I laughed.
“Oh yeah. I’m an extremely flawed human.”
We are all flawed.
And we all struggle sometimes.
That is not an insult. It’s one of the few things every one of us has in common.
Every person you meet is carrying something at some point, even if you can’t see it.
It might be an overwhelming schedule, financial pressure, a difficult relationship, low mood or energy, an unhealthy habit they are trying to control, or the daily challenge of keeping up with work, family and a household.
Some struggles are relatively small and pass quickly. Others are serious and last for months or years.
Some are visible. Many are not.
The person who appears to have everything together may be fighting the hardest battle of their life in private.
The performance of being okay
I think I have been unintentionally good at appearing stone-cold and rock-solid on the outside, regardless of what was happening internally.
For much of my life, I might have considered that a strength.
I’m no longer sure it always is.
Sometimes composure is necessary. There are moments when other people are relying on you and you need to remain steady.
But there is a difference between staying composed when the situation requires it and putting on a permanent performance that nothing affects you.
Maintaining that performance takes energy.
You are dealing with the original problem while also managing the appearance that there is no problem. You are carrying the struggle and the effort required to hide it.
I have been there. It can be exhausting.
Real strength is not always looking unaffected.
Sometimes strength is admitting that you are not at your best. It’s allowing yourself to be vulnerable, asking for help or telling someone you trust what is actually going on.
It is being okay with not always being okay.
It can also mean continuing to move forward without pretending the struggle doesn’t exist.
Vulnerability and perseverance are not opposites. You can acknowledge that something is hard and still refuse to give up.
The hardest thing you have ever done
Struggle also changes our frame of reference.
Someone who has been through something devastating may be less shaken by a smaller setback later. Someone who has experienced relatively little adversity may find their first major setback overwhelming.
That doesn’t make one person stronger or the other person weak.
The hardest thing you have ever done is the hardest thing you have ever done.
We can only respond using the experience and capacity we have developed so far. This is why comparing or ranking people’s pain rarely helps.
It is also why some experience with adversity is necessary to become the best version of ourselves.
We become more resilient by doing difficult things, recovering from setbacks, getting back up every time we get knocked down. Each experience gives us evidence that we can handle more than we once believed.
None of us wants life to be a constant struggle.
But trying to avoid every form of discomfort creates a different problem.
If we remove every difficult experience from our lives, or shelter our children from every frustration, consequence and disappointment, we may leave ourselves or them unprepared for the hard periods that will eventually come.
Our job as parents is not to make the entire path smooth. It’s to help our kids learn how to keep their footing when it is not.
Give people more grace
Remembering that everyone struggles should also change how we treat one another.
The simpler version is that other people are going through some shit too.
Someone may be distracted, impatient or unnecessarily short with you because they are having a terrible day. That doesn’t make their behaviour warranted or fair. But understanding where it might be coming from can help you avoid taking every bad interaction personally.
We have all done some version of it ourselves.
Pressure builds in one area of our life, and someone who had nothing to do with it receives the consequences.
When someone else might be struggling, try to give them a little more grace before you judge or react.
When you are struggling, try to pause before you pass it on.
Slow it down
When I am feeling overwhelmed, one thing that helps me is to slow everything down.
Instead of mentally carrying the ten things I need to do, I return my attention to whatever is directly in front of me.
What is the next thing?
When you try to hold your entire to-do list in your mind at once, it can become difficult to begin any of it.
Staying in the present makes it easier to take action.
On a day when I am not at my best, I find it helpful to identify one thing that if I accomplished only that thing it would make the day a success.
Not three things. Just one. And I put my energy and effort there first.
I also try to cut myself some slack.
Instead of feeling guilty about everything I believe I should have accomplished, I recognize what I was able to do with the capacity I had.
Take the small win on the bad day.
Don’t carry it alone
All of us struggle, but none of us should have to go through everything alone.
Having someone you trust who you can confide in matters more than many of us admit. The don’t always need to give you advice or try to fix the problem. Sometimes you simply need someone willing to listen.
Most of us need at least one place where we don’t have to perform.
It might be with a close friend, a family member, or a therapist.
Find that person.
Be that person for someone else.
Reboot - Health & Longevity
Productive Struggle
Resistance training is one area where struggle is useful. In fact it’s the goal.
Muscles adapt when they are given a sufficient reason to adapt. If the training never asks more of them than they can already do comfortably, there is little reason for them to become stronger or larger.
That doesn’t mean you need to add weight every workout. Progressive overload can also come from completing more sets or repetitions, improving your range of motion, controlling the weight more effectively, or performing a more difficult variation.
The point is that the challenge progresses in some way.
Repeating the same exercises, weights and repetitions is not necessarily useless. It may help maintain what you have built. But continued adaptation generally requires the challenge to change over time.
For many muscle-building sets, finishing with one to three good repetitions in reserve is a practical way to ensure sufficient effort.
That means you could complete only one to three more full repetitions with proper technique if you absolutely had to.
It doesn’t mean you need to take every set to absolute failure. Research doesn’t show that failure is required for strength or muscle growth.
With lighter weights, getting closer to failure tends to matter more for creating an effective muscle-building stimulus. Heavier, strength-oriented work can be effective without being taken as close to the limit.
The goal is challenging repetitions performed with sound technique. Not ugly repetitions after your form has broken down.
I have always preferred a relatively low-volume, high-intensity style of training. The approach was associated with Mike Mentzer and later popularized by six-time Mr. Olympia Dorian Yates.
I don’t attempt to copy the extremes of how they trained. Very few people can train with the intensity Dorian brought to a working set, and most people should not try.
The principle I take from that style is much simpler:
Fewer working sets, performed with focus and genuine effort.
I would rather perform one or two demanding, controlled working sets than accumulate a bunch of easier sets.
It’s also an efficient way to train when time is limited.
The objective is not to struggle for the sake of struggling.
It is to apply enough of the right kind of resistance that your body has a reason to adapt.
One Action
Just One Thing
The next time you recognize that you are having a day where you are not at your best, stop and ask:
What is the one thing I could accomplish today that would make this day feel like a win?
Write it down.
Do that thing first. Before spending your limited capacity on less important things.
When it’s finished, acknowledge the win.
Anything else you complete that day is a bonus.
It's not about lowering your standards. It’s matching the target to your current capacity while keeping one promise to yourself.
Inspirational Quote
“What do we live for, if it is not to make life less difficult to each other?”
— George Eliot
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Until next week,
Kevin
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