When they dug further, the expert meditators had a “greater ability to fully embrace the feeling of pain and … let go of the appraisal of what the pain meant to them.

My favorite quote from the first chapter that really sets up (and summarizes) the book: “Real toughness is experiencing discomfort or distress, leaning in, paying attention, and creating space to take thoughtful action. Also, most people avoid discomfort and we are a taught at a young age that we get positive affirmation when we succeed or accomplish a task and no response or a negative response when we fail. When a team of organizational psychologists studied the NBA, they found that a coach’s behavior in a single season influenced their performance for the rest of their career. Magness has served as a consultant on mental skills development for professional sports teams, including some of the top teams in the NBA.Turns out what we need is something akin to compassion, self-reflection and emotional awareness… Steve Magness really has flipped the script. In one study of over 1,200 parents, authoritarian parenting was linked to a much higher rate of child misbehavior.

Author Steve Magness is a world-renowned expert on performance, coauthor of Peak Performance: Elevate Your Game, and The Passion Paradox: A Guide to Going All In, and the author of The Science of Running: How to find your limit and train to maximize your performance. On the other hand, if you’re honest with yourself, and acknowledge your strengths and weaknesses, what you’re capable of and what might scare you, then you can come to terms with what you’re facing and deal with it. In a world that pushes us towards reacting, slowing down to respond is a skill society desperately needs. Compounding our confusion, we’ve resorted to tying toughness to masculinity and an ethos of machismo.Being honest with yourself is what will allow you to pursue your goals relentlessly, which will improve your endurance and performance over time. Below, Steve shares 5 key insights from his new book, Do Hard Things: Why We Get Resilience Wrong and the Surprising Science of Real Toughness.

The subtitle of this book is “Why We Get Resilience Wrong and the Surprising Science of Real Toughness”. I might be biased because as a runner and someone who works in mental health this book was somehow extremely relevant to both aspects of my life.He helped guide Roberta Groner, a forty-one-year-old full-time nurse, to 6th place in the marathon at the 2019 World Championships. Steve Magness, a performance scientist who coaches Olympic athletes, rebuilds our broken model of resilience with one grounded in the latest science and psychology. Magness’ anecdotal advice, especially when they involve marrying ideas from Buddhism as well as self-help and discipline combined with basic biology, provide very reasonable guidance for individuals looking to better their lives, and confront reality on a more sound footing. As someone who has repeatedly faced this in life, and especially so in the last few years, and as someone who used a combination of aggressive and disciplined workout regimens and mindfulness practices to take back a little bit of control of my own life, and to set in on a more sound footing despite external circumstances, I can very strongly relate with his suggestions.