There’s a video I watch every time I think about giving up. Actually there are two. One is actually a commercial, the other one a motivational video. The important thing isn’t actually about where the motivation comes from, but rather that it just comes. There has been so many times where I thought I couldn’t handle what was going on, or I questioned why I was doing something. I’ll be completely honest, there are times when I look at this site, and all I can think about is “what’s the point? Are people actually reading this or does the audience consist of my wife and my mom?” We all have these moments in our lives, even without disease. Disease just simply gives us more reasons to feel this way. This brings me to my first point: we all have the feeling of giving up, regardless of what it is we are thinking of quitting. This feeling doesn’t make you any less of a person. It’s actually of my opinion that it’s these feelings that make us more resilient. I have gotten to the point where I no longer fight that feeling of giving up, but rather I let it happen. I have come to realize that no matter how badly I feel like giving up, at the end of the day I know that I’m not going to. I have deci
ded somewhere along the line that I just don’t have it in me to quit, so quite simply I’m not going to. And believe me, I’ve definitely had my moments of wanting to quit.
The hardest thing I have found through talking to people is that I cannot tell you how to be motivate, or in my case, to be stubborn. I can only tell you what works for me, and hope that you can take something away from it. Motivation is something that needs to come within. It’s something you hold close to your heart, it’s that fire that burns in you.
I’ve spent a lot of time reading and investigating mental toughness. I came from a martial arts background where there is this idea that it comes down to mental toughness. If I’m mentally tough, I can ignore the pain, I can take the hits, and I can outlast my opponent. It seemed that for me to be successful, I had to be the biggest, baddest, most mentally tough person out there. Thus started my journey towards learning how to become mentally tough. I hate to say it, but to this day, I never really learned the “secret” to building a certain mental toughness out of thin air. I even experimented with various ways that supposedly built mental toughness. I did hard, grueling workouts. I sprinted 1 minute on, one minute off till I basically dropped several times a week just to build mental toughness. I spent 8 weeks prepping for Jiu Jitsu Tournaments this way; hill sprints, treadmill runs, workouts at 6am just because it took “mental toughness” to get out of bed to do the work, I did it all. But then came the tournament…. My fight was delayed by hours and I waited around, getting frustrated, losing concentration, and more importantly, losing motivation. I broke mentally. By the time my fight came around, I was so mentally unprepared that I stepped on the mat knowing I had already lost, and I did lose, in 31 seconds. But what happened? I had done all this mental toughness training?? The answer eluded me.
This same scenario kept occurring. I didn’t understand it. Mental toughness was eluding me even though I was training for it. Well, it wasn’t until I came across Mark Divine’s interviews and his site http://sealfit.com/ that I realized mental toughness was nothing more than the “tough guy’s” description for motivation. This isn’t to say that mental toughness is a “meathead” word but rather that somewhere along the way, mental toughness and motivation began to be discussed about in different topics. I highly encourage anyone that wants to learn more about motivation/mental toughness go check out Mark Divine’s material. Anyway, once I realized that it was motivation, and not mental toughness that plays a big role, I was on the straight and narrow. But with this discovery came newer issues.
Like I said before, no one can tell you how to get motivated. It takes some soul searching and takes pursuing things that truly mean something to you. I didn’t return to my outdoor soccer team after a 4-0 stomping defeat because I was too mentally tough to step away. No, rather I came back because I was motivated to do well, to prove to myself and to others that I can be a successful athlete even with a chronic disease, and because I was motivated to not let my teammates down by giving up. Some of these motivators were internal, others external, but they were all personal. That is what it requires in my eyes. To be motivated, you have to find that personal reason why you do something. I can look back now and see that anytime I considered myself as “mental tough”, I had a motivation behind it. Yet, the beauty of motivation can simply be “I will not quit on myself”. It can be anything.
Bringing this full circle, motivation has gotten me to where I am today. I’ve had some excellent opportunities simply because I did not quit, and will continue not to quit. I hold onto my motivation and step onto the field every single week, with the hope that I can inspire maybe even one person to fight back against their chronic disease, or get out of bed and start trying. This takes me back to what I believe is the most important thing, and it takes me back to the motivational video I watch consistently. The best quote of the entire thing [SPOILER ALERT] is “you can’t defy the odds when your down, you can’t make someone a believer when your down,” and nothing could be any truer. Even if you feel like you can’t stay up for yourself, remember there are people that look up to you, be it kids, friends, family, or someone you only barely know. Stay up for them, make them a believer, defy the odds. Do it for yourself, but do it to pay it forward, inspire others, and lead by example. Don’t go down.