A while back I picked up a copy of Brendon Burchard’s book “High Performance Habits” and started to read it while on a trip to Dallas, Texas to attend Tony Robbins’ Unleash The Power Within event.
The book is fantastic and I highly recommend you pick it up if you’d like to improve your performance in any area of your life.
When I was reading one of the final chapters, Demonstrating Courage, he told the story of a US Army Special Forces member he had worked with previously. This story reminded me of something I tell my clients fairly frequently, especially early on.
In the book Brendon describes a conversation he had with this person about a maxim they use in the Special Forces to help people realize they must deal with the hardships of service – “Embrace The Suck”.
As he says in the book:
“Sometimes, doing your duty sucks. Training sucks. Patrol sucks. The weather sucks. Circumstances suck. But you can’t just avoid them or be bitter. You have to deal with it, face it, and will yourself to persevere and rise. You have to embrace the suck.”
Now, obviously, there’s a big difference between the hardships members of the US Army Special Forces face and the hardships of getting to the gym consistently to do your strength training, but the mindset still applies.
It’s not always going to be sunshine and dancing unicorns when you’re trying to change your health, transform your body, lose weight or get stronger. Not every day is going to be easy to get to the gym or prepare your healthy meals.
Sometimes, you’re going to have to embrace the suck.
There are going to be obstacles along the way.
You’re going to wake up some days and feel like doing anything other than your workout.
The thought of pizza, ice cream, chocolate or whatever your particular vice may be, is going to be so strong that you’ll feel like you’re going a little bit crazy.
You’ll have days and weeks that you’re so busy, you can’t imagine having time to prepare your meals in advance.
That’s all ok – that’s just the “suck”. Embrace it.
The good news is that this happens to everyone and guess what? Now you know it’s coming. You know what to expect, so you can start to prepare yourself mentally for when it starts to suck.
When you feel the suck coming on, you’ll be able to take a deep breath, refocus and remember that this is all part of the journey. This is part of the sacrifice you have to make in order to get what you want.
The suck is what makes the reward worth having.
Embrace the suck.