“Embrace the Suck” is a book about resilience and how to deal with adversity. It is written by Brent Gleeson, a former Navy SEAL combat veteran turned entrepreneur and speaker. The book is based on the author’s experience as a Navy SEAL and the principles he learned in the military that can be applied to personal and professional life.
The book provides tools and frameworks for dealing with adversity and embracing challenges. It is a raw, brutally honest, in-your-face self-help guide that teaches readers how to use pain and discomfort as motivators to achieve their goals.
Reality 5: Fear of failure often leads to unconscious self-sabotaging
Like the college student who decides to stay out drinking until 2 AM before a big job interview, he knows he’ll bomb. Or the young kid who doesn’t pick up a sport as naturally as her peers, so she tells her parents she hates it and wants to quit.
These kinds of self-sabotaging behaviors guarantee future failure. The best accomplishments in life usually reside on the other side of fear.
Reality 3: Failure can make you feel helpless
This is a mental defense mechanism. When we fail, the brain sends signals that make us feel temporarily helpless. It’s an emotional wound, so to speak. like when a toddler touches a hot stove and the brain says not to do that again.
The same applies to failure. When we allow ourselves to be convinced that we’re helpless, we successfully avoid future failures. But that’s actually what makes you a failure—when you listen to the voices and rob yourself of future success.
Reality 4: A failure experience can cause a fear of failure complex
People also tend to avoid success as much as they try to avoid failure. The two usually go hand in hand. Success rarely, if ever, comes without experiencing some failure along the way. This is why success is so uncomfortable.
So rather than working on improving their abilities and skills, people head back to home base—their own cozy little comfort zone.
Step 3: Use the stress
While it may feel like the stress response is harmful to us, it is actually designed to help us function at our best. Stress can release chemicals in the body that rebuild cells, synthesize proteins, and enhance immunity, making the body stronger and healthier.
Athletes and Navy SEALs understand this and use stress to their advantage to achieve their highest potential. While stress can sometimes have negative effects, the body’s stress response can be a powerful tool for growth and success.
Step 2: Own the stress
Acknowledging that we experience stress because we care about certain things can activate a positive drive within us. We recognize that the things that truly matter in life require effort and perseverance.
Navy SEALs use this concept in their training, which is designed to be incredibly stressful and challenging, to help the team learn to stay centered and focused in chaotic situations. By choosing to embrace stress as a necessary part of achieving their goals, trainees can take ownership of it and use it to their advantage.
Reality 6: The pressure to succeed can cause choking
Choking at those critical game-winning moments, blanking out during the test after weeks of studying, and leaving out the most critical talking points in your presentation are usually a result of over-thinking.
Proper preparation, not overthinking, is the bedrock of pulling off your best performance in critical moments.
The Challenge-Commitment-Control mindset Part 2
Specifically, this mindset involves:
- Challenge: Viewing difficulty as a challenge rather than a paralyzing event. This means seeing mistakes and failures as opportunities for growth and learning.
- Commitment: Being committed to one’s goals and having a strong reason to get up in the morning. This helps individuals stay focused and not get distracted by things that don’t align with their desired outcomes.
- Control: Focusing on situations and events that one has control over, and putting effort into areas where they can have the most impact. This helps individuals feel empowered and confident.
You might be wondering this and telling me to go f*** myself, that I haven’t been through the kind of suffering you’ve endured. And that may very well be true. My intention with this book is not to make it appear that I know it all or have experienced all the hardships life has to offer.
I’m simply providing a tool to use in your own way while navigating darkness and uncertainty.
Reality 1: Failure makes the same goal seem less attainable.
In one study of a special operations sniper school, instructors had their students fire at targets from the same distance on an unmarked range. They then had the students estimate the distance to the targets.
Students who scored lower believed the targets to be significantly farther out than students who scored the highest. Failure distorts perception if you allow it to. The good news is there are ways to avoid it.
Pain is a pathway
Life will eventually knock you hard on the backside. Accepting that fact is a stepping stone to growth. Just expect pain. Constantly trying to avoid hardship and pain will only hold you back. Each experience and each moment that you have are precious.
Challenge every moment to make the best of even the worst circumstances. You may well be amazed at the power, wisdom, and strength you gain in the process.
David Goggin’s Forty percent rule
We all have the ability to master our minds. But our brains are wired with defense mechanisms for avoiding pain and hardship and for staying well within the confines of our comfort zone. Our minds have a tendency to force us into a sheltered existence.
When our brains start sending signals that we can go no further, endure no more, and retreat to the blissful embrace of denial and mediocrity, we’ve only achieved forty percent of our mental and physical potential.
The Challenge-Commitment-Control mindset
The Challenge-Commitment-Control mindset is a way of thinking that helps people become more resilient.
Resilient individuals see difficulties as opportunities for growth and learning, and are committed to their goals. They focus their energy on what they can control and don’t get distracted by factors they can’t influence.
Reality 7: Willpower is like a muscle. Use it or lose it
Like muscles that become fatigued, mental willpower can become overworked and undernourished. Soldiers participating in sustained combat experience battle fatigue, which causes clouded thinking, a lack of ability to control emotion, confusion, and even depression.
So when you feel your willpower fading, take a good rest and some space to revisit your motivations. Just don’t take it too long.
Reality 8: The healthiest psychological response to failure is focusing on what you can control
This ability is fundamental to building resilience. Failure can result in us focusing primarily on the cause of our current adversity. We look backward instead of forward. We focus on elements we have no control over as opposed to developing an action plan – leveraging what’s in our control
Reality 2: Failure alters your perception of your abilities
As much as failure can distort your perception of goals, it can also alter your assumptions about ability. Students who quit BUD/S or fail the selection process fall into deep depression and sometimes even become suicidal.
Failure can make us doubt our skills, intelligence, and capabilities. Simply acknowledging this is the first step to self-correction.
If you ain’t falling, you ain’t trying
Failure is usually a fairly demoralizing and upsetting experience. It can alter your perception and make you believe things that simply aren’t true. Unless you learn to respond to failure in psychologically adaptive ways, it can paralyze you and ultimately keep you from moving forward.
Do something that sucks, everyday
Stress and anxiety can be great tools if you know how to use them and choose to use them. With all the media and medical attention on the negative impacts of stress, it’s easy to conclude it’s irredeemably bad, something to be avoided at all costs. This applies to both physical and emotional stress and anxiety.
Think about a time when you experienced substantial and professional growth or a time when you performed at your highest level. Say finishing a race, building a business or saving it, landing your dream job, raising a child. Chances are, all those moments shaped your growth and defined who you are today.
The three step model: See, Own, Use
Psychologists have developed a three-step model for effectively managing stress and utilizing its creative power based on their research and work with professionals such as business executives, Navy SEALs, students, and athletes.
Step 1: See the stress.
It’s common to experience stress over things that we care about deeply. By identifying and labeling the things that we care about, we can gain clarity on the causes of our stress and find solutions for alleviating it.
For instance, when feeling overwhelmed, one can understand the root cause by asking, “Why am I so stressed?” This helps identify the true source of stress and realize that it may not be related to what was initially thought.
Embrace the suck
But when we find ways to harness our minds, we can defy all odds. From overcoming depression, abuse, financial strain, or illness to conquering the most unimaginably lofty goals, when properly vanquished, our minds become the weapon needed for success on any battlefield.
We just have to embrace the suck.
