Mental Toughness. Power Of Endurance
A couple of days back, a non governmental organisation organised a marathon race for a particular region in the state and I was privileged to witness it as one of the crews. The prize was considerable, so it saw a huge number of participants. When it started, everyone took off, but about 30 minutes into the race, over 70% of the participants had already dropped out. By the end of the 1hr, it was just remaining about 10 participants. This shows the power of endurance. They endured, kept going, and refused to give up till the end, and they got the prize. In the same way in life, in the pursuit of your dream, you may get to a point when everything will be screaming "give up." But you still need to toughen up and keep going, in order to hit your goal.
Life will always give you very challenging moments, and of course, it will also exact pressure on your mind. However, mental toughness and endurance is needed to keep you going. Just to let you know, endurance can become the deciding factor between victory and defeat, progression and stagnation, or even success and failure. Trust me, it is not really about what comes your way and how difficult your challenges are, but it is how you have faced them. The people that have made some good successes in life, did not have an easy journey, they also met challenges too, but they did not give up - they persisted till the end.
It is worthy to note that pushing through at the point that you feel like quitting, does not mean that you are denying the presence of the challenges nor that the difficulties do not exist. Rather it means recognizing the existence of the challenges, yet refusing to let it to defeat you nor define you. Every great thing that you want to achieve will definitely come with requirements of persistence and determination. The people who rise from the back to the forefront are not the most talented. In fact, some of them do not even have enough privileges and opportunities that you might think of, but they were determined to succeed, and they refused to quit even when they do not feel like going ahead.
One of the major reasons why some people give up on their dreams is because they expect success to come so easily without any form of resistance or challenge whatsoever. Well, to let you know, life does not conform to your emotions, neither does it play by your rules. True growth does not happen at the place of convenience, but you have to go through challenging moments, resistance, and tough times, but you need to resolve not to give up. After all, strength comes when you have endured what should have made you weak.
Mental endurance can teach one to be patient in life. At this point in life, everyone is looking for quick and instant results to everything they do. Well, while this is good, but you should also know that not every result will be delivered at the time of actions, others will definitely take time. Take for instance; when you plant a mango seed, it is not possible to harvest the mango fruit on the same day. In fact, you may not even harvest it the same year. Some may take an upwards of 3 years to start producing fruits. The same way in life, you have to make patience your ally, and this is also a resultant effect of mental endurance.
In order to build yourself for mental endurance in the pursuit of your dreams, you have to give yourself a clear reason why you are doing what you are doing. When you give yourself a reason that is stronger than your excuse, then you have already positioned yourself for mental endurance. As a student for example, the reason might be to have good grades, so you can endure the demands of studying without cracking. When you give yourself a purpose, it will become a driving force for you to keep going and putting in your best. Then you also need to surround yourself with some trusted people, who will help you to achieve clarity of purpose and will also help you to build mental endurance.
Thanks for reading
