Essential Strength: 6 Reasons You Should Pursue Strength
The days are long, it’s raining, it’s cold, it’s too damn hot, I don’t have a gym membership, the list consists of every reason as to why your pursuit of strength should NOT happen! Today we’re going to go against the grain and change the attitude of why essential strength should happen! Trust me, this one is an essential read.
Essential Strength…
As a coach and teacher I am always trying to communicate why strength is important and how it goes way beyond an individual’s journey to just build physical muscle. The physical manifestation of the body is simply a side effect of what’s really at the core of someone that pursues strength.
The thing is that if you meet a strong person you generally know it before you ever even get a chance to see how much weight they can lift, or how firm their handshake is upon that initial greeting. Not to ever judge a book by its cover, but strength is something that you can sense in a guy or girl a lot of the time based on how they carry themselves and what they value in life.
The Why…
1. Failure To Accept Responsibility: This is a big reason in today’s society as to why we should be pursuing strength. Personal responsibility in pursuing any endeavor whether it’s business, or overcoming personal setbacks means that you must be disciplined in your recognition of your situation and what actions you decide to take in your life to determine future outcomes.
2. To Break Out Of The Cage: To piggyback off the previous statement about what decisions you should make to determine the outcomes unfortunately many people in today’s society choose to utilize all their time and energy creating a cage for themselves.
They do this by putting their skills on lockdown simply because life hasn’t been fair, or proper to them in the way they see it. As a result they feel helpless and the prison, or cage they have created is self inflicted even though they spend a lifetime blaming everyone and everything else for building it.
3. All Problems All The Time: People should pursue strength in a big way because people that don’t tend to only focus on the problems in their lives and not the solutions. Problem solvers are strong people because even though they do look at a problem as an inconvenience it’s not a fatal blow to the desired outcomes of their training or business.
I mean if an athlete misses a lift for a new PR in the weight room should they then complain about the problem and simply stop lifting? No, they acknowledge it and then move forward working and figuring out how to go about hitting that new PR the next time they attempt it. This is a sign of strength and the sign in this case is solution oriented rather than wasting away focusing on the problem.
4. Discipline: One of the most lacking qualities among the masses in today’s world is having a lack of discipline. Discipline requires structure, structure requires commitment, and commitment builds strength. In short if we remove discipline from the equation then the outcome is weakness. Weakness is like a virus because it will also feed the problems I’ve identified here in reasons 1, 2, and 3 and will spread from one individual to the next.
5. Pursue Strength To Recognize Your Own Identity: I remember when I saw the movie American Sniper about Chris Kyle there was a flashback scene to when he was a boy that was a profound moment at the dinner table with he, his brother, and his dad. His dad was basically explaining to Chris and his brother that there are only 3 types of people in the world. In this life lesson he points out that there are sheep, there are wolves, and there are sheepdogs.
The dad continued to make his point clear by stating that they didn’t raise sheep in the family because they didn’t just blindly follow a herd. He also stated (with strong conviction) that if the boys chose to be wolves that he would beat their little asses. Now I know that last sentence wasn’t politically correct, but political correctness is another sign of weakness, but that topic is for another day.
The point is that when you are pursuing a strong life you may discover your own identity and more than likely if you’re reading this I’d like to think you’re a sheepdog.
Once again the point is that strength goes beyond building physical muscle. It can certainly be physical, but only recognizing strength in this way is very one dimensional and a narrow minded way of understanding what strength is all about. Strength is about individual character, it’s a lifestyle, and a belief system.
6. Stop With The Victim Act: It seems that ultimately all of the reasons I’ve mentioned up to this point culminate into one destructive and very obvious characteristic that is the biggest sign of weakness. The mindset of going through life as a victim with the deck stacked against you in life is another sign as to why everyone should pursue strength.
Sadly and in very disappointing fashion I see the evidence of this growing more and more in my Facebook newsfeed from people that act like they are positive influences, but immediately turn around and demonstrate an attitude of victimhood. People are too easily offended, people are unaccepting of truth, and people choose not the think logically about the outcomes of their choices.
This is very apparent when politics come into play. For whatever reason half the population fails to see that they are supporting a mindset of victimhood when they willfully spread that very mindset by demonstrating it through their own actions and in their own lives.
I do believe that when one pursues strength and possesses the will to overcome hardships then that individual can better see that they don’t have to rely on any crutch in life such as a victim mindset. To clarify this further a great deal of the victim mindset I see comes from people that have never even been tested in life. It’s as if they think they know what’s best for everyone else because they deem themselves the experts on life when in fact they have zero experience to apply to the situation.
Remember that our struggles develop our strengths and in turn that eliminates excuses. I hope you enjoyed today’s post and if so please don’t be shy about posting up in the comments below. Stay strong and keep training smart!
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