Message from the Mountain 002
What do you do every day, that you dislike (hate) doing? Yet you do it because you know that by doing so, by leaning into it, you create a callus. A callus that makes you stronger. Not just strong in the body, but more importantly, strong in the mind.
As our STAIT team members attest to:
One more step, lean into the grind, and know, the mind always fails before the body.
This is so evident when we watch the MyNextOp team put people through a taster of Special Forces selection, or when we attended the Veteran Games in October, seeing the guys lean into the whole slog, with smiles and shouts of “we love this sh*t”.
Listening to various audio books whilst travelling, the latest being Can’t Hurt Me by David Goggins, what is clear is that by making ourselves do things we dislike, we condition the mind to become stronger. We create an inner resilience, that allows us to face and defeat all of the challenges of life, no matter what.
For us, we have our own little 'drill Sargents', Musky and Ebony, our 18 month old Belgian Malinois puppies, who, come rain or shine, dark or light, martial us out of bed for their morning walks around 5.30am.
Failure to react with anything other than shoes on, leads to a loving beasting by our relentless leaders, aka puppy nibbles, paws in the face, and barking, until we jump out of bed and life starts.
A quick whizz through the property and we reach Dopamine Hill. This brings us to one of the ways we lean into the day. We nicknamed it Dopamine Hill after we listened to an Andrew Huberman podcast, where he recommends doing something tough 1st thing, to earn the dopamine hit. So we welcome in the day, and proceed to follow our two furry leaders up the steep incline, until we reach the top.
Not to mislead you, this hill is no K2 or Mount Everest, but to us, before 6am it feels that way, and we certainly spend some time thinking of ways to avoid this slog before coffee.
Yet, the pleasure of reaching the top, welcoming in the sunlight, seeing the joy on our dogs' faces, makes the calluses all the more worthwhile.
What is it you do on a daily basis that creates the friction and calluses for your own growth?
We would love to hear about them.