To build a muscle to become stronger you first must have to break it down. It starts out weak and the only way to get stronger is to train it. Your internal strength is not much different. I recall having a business meeting, I wrote on the top of my large white presentation paper “Muscle Builds Under Pressure ~ Likewise Our Company!” I have used strength training within my life every day in every form to navigate my personal and business life as its correlations are undeniable. Let’s dive in a bit deeper.
Strength: (definition) the quality or state of being physically strong or capacity to endure pressure or pain. The truth is strength can not be recognized or displayed without moments of weakness or the feeling that we think we can not go on. Strength is when we keep going, it’s when we are persistent in our trials. Strength is realizing you had to be strong to endure the situation.
It is often reflected that strength means being super strong without tears, which isn’t true. I remember my daughter telling me one day that I am the strongest person she knows. I quickly saw a flash, me on the floor by the back door crying because it was switch week and my babies would be gone a whole week or the time I was so stressed about my business, I sat in the kitchen up against the cabinets on the floor crying knowing I was growing my dream that not many could see. One of the most beautiful things I think when we reflect on what strength is when we show our vulnerability, I think that is the purest form of strength. When you allow others in to see how you are in a down moment you are choosing to get back up. Not often do we share this part of ourselves. They see the strong, the warrior, but really the warrior has the battle, the warrior has scars, the scars are what makes the warrior, so that is the strength within the scars.
They see the strong, the warrior, but really the warrior has the battle, the warrior has scars, the scars are what makes the warrior, so that is the strength within the scars.
The warrior though appears unshakeable has been shaken to the core. The warrior bleeds deeply and without fail still chooses to keep going forward. When all is falling apart and the light at the end of the tunnel seems out of sight, the warrior has something deep inside a faith larger than the heavy moments that pumices them to the ground. The spirit that drives them forward to something they can not physically touch but something they believe so deeply in that they push on. That is strength within adversity. Very little to do with weakness other than it is the term that we use in opposition to strength.
I am a warrior and on days I want to give up I have taught myself discipline through training. Training where I show up every day no matter what. I feel defeated often, running a new business is harder than anything I could have imagined, telling your children you are leaving their dad is hard, again experience in knowing how to keep getting up and keep going! On the hard days when I want to throw in the towel I have this little voice within my head, my internal dialogue. It tells me this, “It’s okay, you can feel defeated today, you can cry, you can lay flat out on the floor and give up today, but you know the fire inside you is brighter than the hard and tomorrow is a gift of a new day and you will rise and find a solution to your problem”. My internal dialogue is equally as chatty as me. The point is, warriors don’t always win the day but they can win the battle as long as they keep trying.
How to Correlate Strength Training with Internal Strength
- We all start at a starting spot, a place of weakness for lack of a better term.
- You do not know what you can physically lift until you try, also you do not know what you are capable of doing with your internal strength unless you try.
- You will find failure within your journey of lifting or trying new things.
- Failure and breakdown are how we successfully build muscle mass and only when we keep moving forward through an event do we recognize how strong we were in our biggest moments of weakness. I don’t know how many times I have sat with people and they are “in the thick of their life’s challenge” and they say I don’t feel strong right now as when you are in it you feel weakness more than strength. Similar to building the muscle of a press it will feel hard at the start until you train your body and your mind. Then after completing or out of the challenge are you able to recognize the strength within yourself.!
It is our internal strength that is pulling us through the weaker moments. Strength can never exist without weakness. Holding static is a dangerous place to be so like in training and in life. The key is to move forward, and the rate of the movement is not important, it simply is the fact that you are continually stepping or moving forward. If you correlate mind and muscle, muscles that are stagnant, that do not move lose atrophy, our mind is no different. Equally, you must not overtrain the body or the mind, they need time to rest so they can reset.
The beautiful thing is we do not have to forge for our food any longer but we have to have the knowledge to correlate movement and create hard tasks that challenge our minds and bodies to tap into our Will!
Now the bigger question is how to build or practice doing hard things to mentally challenge yourself. We know with muscle we must load, rest it and repeat. The same can go with the practice of our internal strength. Within my transformation programs, there are always three exercises that we execute simply yet challenging with reps of exercises that will challenge your internal dialogue and tax your mind through movement. These are the exercises that build the strength of your internal dialogue, remembering that you must tax yourself, almost to weakness, to allow strength to show up or to unmask yourself. It allows you to acknowledge an awareness within us that we might not have been ready to share and let go. These exercises are mentally as important as they involve your WILL and if you can learn to tap into your will, I think you can overcome the greatest of challenges.
Definition of Will: (defined by Oxford language)noun: will power control exerted to do something or restrain impulses. “Most of our bad habits are due to laziness or lack of willpower”
Fundamentally we need to learn how to tap into our willpower. Our ancestors had to move their bodies daily as it was how most of them survived for a living. They had grit, willpower and movement. The theory is not rocket science, it is a correlation between movement and mindset. The beautiful thing is we do not have to forge for our food any longer but we have to have the knowledge to correlate movement and create hard tasks that challenge our minds and bodies to tap into our Will! The saying goes “You can walk a horse to the water but you can not make it drink”, you must be ready to take the steps to become healthy mentally and physically to make real changes to find your strength and grow!
