Trying to be Comfortable in the Uncomfortable

Hey team, so I got a quote for you today and thought I would share it. A friend of mine—somebody I know in Texas—runs martial arts. He’s been a cop for a number of years and a trainer like me for many, many years. He teaches Krav Maga and other martial arts.

He had this quote that he put on his social media page. I don’t know if it’s from somebody famous or if it’s something he said and put out there, but I really liked it. It resonated with me, so I figured I should share it with you. It says, “It’s important to train to be comfortable in the uncomfortable to become unconquerable.”

To train to be comfortable in the uncomfortable situations of your life so that you can be unconquerable when time really demands it. I think about the military. I think about a lot of the work I’ve done in my life. It’s hard to push yourself beyond the limits of what you think you can do.

But it’s amazing what you can do when you push yourself just a little bit harder—when you try a little bit more. There are lots of examples in sports and other places where we see that happen, where people push the limits of human possibility to what seems like the impossible.

I’ve seen the word impossible broken down—and I think I’ve talked about this before—but if you take the I and the M of “impossible” and you put an apostrophe, it says “I’m possible.” All of a sudden, what’s impossible is possible because you’ve just rearranged the word a little bit. By just adding a space and an apostrophe, you turn “impossible” into “I’m possible.” All of a sudden, I am possible. I can do this. I am capable of doing this.

It’s about mental mindset. There are a lot of things in my life where I wasn’t sure if I could do it, and I had fear. Jumping out of an aircraft—that’s not normal for most people. Climbing heights—most people are a little bit scared of heights. Being up in a tower and rappelling down, fast-roping out of a helicopter. There are lots of different things in life that feel really tough. Being really cold and frozen and wet in a big storm in the night, figuring you’re going to blow away.

These are tough, impossible things to feel like you can’t conquer—but with the right mindset… I had a captain one time who used to say, “This is going to build your character.” Every time we were doing something difficult, he said, “This is going to build our character, man.” And I’d think, I’m building blisters and building pain. It’s not helping me too much. But okay.

I don’t know about my character—but looking back 30 or 35 years—goodness gracious, I’m old—my character was built in those moments. I was strengthened in those moments because training to be comfortable in uncomfortable situations makes you unconquerable in the really hard things.

So I’m really thankful for my friend Matt, who came up with that. Or maybe he got it from somewhere else. But I really do believe that it’s true.

What are you training yourself to be comfortable in right now? What uncomfortable situation are you currently in that you might be feeling like you’re regretting? How can you work through that to be unconquerable somewhere else in your life? How can you train yourself to be better?

Most of you know that I didn’t read very much when I was a kid. I didn’t read at all. And now, I read a lot. That didn’t happen overnight. It happened over thousands of nights. And it took a lot for me to push through my reading disability—my inability, my impossibility—of being able to phrase words and understand what words meant.

You have no idea how many hours I spent and how long it took me to get through a book because I had to look up, in a little red Webster’s dictionary, what words meant. Because I had no clue what I was reading. I had no comprehension of what many of the words in the book meant. I had to fight through those situations—those uncomfortable moments—so that I could be a better trainer, so that I could be a better educator, so I could be a better leader, so I could be a better father, so I could be a better human being. I’ve had to do those things in my life.

I don’t know if you guys can hear the crow in the background. It’s annoying the heck out of me. I’m going to go get my gun in a minute.

But I just wanted to wish you all a wonderful rest of your summer. If you are in an uncomfortable moment, then train to be comfortable in that moment. Figure out how to get through the tough things—the uncomfortable things—in your life so that you can be unconquerable. So that your weaknesses and the things that are hard for you today will not be hard for you in the future. So that you’ll be destined for greatness.

You can accomplish more than you think you can. But you have to break through that mental picture—that mental block—in your own brain and push through to the other side. And only you can do that. Because it is a mental game first.

Yes, there are physically hard things to do. But they are not the thing that prevents us. We give up more here, long before we ever give up out there.

So push through. Be valuable. Nothing less will do.

And God bless you. I’ll see you next week.