To All My Fellow Quitters, Wimps, and Giver-Uppers,

This post is for you.

Brooke Landberg
Aug 22, 2017 · 6 min read

Warning: If perseverance comes easily to you, best find something else to read. Unless you just want to hang out inside the mind of a person you’ll likely find pathetic, unrelatable, and/or insane… in that case, come on in.

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Ok, friends, this is one of the tough days on the daily discipline train. One of those days when I feel like I want to give up — or at least take the day off from writing. The kind of day that makes me think things like,

“Who cares? Sometimes I just need a break. No one will notice anyway. The Medium algorithm won’t care if I skip a day.”

True. None of my readers will likely notice. But also, Nice try, Self. The Medium algorithm probably will care. Moreover, even if neither Medium nor my readers notice or care if I miss day, I’ll notice. I’ll care. I made a promise to myself —

Oh, blah blah BLAH, shut up about all that. I won’t really care. I mean, I will for a minute, but I know as well as anyone just how useless flogging myself with guilt is for motivating better behavior. So I’m not even going to go there.

Besides, for the first time ever I’m allowing myself to actually get curious about my resistance to persistence…what’s going on there anyway? Why am I so averse to perseverance? Not just with daily writing, but in general?

I can suddenly feel that my vision about this whole topic is obscured by some sort of veil. I’m reminded of what I wrote the other day about listening to the nagging feeling that says, and also something I said to one of my clients today, about how we always have unconscious thinking driving our behavior. I told him in so many words,

Perhaps that’s what growth really is: lifting veil after veil after veil of unexamined thinking.

I wonder what unexamined thinking is driving my temptation to give up on writing for today.

What if I chose not to believe that thinking?

What if instead — for the first time in my life — I decided to just suck it up and do it anyway?

What would that look like?

How would I grow — where would I go — if I somehow managed in this moment to actually persevere?

And yet, this sort of seems in conflict with the idea that we’re always perfect the way we are. I really do believe in ease. In the words of Jewel Kilcher (Yes, Jewel. Shhhh.),

🎵 If I could tell the world just one thing, it would be that we’re all okay.🎵

When we know that , our experience of life gets easier. Life doesn’t get easier, but we find more ease in our experience of it.

Now I’m wondering how often I make, “You’re okay” into a self-defeating mantra. I wonder if I’m capable of more. I wonder if I’m capable of pushing through moments of confusion, lostness, distraction, and boredom. Do I have the capacity to sit with these kinds of discomfort long enough to see what might happen on the other side?

No sooner did I type that question than I realized, of course I have the capacity. Of course I can be more persistent. Boredom, muck, and distraction are just psychological experiences like any other. And as I point to almost every day here on The Daily Lift, .

So the question, truly, is not, “Can I stretch myself?” Because indeed I know I can.

The question might be, then, “Should I stretch myself?”

I hear things like solitude and discipline being lauded all the time as necessary steps to achieving goals — to experiencing growth.

I’ve always been skeptical, though. I’ve wondered if these things were really all that important, or if these external behaviors were actually falsely associated with whatever inner steps have to happen in order for us achieve our goals.

But a small part of me has always wanted to give it a go. She’s been hanging her head in shame in the back of my mind. She’s been wondering if the reason I spend so much time directing myself and others away from effort is because on some level I’m afraid I’d fail at it if I actually tried.

So now there’s nothing left to do but try.

I guess that’s what I did when . It’s what I did when I . Trying is what I’m doing today — a day when I nearly let myself off the hook by saying,

“Oh, just take the day off. If you’re not feeling it, you’re not feeling it! True work isn’t supposed to feel effortful, remember? Life is meant to be enjoyed.”

I hear myself repeating in my head those things — things I say to readers, clients, and friends — but this time it feels like I’m not really saying them. It feels like the Devil speaking from his perch on my back, liked they used to try to teach me back in Sunday school. It feels like the whisperings of Satan, but now it seems to me that Satan is really just the little ego voice inside my head that’s afraid of my own experience.

It sounds like I’m exploiting usually-good wisdom to justify my own sloth — which arises from my fear of failure — which is really just fear of being unable to handle the psychological experience of shame I imagine follows failure.

But shame I can handle. And that means I can handle failure.

Which means I suddenly don’t feel so lazy anymore.

Which means I want to try to stretch myself.

I’m ready to try. I’m going to try persistence. I’m going to use this as an opportunity to see just how far I can go.

Meanwhile, I’m going to see how much ease I can find in the midst of effort. It reminds me of the only yoga teacher I ever liked (hmm… now I’m wondering if it wasn’t the yoga teachers themselves that bugged me, but the experience of effort so integral to yoga that made me uncomfortable): this teacher used to ask, “Where can you find even one bit of ease in this pose? Is it in your breath? Your forehead? Your toes?” He wasn’t suggesting we give up on the pose, or even ease out of it — he was suggesting we find an experience of ease within the context of effort.

What if I can find a sense of ease within the perseverance?

Can I find inner, metaphysical, spiritual, meditative ease even as I push through this and do a thing that feels challenging?

Can I be leisurely on the inside while working hard on the outside?

Why not give it a go? In the words of Moana (Wow, Jewel and Moana in the same post… I must really be on the brink of a breakthrough — or a breakdown…the jury’s still out),

🎵 One day I’ll knowwwwwww— if I go, there’s just no telling how far I’ll go.🎵

This moment has that familiar trepid feeling that usually accompanies lots of growth. I think this is gonna be a big one.

Stay tuned, my friends.


The Daily Lift

Grounded insights on living well — and loving well — in an unwell world.

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Brooke Landberg

Written by

Working toward freedom.

The Daily Lift

Grounded insights on living well — and loving well — in an unwell world.

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